By: perhaps

perhaps — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 23:45:31 +0000

Cool to see Vaughters’ NY Times Op/Ed a few days after this. I really appreciate what he has written, and fwiw, he considers anti-doping enforcement to be “1000%” better than in the time of USPS. Again, in my opinion, the idea of having to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone doped (I just keep wondering how you would prove that something wasn’t accidentally ingested if that were an athlete’s claim) and being laissez faire about it all gets no one anywhere and is, essentially, a position that accepts cycling must include doping.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-doping-out-of-sports.html

By: LarryTheobald

LarryTheobald — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:00:24 +0000

Funny this – most fans seem to be just fine with antidoping efforts UNTIL their favorite rider gets caught. False positive? What is that? Banned substances are floating around in the air in the room where the urine samples are given or present in the public water supply? The tests do not find things that are not present in the samples, so what exactly is a “false positive?” Contador might have done better at CAS with a claim of contaminated supplements, especially if he could have come up with one that contained the banned substance but instead chose the “beef steak defense” that was laughable at best. I would suggest the author read this book for a better grasp of this issue http://www.amazon.com/The-Ethics-Doping-Anti-Doping-Redeeming/dp/0415484669/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1344621094&sr=8-3&keywords=doping+antidoping

By: perhaps

perhaps — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 23:15:21 +0000

Hi Dan, I get your point. Innocent should be innocent unless proven otherwise beyond any reasonable doubt. And as you write, this is 100% as it should be in courts of law where the weak might otherwise easily be preyed on by the strong–although, arguably, have power in the form of money still seems to have its effects (though often in the form of powerful defendants getting away with things).That said, I don’t think this translates so well to sport/cycling. How could the “I ingested it unkowingly” argument EVER not be a valid defense for some of the compounds that are used in small traces to cover up other doping? And sure, it might have been the reason Contador came up positive, but for those of us who follow the sport a little more than casually, in this case at least there was Operacion Puerto, where bags of blood labeled “AC” (if I recall correctly) where never even tested by the Spanish authorities. I shake my head just thinking about how a simple DNA test would have sufficed there, but it got brushed away. Again, if I recall correctly, the Germans did test those labeled “hijo de rudy” and Jan Ullrich was scientifically linked to the bags.So, the point I guess I’m making is that we know in at least that case that there were a whole bunch of athletes doping (not just cyclists). We know that a guy like Eufemiano Fuentes wasn’t using those bags for pillows and that there were some high-profile athletes who were cheating (but not linked beyond a reasonable doubt). Thus, we fans know there are instances of doping being covered up, and it is almost insulting to the fan’s intelligence to suggest it isn’t going on at the highest levels if you are making decisions on a national level to squash what seems to be the most open-shut investigation possible ever. (“Hey look at all these bags of blood–if only there were some widely available forensic test used everywhere in courts of law to link them to the people they came from…”) We can be certain that those guys and perhaps their proteges are still competing and likely not changing habits just because they almost got caught (likely they are even bolder now that they know they can get transfusions in Spain). Ok, so the point I’m really making is that your position essentially asks the fans to continue to accept doping in sport and thus an uneven playing field where we can know (not “beyond a reasonable doubt/court of law” knowing, but we know) winners are decided in part on who ever, behind closed doors, is collaborating with doctors to develop the best doping schemes. Which might be fine if this were just the rule: ok, everyone dopes however they choose–then you just do it out in the open, compare results, and just have your techniques out there. The medicine becomes part of the sport. But since that is unlikely to be the case ever, those of us who invest some energy in following a guy like Ullrich (I was/am a fan) and see him get blasted, then watch the other guys ride around, evading punishment by virtue of doping in a country that turns a blind eye or by claiming that they accidentally ingested these esoteric substances–to witness this when you KNOW there’s stuff going down, it ruins the sport. Frankly, the sport died to me a little since that case in particular. I just haven’t found a new hero, they are all the opponents who managed to escape punishment by in my eyes. And that is perhaps why the authorities do need to be strict. I want the drug cheats to go down hard. Zero tolerance, so that if you risk it, you really risk it all. And yeah, it sucks for the guys who maybe ate tainted beef–perhaps that happens a lot in the peloton, I don’t know. But, in the meantime, I’m willing to accept that it’s probably doping, and perhaps some recourse or means of insurance could be found to for those who truly are not doping and come up with a false positive.I really wonder, which is better (or worse) for the sport on a whole: an occasional false positive (yep, there really was some Xipamide in his lettuce, sucks to be Frank) or a peloton of people who are accidentally ingesting things routinely, but we’re cool with that because we know our heroes won’t fall unless they’re caught with a needle in their arm? Some measurement of cost, fan dollars or maybe willingness of the best athletes to participate (which also relates to fan dollars), is probably what it comes down to at the end of the day.

Comments on: Fränk Schleck and the plummeting credibility of anti-doping enforcement

By: perhaps

By: LarryTheobald

By: perhaps