Armstong dopes AGAIN



VeloFlash said:
The rules have no provision for sanctioning an athlete on observation evidence. They must fail a test, avoid a test, have drugs in their possession, have implements in their possession or admit to drug taking.

With the exception of the admission all other offences are circumstantial evidence. An observation if admissible would be direct evidence.

A doctor for a US 2000 Olympic swimmer (gold medallist) admitted after the Games to administering a drug to his charge on the misunderstanding it was not a forbidden substance (hgh precursor). As there was a denial and not an admission by the swimmer there was no sanction.

seems to me that, if you know your way around the rules, you could just about get away with murder...
 
Victor Conte head of BALCO was handed a 4 month jail sentence yesterday and his statment to the press before being lead off to serve his term was:

“I’ve decided to direct my knowledge, experience and determination toward making sports more honourable for athletes and fans,” he said. And in so doing, he repeated another assertion: that the anti-doping police are way behind the cheats.

“It’s important to fully acknowledge that the current anti-doping programmes are very ineffective and this fact has contributed to the ‘use or lose’ mentality that exists today,” he said. “I plan to share what I’ve learnt about the rampant use of drugs at the elite level and to explain how elite athletes routinely beat the existing anti-doping programmes. It’s time for the world to finally become educated about the truth.”

Look out LA your time has come !
 
wicklow200 said:
OK. But I don't understand how this will have any influence on the LA affair.
Not directly but we will gain more insight into how the drug users beat the existing anti-doping programmes and this will aid the UCI independent investigation into the alleged use of EPO by Armstrong in 1999.
 
Sorry, but this topic needs to be resurrected.


After a couple of quiet weeks, World Anti-Doping Agency president **** Pound has given professional cycling’s attitude towards doping another mauling, writing in The Guardian that even after the 1998 Festina scandal “drug use, within entire teams, continues unabated”.

Pound’s latest bout of cycle-bashing took place in the British newspaper’s weekly ‘debate’ column, which asked the question “Does cycling take its drug problem seriously enough?”. The WADA chief said that cycling does not take the issue seriously enough, while International Cycling Union health manager Dr Mario Zorzoli took the opposing view.

Pound explained that polls conducted in the main cycling nations suggested that 80% of the people in those countries selected cycling as the sport they most associated with doping. “This is a stunning indictment of failure on the part of officials, organisers and riders,” said Pound.

Pound declared that cycling has a knee-jerk response to news of doping issues. “If [doping stories come] from riders, the riders are immediately denounced, marginalised, written off as cranks or sued. If from the media, they are dismissed as untrue, exaggerated, not representative or taken out of context,” he commented.

Pound stated that cycling has not faced up fully to the problem of doping even after the 1998 Festina scandal, when “industrial quantities of drugs and related equipment and arrests were made by the French police. This should have served as a call to arms for cycling. Apparently not. Drug use, within entire teams, continues unabated.”

Pound continued: “Get something straight. This drug use is not the accidental ingestion of a tainted supplement by an individual athlete. It is planned and deliberate cheating, with complex methods, sophisticated substances and techniques, and the active complicity of doctors, scientists, team officials and riders. There is nothing accidental about it. All this cheating goes on under the supposedly watchful eyes of cycling officials, who loudly proclaim that their sport is drug-free and committed to remaining so. Based on performance, they should not be allowed outdoors without white canes and seeing-eye dogs.”

Pound suggested that cycling should outsource its testing programmes to an independent agency and that more random testing should be undertaken. He concluded: “Is cycling serious about doping? How about a biblical answer: there are none so blind as those that will not see. Until cycling itself acknowledges that there is a problem, it will not be able to find a cure. Ritual denial and organisational omerta are not solutions.”

