Posted on 07/29/2007 2:42:41 AM PDT by Aeronaut
If his tests come back positive from this tour, then obviously he'll lose it. But remember this is the Daily Mail. We should probably take the hyperbolic lead paragraph with a grain of salt. Just to be on the safe side, though, don't get used to the idea of Contador in yellow until all the tests are in either. I know I'm not.
It was news to me.
Unbelievable.
Contador was a member of the team Liberty-Seguros & the doctor involved in that investigation was one of their team doctors.
Contador insists he was on the wrong team at the wrong time & claims he wasn't involved with the doping as some of his fellow riders were. And to be fair, there wasn't anything concrete in the seized records that indicated he was being doped.
I'm thinking the OP stuff is probably irrelevant at this point to Contador. He was cleared by a judge, the UCI & tour officials, all of whom have had access to the seized records, unlike Dick Pound.
The Daily Mail's hyperventilations aside, Contador probably only has to worry about how his tests come out this week.
Now that you mention it I do remember. I figured there was some new bombshell out.
You really know your stuff.
You’re just being modest.
When will it end?
Mayo was in 16th place.
Somehow Mayo doesn't surprise me though. Nobody testing positive from that 'old guard' surprises me now. I think if Kloeden had stuck around longer, we'd be hearing about him too.
Frankie Andreu told the AP today:
"It could be a generational thing because the guys grew up racing in the '90s fell into maybe taking stuff in order to perform," said Andreu, who admitted taking EPO in 1999....You always wondered what the next guy was doing," Andreu said. "If you're trying to win the Tour de France and you think everybody else is doing stuff it becomes an arms race. And it might be a mysterious arms race because you never know, but you don't want to be caught out. So it becomes a game."
We've just got to hope that the younger ones who haven't been steeped in the doping culture long enough will finally see that cycling is serious about getting rid of the cheaters, & it's not worth the humiliation if anything else.
Americans can be hypocrites in the performance-enhancers debate
by Jemele Hill ESPN Page 2
Excuse us, kind Frenchmen. We Americans can be haughty. We can be delusional. We can be accusatory, and we love laughing at you while ignoring the outrageousness of our own situations.
We sat here for the past week or so, high and mighty in our sports ivory towers, ridiculing the Tour de France, which concluded with numerous doping scandals and a heavy cloak of embarrassment.
Understand that it's very easy for American sports fans to thumb their nose at the Tour de France and find great pleasure in the unraveling of an international event, especially when our homeboy Lance Armstrong is no longer involved.
[snip]
What Americans would never, ever want to do is what cycling officials did. We would never want to let a band of doping experts loose on American athletes. We are far too comfortable being entertained by dirty athletes to want to see any real cleansing take place.
Just imagine if the same vigilant testers used in cycling set up shop in American pro sports leagues. How many times would we read about American athletes being busted for performance-enhancing drugs on the ESPN crawl?
[snip]
Michael Rasmussen, the Tour de France leader after Stage 16, dodged drug tests prior to the Tour, leading to his team sending him home. I can only imagine how creative NFL players would be if they knew they would have to test clean before the playoffs and Super Bowl.
Had the NFL had the same rigorous testing as cycling, the Carolina Panthers might have showed up for Super Bowl XXXVIII a little shorthanded. As it turned out, several Panthers reportedly used performance-enhancing drugs during the 2003 season, and two of them allegedly had prescriptions for steroids filled right before they appeared in the Super Bowl.
[snip]
Last year, the most feared defensive player in the NFL -- which only happens to be the most powerful sports league in America -- was suspended four games because he violated the league's steroid policy. The dirty Tour de France cyclists were expelled from the event, and some were fired from their teams. But Shawne Merriman still played in the Pro Bowl and every sack he has earned still counts.
And yet with a straight face some of us refer to cycling as the dirtiest sport in the world. That's rich. [emph mine]
There is no way American sports are any cleaner than cycling. In fact, if our sports were held to world anti-doping standards, the cycling's scandals would seem mild by comparison.
Americans love to be entertained, often at the expense of our judgment, morals and values.
We don't want to know what lies behind the performance-enhancing trap doors. Cycling officials have at least been brave enough to want to lift the mask. Knowing that cleaner sports would mean decreased competition and decreased fun, many of us gladly accept the tradeoff of a little dirt.
We can continue to harshly criticize the Tour de France, but its officials wanted to know the truth, even if it meant shaming the sport before the world. So the question shouldn't be what has gone wrong in cycling, but rather what's gone right.
Well amen to that. Also, we can remind ourselves if we hear about someone else testing positive (& likewise if we hear others ridicule TdF as the 'Tour de Farce') of the point someone made over at the Disco forum yesterday:
"... in the TdF, there were 660 blood tests administrated to a population of 200 riders over a period of three weeks. Of these 200 riders, a grand total of four (4) were found to have tested positive for steriod use, EPO, or homologous blood transfusion. That's two percent (2%) of a population in which probably everyone was tested at least once. From this, some people have concluded that a vast majority of the peloton is actually doping. But I'm afraid that is both a hasty generalization, and also an inductive fallacy."
BERLIN (AP) — German authorities said Tuesday they have received documents from doping expert Werner Franke which he claims show Tour de France winner Alberto Contador was involved in doping.
Thanks for the Tour thread.
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