had begun to disfigure Italian cycling. Bike racing had always been a marriage between sport and commerce, but now the latter was contaminating both methodology and results. The issue, fundamentally, was that the trade teams had become just too powerful. Drafting was commonplace, the term gregario [support riders] had entered the lexicon and, worst of all, races were routinely bought and sold. Team riding was completely out of hand, and the bare-knuckled, man-on-man contests