Zorzoli offered an extremely different perspective, saying that cycling and the sport’s authorities are doing all they can to tackle the problem of doping. “At the UCI, we can be proud to have led the way with measures which other sports adopted and which are now seen as the norm. We see prevention as vitally important; after all, it is better to stop athletes using banned substances in the first place,” Zorzoli explained. “With the information I obtain from our anti-doping programme, I am assured our sport, at the highest level, is a lot cleaner than our critics believe.”
http://www.procycling.com/news.aspx?ID=1685
 
In addtion to:

- Highly rated Bouygues Telecom rider Jérôme Pineau has spoken out for the second time in recent weeks against what he believes is a culture of doping within the sport. Tipped as the French rider most likely to make an impact in the major tours, the 25 year old has struggled to make an impact this season and has told Ouest France that he would quit the sport completely if he could find another way to make a living.

“The sport is being killed by those who are doping, not by those who speak out,” said the young Frenchman. “I don’t like cycling now as much as I used to. The only thing that keeps me doing it is the money, it’s my career. Cycling is not a clean sport. You can be successful on one day if you are clean, but not in stage races. Of that I am sure.”

http://www.procycling.com/news.aspx?ID=1686

Ullefan said:
Sorry, but this topic needs to be resurrected.


After a couple of quiet weeks, World Anti-Doping Agency president **** Pound has given professional cycling’s attitude towards doping another mauling, writing in The Guardian that even after the 1998 Festina scandal “drug use, within entire teams, continues unabated”.

Pound’s latest bout of cycle-bashing took place in the British newspaper’s weekly ‘debate’ column, which asked the question “Does cycling take its drug problem seriously enough?”. The WADA chief said that cycling does not take the issue seriously enough, while International Cycling Union health manager Dr Mario Zorzoli took the opposing view.

 
patch70 said:
He was reported as saying a couple of years ago that Tyler and someone else at USPS approached him to get them some PEDs back in the mid 90's.

Once again, let's not let a few facts get in the way, but that's not what they said, it what he chose to infer. They NEVER asked him directly for EPO or whatever. They asked him how they could improve their performances .. which is what a rider would be expected to ask the team doctor.

But heh .. carry on.
 
What I like is how Pound makes some new statements about doping in cycling in general and never once is Armstrong's name even mentioned and yet somehow that warrants resurrecting the "Armstrong dopes AGAIN" thread. LOL! It's just so typical of how a certain group wants to bring one guy down and pin all of the ills of cycing on one man's back. :rolleyes:
 
bing181 said:
Once again, let's not let a few facts get in the way, but that's not what they said, it what he chose to infer. They NEVER asked him directly for EPO or whatever. They asked him how they could improve their performances .. which is what a rider would be expected to ask the team doctor.

But heh .. carry on.

Bing, just out of interest, I infer from your post that you were actually there, in the room, when this conversation took place - you are quite categorical that they NEVER asked him directly for EPO etc.

Can you substantiate this? I'd love to read a transcript of the conversation that actually took place...
 
TDF: Beef up doping fight

28/10/2005
Much of the Tour presentation was given over to a lengthy appeal for an increased ethical stance on doping, with calls going out to WADA to take over testing before big races.

PIC BY TDWSPORT.COM

It may not have pleased Discovery Channel team boss Johan Bruyneel to hear the management hierarchy of the Tour de France spending much of yesterday’s 2006 Tour launch appealing for an increased ethical stance on doping rather than offering a single word of praise to recently retired seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, but the Tour’s stance underlines the concerns about the doping issue in France at the moment.

Although the furore over what are reported to be Armstrong’s dope control samples from the 1999 Tour, which L’Equipe recently alleged showed evidence of EPO, was not specifically mentioned, the fallout from this incident seemed to hang over the gathering in Paris’ Palais des Congrés on Thursday. Tour co-directors Christian Prudhomme and Jean-Marie Leblanc both appealed to cycling’s authorities to help end the culture of doping in the sport, and they were backed in this call by the president of Tour owners ASO, Patrice Clerc.

Prudhomme called on the World Anti-Doping Agency, headed by the outspoken **** Pound, to help organise testing of riders in the weeks leading up to next year’s Tour. “It seems a move which is necessary,” he said. “We can’t have guys disappearing for two to three weeks without us knowing where they are. Let’s make it possible for the controllers to find the riders wherever they are before the Tour.”

