Astana duo dodge drug test at Vuelta

The Astana riders were in the team bus en route to the start when inspectors from cycling's governing body UCI arrived at the team hotel to carry out the tests.

The inspectors requested the bus return to the hotel, some 80 kilometres from the start in Almussafes, but were turned down.

"The inspectors arrived too late for the two riders," said team spokesman Jacinto Vidarte.

"The hotel was a long way from the start town, and the stage started at 10am in the morning.

"Everybody was due to ride in the team cars, but the two Kazakhs had breakfasted early and decided to go in the bus because it would be more comfortable."

Kashechkin is second overall in the general classification, 48 seconds down on Spaniard Alejandro Valverde and Vinokourov, who has won two stages, is lying fourth.

The 15 riders who carried out the tests, six of them from Astana and the remainder from the French team Ag2R, were all declared apt to start.

Astana were forced to make a last minute withdrawal from the Tour de France in July after five of their riders were implicated in a major anti-doping operation in Spain.

 

What a shock! Vino was seen choking on his weetabix at 4.30 in the morning

 

Press conference to be held tomorrow morning on the rest day.... Astana claim that the UCI were late but doesn't explain why the rest of the team was still in the hotel whilst Vino and Kirchesk had already left with the team bus at 7.00 am !.....

 

Its hard to stop a transfusion, get the right amount of saline in to dilute the extra red cells, and drive back to the hotel, so they took a chance and refused to turn around.

We are about to find out if the UCI has any balls.
Let me re-phrase that.
We already know nothing will happen or they would not have started the race.
Unless there are different facts to come out, they should be dismissed from the race.

And BTW, arent we all SHOCKED that Saiz's boy is caught refusing a UCI request for blood testing.
Can you imagine the uproar if this had happened in the Tour de France or by say an American on Disco with initials LA. Game over.

Arent Jean Marie and Prudhomme gloating now they refused Vino and Astana a spot in the Tdf. I never thought I would say this, but they made a brilliant decision.

 

Although why didn't they transfuse on the rest day ? When do the teams get notification of a UCI blood test ? The night before or in the morning ? Why was only Vino and Kashechkin on the bus and not the rest of the team ? Perhaps they did there own test in the morning, realised there red blood cell count was too high and had to take action.. like you say not enough time to dilute the blood so they got on the bus at left for the start line 3 and half hours early !

 

Quite possibly correct. He rides likes he uses substances end of story. Two year ban whose next!

 

Hold on guys... The two lead riders get to lie on the bus for a two hour ride and sleep in style, while the domestiques ride packed in cars that leave later. Not everything is crooked...

 

Oh I forgot!
Why did they not turn around when asked to by UCI?
And if they were already near or more than halfway to the start 80 km away...what freekin time did they leave the hotel.

Lets see.
Its really a simple math problem.
UCI arrives at 7:30.
Bus already at start or close they claim.
Race Starts at 10-10:30.
80 km from hotel to start.
Average speed at 75 km per hour.
hmmmm.....

If a train with two dopers leaves CHicao to NY going one direction and a train with UCI inspectors leaves NY going to Chicago,


at what time will FLoyd's positive be leaked by L'Equipe?


Immediately!!!!!!!

 

This is professional cycling. Everything is crooked.

 

Sad but true... Great comment.
And tell me frankly, is anyone here (on this forum) really surprised by this news, I mean really?
On the other hand, cycling fans have complete package following this sport - sport, competition, cheating, catching cheaters, cheaters geting away, prosecutions, advocates...
You don't need to follow politics and science shows... Just follow cycling - the sport which gives you all kinds of knowledge and entertainment. It's even better than The Godfather saga.

 

Yawn.

 

Why would that be a shock? We all expect it. What else is new?

What would be a total shock, is if you/bobke admitted that Disco dope(d) just as much as ONCE/LSW/Astana or CSC or T-Mobile etc.

 

First of all, they should expel the Kazakh boys from the vuelta for this stunt.

Doubt they will, but they should. This is really farcical.

Second, American riders do not dope. Ever. It is an anti-American French cabal picking on them. So there.

Third, Floyd had no issues with testosterone, he simply had one or twelve shots of Jack Daniels the evening following a hard moutain stage, and he has large spherical objects between his legs, that produce testosterone which is not from his own body (isn't all this obvious to you idiots?).

 

I agree. The request that they come back was ridiculous. They should have been requested to make themselves available at the start, and the testers should have gone to them.

 

Those two definetly should be banned from Vuelta and their Astana team from Pro Tour.

 

Yes, the Drugs testers broke the unspoken rule. That rule is you don't make a surpise control during a stage race. You make a control but within certain accepted periods of the morning.

But because the testers were running late, I guess the Kazakh drug buddies thought they were in the clear to hook themselves up.

Is this a case of another drugs discovery by sheer accident?

 

Maybee their watches were on kazakhistan hour.

 

Both Kazakhs left in the Astana team bus at 7:30 in the morning. They wanted to sleep during the 80 km of the transfer until Motilla of the Palancar. About ten minutes later appeared the doctors of the UCI in the Hotel Ciudad Encantada, of Cuenca, and they did the analyses to the six Astana riders, that were going to move in car and had not left.The doctors requested that Vinokourov and Kashechkin returned to put them under the analysis, but the director, Herminio Diaz Zabala, refused alleging that in that case the bus was not going to arrive in time to the start and he requested to them that they went with them to Motilla and that they took the samples there. But they did not do it.

 

Diaz Zabala works for Astana ?
I remember Hermano as a super domestique for Jalabert and Zulle at ONCE during the 1990's.
He was a very tough rider.

 

So what's wrong with that? All the testers had to do was extract a sample, why didn't they just follow the bus and get the sample on the other end? Or catch up with it and get a sample on the road? It's not like getting a blood sample takes an hour or two.

Someone else gets lazy or behind schedule, and it's a sign of rider doping. Welcome to the Vuelta a Nihilism...