The Tour hierarchy have already met with Pound to discuss the issue, and the WADA president is reported to be keen to lend support to the initiative – as long as it also receives the backing of the International Cycling Union.

Leblanc, who has been through this before in the wake of the 1998 Festina scandal, described the sport as being at another crossroads. “I said it in 1998, and I’m saying it again. We’re at the crossroads of ethics and chaos,” he said. “I call on the riders, the teams and their doctors to make sure we don’t make any mistake about which direction we should be taking.”

With rumours now widespread that some riders are blood doping immediately before and after stages of the Tour in order to avoid detection in early-morning swoops by the UCI’s ‘vampires’, there have even been calls for blood tests to be carried out on riders on the start line.

However, recently elected UCI president Pat McQuaid said he thought the rumours were baseless, and also wondered about the practicalities of testing riders at the very start of races. “I’m not a medical expert, but I’ve spoken to the medical experts and to raise the haemoglobin (haematocrit) from 44 to 53 or 56 means that a couple of litres of blood have to go in (the body), which takes around an hour and a half,” McQuaid told AFP. “And if you’re in the situation where riders are spending an hour and a half in the morning putting blood in and the same taking it out at night, then it’s just absolutely impossible. It’s not going to work.”

McQuaid said that, based on the conversations he has had with medical experts, daily blood doping is not taking place. “The practicalities, from what I’ve been told by the medical people means that it’s just not possible.”

Leblanc summed up the problems his organisation faced in dealing with doping issues. “We don’t establish rules and procedures, we don’t hand out sanctions… Since the federations can’t deal completely with this menace, let’s appeal to the supreme authority, which is WADA,” he commented. “With the means it has at its disposal, backed by its rules and procedures, it will perhaps be able to do better, notably with regard to increasing the number of random tests on riders when they are training.”

It probably won’t have passed the attention of most readers that this issue pits the UCI against two of its most vocal and persistent critics in the shape of ASO and Pound. McQuaid will no doubt be reaching for the hard hat he inherited from predecessor Hein Verbruggen, as discussion of the doping issue will surely only become more intense as the new season comes into view.
 
whiteboytrash said:
TDF: Beef up doping fight

28/10/2005
Much of the Tour presentation was given over to a lengthy appeal for an increased ethical stance on doping, with calls going out to WADA to take over testing before big races.

PIC BY TDWSPORT.COM

It may not have pleased Discovery Channel team boss Johan Bruyneel to hear the management hierarchy of the Tour de France spending much of yesterday’s 2006 Tour launch appealing for an increased ethical stance on doping rather than offering a single word of praise to recently retired seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, but the Tour’s stance underlines the concerns about the doping issue in France at the moment.

Although the furore over what are reported to be Armstrong’s dope control samples from the 1999 Tour, which L’Equipe recently alleged showed evidence of EPO, was not specifically mentioned, the fallout from this incident seemed to hang over the gathering in Paris’ Palais des Congrés on Thursday. Tour co-directors Christian Prudhomme and Jean-Marie Leblanc both appealed to cycling’s authorities to help end the culture of doping in the sport, and they were backed in this call by the president of Tour owners ASO, Patrice Clerc.

Prudhomme called on the World Anti-Doping Agency, headed by the outspoken **** Pound, to help organise testing of riders in the weeks leading up to next year’s Tour. “It seems a move which is necessary,” he said. “We can’t have guys disappearing for two to three weeks without us knowing where they are. Let’s make it possible for the controllers to find the riders wherever they are before the Tour.”

The Tour hierarchy have already met with Pound to discuss the issue, and the WADA president is reported to be keen to lend support to the initiative – as long as it also receives the backing of the International Cycling Union.

Leblanc, who has been through this before in the wake of the 1998 Festina scandal, described the sport as being at another crossroads. “I said it in 1998, and I’m saying it again. We’re at the crossroads of ethics and chaos,” he said. “I call on the riders, the teams and their doctors to make sure we don’t make any mistake about which direction we should be taking.”

With rumours now widespread that some riders are blood doping immediately before and after stages of the Tour in order to avoid detection in early-morning swoops by the UCI’s ‘vampires’, there have even been calls for blood tests to be carried out on riders on the start line.

However, recently elected UCI president Pat McQuaid said he thought the rumours were baseless, and also wondered about the practicalities of testing riders at the very start of races. “I’m not a medical expert, but I’ve spoken to the medical experts and to raise the haemoglobin (haematocrit) from 44 to 53 or 56 means that a couple of litres of blood have to go in (the body), which takes around an hour and a half,” McQuaid told AFP. “And if you’re in the situation where riders are spending an hour and a half in the morning putting blood in and the same taking it out at night, then it’s just absolutely impossible. It’s not going to work.”

McQuaid said that, based on the conversations he has had with medical experts, daily blood doping is not taking place. “The practicalities, from what I’ve been told by the medical people means that it’s just not possible.”

Leblanc summed up the problems his organisation faced in dealing with doping issues. “We don’t establish rules and procedures, we don’t hand out sanctions… Since the federations can’t deal completely with this menace, let’s appeal to the supreme authority, which is WADA,” he commented. “With the means it has at its disposal, backed by its rules and procedures, it will perhaps be able to do better, notably with regard to increasing the number of random tests on riders when they are training.”

It probably won’t have passed the attention of most readers that this issue pits the UCI against two of its most vocal and persistent critics in the shape of ASO and Pound. McQuaid will no doubt be reaching for the hard hat he inherited from predecessor Hein Verbruggen, as discussion of the doping issue will surely only become more intense as the new season comes into view.

McQuaid has already called off ProTour talks with ASO over this very issue - he doesn't like the Tour's strict anti doping stance.

Well, plus ca change at the UCI then....and this says what exactly about the UCIs attitude to the same problem?
 
whiteboytrash said:
However, recently elected UCI president Pat McQuaid said he thought the rumours were baseless, and also wondered about the practicalities of testing riders at the very start of races. “I’m not a medical expert, but I’ve spoken to the medical experts and to raise the haemoglobin (haematocrit) from 44 to 53 or 56 means that a couple of litres of blood have to go in (the body), which takes around an hour and a half,” McQuaid told AFP. “And if you’re in the situation where riders are spending an hour and a half in the morning putting blood in and the same taking it out at night, then it’s just absolutely impossible. It’s not going to work.”

McQuaid said that, based on the conversations he has had with medical experts, daily blood doping is not taking place. “The practicalities, from what I’ve been told by the medical people means that it’s just not possible.”

Pat is no expert on anything.
He's a moron.

I'd better not say anymore.

Look I know this man well - he coached us for 5 years - he's talking rubbish in the above quotation.
He couldn't hold a conversation with any expert in any field - or even in the middle of a field !

The worry is that it's obvious that he's got a vested interest in not cleaning up the doping problem.
 
Bjørn P.Dal said:
Pat McQuaid was your cycling coach for 5 years limerickman?

That's right - he trained our club for five years from 1981-1986.
Since then I have met him - mostly at national (Irish) federation meetings.
 
whiteboytrash said:
No they were lovers for five years.... love bites.

Can't say that we were lovers, WBT.

I don't swing that way.

I prefer the female of the species !
 
Suprise, suprise:

[size=-1]The UCI - stung by the strong anti-doping message from ASO president Patrice Clerc during Thursday's 2006 Tour de France presentation - has cut off ProTour talks with cycling's most important race.[/size]


[size=-1]UCI president Pat McQuaid, who sat uncomfortably through Thursday's presentation in Paris, notified Tour de France officials Friday that ProTour talks are now tabled.[/size]

[size=-1]"You decided to remove the conditions of serenity and without pressure for the ProTour negotiations," McQuaid wrote in a letter, adding cycling's governing body was "surprised" and "indignant" about the anti-doping discourse offered up by Clerc to open the 2006 Tour presentation.[/size]

[size=-1]The announcement comes as a major set-back in talks between cycling's new 20-team ProTour racing calendar and the grand tours, which have complained that the new system has been arbitrarily imposed on them.[/size]

[size=-1]Before Thursday's presentation, both McQuaid and Clerc told reporters the UCI and the Tour were close to hammering out a compromise agreement "before the end of the year" that would incorporate the Tour as well as the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España in the 2006 racing schedule.[/size]

[size=-1]"Of course the Tour belongs in the ProTour," McQuaid said earlyThursday. "The future of cycling is the ProTour and the Tour is the most important race in cycling."[/size]

[size=-1]That conciliatory tone quickly evaporated as the lights dimmed in the Palais des Congrès for the presentation.[/size]

[size=-1]In a dramatic call to arms, Clerc declared a need for additional out-of-competition testing in the weeks before the Tour and insisted cycling must be even more aggressive to fight doping to regain credibility in the eyes of the general public.[/size]

[size=-1]"We hope and pray that we can solve not only the problem of doping, but also the suspicion, which severely damages the sport," Clerc said. "Doping remains the number one enemy."[/size]

[size=-1]Clerc's strong anti-doping message, coupled with the very open snub of seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, rubbed many the wrong way.[/size]

[size=-1]Team managers and sport directors complained that the Tour itself was hardly even mentioned. A 10-minute highlight film largely ignored Armstrong, adding further fuel to the growing rift.[/size]

[size=-1]"I could tell certain people in the crowd, other directors, almost got up and left," Discovery Channel Johan Bruyneel said Thursday. "My general feeling was disappointment. It almost felt like it was raining in the room."[/size]

[size=-1]The latest spat seems to have also have evaporated any goodwill between the Tour and newly elected UCI president McQuaid, who took over from the often-confrontational Hein Verbruggen in October.[/size]

[size=-1]In a bitter letter written by McQuaid, he said he regretted his decision to attend the Tour presentation and, with irony, "thanked" Clerc for lecturing the cycling community on the lessons of the anti-doping fight ‘in front of public opinion and the world media."[/size]

[size=-1]"In these conditions, it makes no sense to sit down and negotiate," McQuaid said. "You have offered us an alarmist discourse."[/size]

[size=-1]What happens next remains to be seen, but the gulf between the UCI and the ProTour teams on one side and the three grand tours on another could be reaching a breaking point.[/size]

[size=-1]As Clerc threatened on Thursday, the Tour is prepared to "do it ourselves."[/size]

[size=-1]WADA on the other hand...
The World Anti-Doping Agency, said on Friday it welcomed the call of Tour de France organizers for stronger anti-doping efforts during the 2006 event.[/size]


[size=-1]"We are encouraged by efforts of the Tour de France organizers to establish an enhanced testing program for cycling's marquis event," said WADA chairman **** Pound.[/size]

[size=-1]"We welcome this opportunity to work with the Tour and UCI to strengthen the testing program to ensure that cheaters are caught and the integrity of both the Tour de France and the sport of cycling are protected."[/size]

[size=-1]On Thursday, Tour organizers appealed for random doping controls, which are normally carried out by the UCI, to be multiplied in the weeks leading up to the race when they would perhaps have a bigger chance of catching the cheats.[/size]

(velonews)
 
hombredesubaru said:
They did do some tests on the 98 stuff. Wait till they release THOSE!!

why would they do that? pantani's dead and gone, already discredited by the way he died.
 
They blitzed the Olympics and smashed world records. But East Germany's sporting prodigies were powered by drugs. Now they regard themselves as forgotten victims - and they want someone to pay. By Luke Harding in Berlin.

Rica Reinisch was just 14 when her swimming coach approached her one day after training and gave her a blue pill. The year was 1979. Reinisch, a swimming prodigy, had already spent four years at an elite sports school in the East German city of Dresden. "My coach came up to me and gave me a tablet," Reinisch says. "He told me: ‘Take it. It's good for you. It will make your body regenerate more quickly.' He made it sound as if it were completely normal."

Just before the 1980 Moscow Olympics the tablets stopped. "It was madness," she says. "But at the time I put my improved performance down to all the hard training. I was, after all, spending seven or eight hours a day in the pool."

The 15-year-old swimmer was one of the games' sensations - winning three gold medals and setting three new backstroke world records, including an astonishing 1 minutes 00.86 seconds for the 100 metres. The next year she set three European records. In 1982, however, Reinisch collapsed at a training camp in the Ukraine, suffering from inflamed ovaries. She was flown back to her training base in Dresden by helicopter.

"I went to see the doctor. He seemed distressed. He told me simply that I should give up top-level sport. My parents were speechless."

Reinisch is one of the forgotten victims. For three decades, East Germans ran, swam and shot-putted their way to glory, winning Olympic gold medals, setting world records and - so it seemed at the time - demonstrating the superiority of communism. But this month the human cost of East Germany's extraordinary sporting success will be laid bare in a courtroom in Hamburg.

About 190 East German competitors are launching a case against the German pharmaceutical giant Jenapharm. They claim that the East German firm knowingly supplied the steroids that were given to them by trainers and coaches from the 1960s onwards until East Germany's demise in 1989. Jenapharm, now owned by Schering, argues it was not responsible for the doping scandal and blames the communist system.

Last month, meanwhile, Germany's athletics federation announced that it was checking 22 national records set by East German athletes. The investigation came after Ines Geipel, a member of the recordholding East German women's 4x100 metres relay team, asked for her record from 1984 to be struck off. She revealed she had been doped. In a separate case another former East German swimmer, Karin Konig, is suing the German Olympic committee for damages. Konig claims that she was also a victim of doping between 1982 and 1987.
 
They blitzed the Olympics and smashed world records. But East Germany's sporting prodigies were powered by drugs. Now they regard themselves as forgotten victims - and they want someone to pay. By Luke Harding in Berlin.

Rica Reinisch was just 14 when her swimming coach approached her one day after training and gave her a blue pill. The year was 1979. Reinisch, a swimming prodigy, had already spent four years at an elite sports school in the East German city of Dresden. "My coach came up to me and gave me a tablet," Reinisch says. "He told me: ‘Take it. It's good for you. It will make your body regenerate more quickly.' He made it sound as if it were completely normal."

Just before the 1980 Moscow Olympics the tablets stopped. "It was madness," she says. "But at the time I put my improved performance down to all the hard training. I was, after all, spending seven or eight hours a day in the pool."

The 15-year-old swimmer was one of the games' sensations - winning three gold medals and setting three new backstroke world records, including an astonishing 1 minutes 00.86 seconds for the 100 metres. The next year she set three European records. In 1982, however, Reinisch collapsed at a training camp in the Ukraine, suffering from inflamed ovaries. She was flown back to her training base in Dresden by helicopter.

"I went to see the doctor. He seemed distressed. He told me simply that I should give up top-level sport. My parents were speechless."

Reinisch is one of the forgotten victims. For three decades, East Germans ran, swam and shot-putted their way to glory, winning Olympic gold medals, setting world records and - so it seemed at the time - demonstrating the superiority of communism. But this month the human cost of East Germany's extraordinary sporting success will be laid bare in a courtroom in Hamburg.

About 190 East German competitors are launching a case against the German pharmaceutical giant Jenapharm. They claim that the East German firm knowingly supplied the steroids that were given to them by trainers and coaches from the 1960s onwards until East Germany's demise in 1989. Jenapharm, now owned by Schering, argues it was not responsible for the doping scandal and blames the communist system.

Last month, meanwhile, Germany's athletics federation announced that it was checking 22 national records set by East German athletes. The investigation came after Ines Geipel, a member of the recordholding East German women's 4x100 metres relay team, asked for her record from 1984 to be struck off. She revealed she had been doped. In a separate case another former East German swimmer, Karin Konig, is suing the German Olympic committee for damages. Konig claims that she was also a victim of doping between 1982 and 1987.