Posted on 07/24/2007 1:35:20 AM PDT by Aeronaut
Rest day today.
Now i feel just like I felt last year, like someone just took a dagger and shoved it in to the hilt.
I don't know if suspending competition for a year would make a difference for be the answer, but I do know this - I am done with cycling for the forseeable future.
I wish I had answers, but instead all I have is doubts and sadness.
You may be right - I don’t know how much more the sport can take. Tho’ I would also like to see a selection of much better labs doing the testing rather than Dick Pound’s lap puppy of Châtenay-Malabry.
Blood doping?
The riders know they are going to be tested and they know what the testers are looking for.
Blood cells of another person with similar blood as Vino’s?
If he did it he was stupid, no, make that very stupid.
He’s asked for the B sample to be tested.
I think that, as well as cleaning up the riders, officials also should take a hard look at the testing company, handling and testing of the A & B samples and the people who work for the testing company.
Forget all the drug testing. I’ve changed my opinion. I’m all for an “all drug” sport, where we don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore. If you can get it in your blood, more power to you.
To the bone.
Speechless.
NOBODY is that dumb.
Are they?
Either that or I'm switching allegiance to a sport where drugs can't help. Except I don't know what that might be....hopscotch, maybe?
One could hardly blame Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme if he were rooting for race leader Michael Rasmussen of Denmark to have a very bad day in Wednesday's stage in the Pyrenees Mountains.
In his race leader's yellow jersey, the 33-year-old Dane is far too visible to be ignored, and his visibility inevitably inspires thoughts of cheating and doping, the devils that have plagued the world's most prestigious cycling event for several years.
Not that Rasmussen has ever been found to have used a banned substance. It is simply that he was kicked off the Danish national cycling team for having missed two doping tests before the Tour started.
Tour organizers suggested that the Dane would not have been allowed to start the Tour if the Danish Cycling Federation had notified them before the Tour started.
"If we had been informed before the start, there wouldn't be this situation," said Patrice Clerc, the head of the Amaury Sport Organization (ASO), which runs the race.
"This situation" is simply that a man strongly suspected of cheating is now the favourite to win the Tour title. If that happens, it would make this year's edition the 12th consecutive Tour de France with a tainted champion.
The 1996 winner, fellow Dane Bjarne Riis, has admitted doping to win the race. The following year's winner, Jan Ullrich of Germany, has been linked to a Spanish blood doping scandal and was kicked off last year's race. Italian Marco Pantani, who won the 1998 Tour, was eventually caught doping and died of a cocaine overdose.
Lance Armstrong, who won seven consecutive Tour titles between 1999 and 2005, has been accused of doping by several people and a number of books - although he has never been found to have doped. And last year's winner, Floyd Landis, tested positive for synthetic testosterone during a Tour stage and is currently fighting to keep the title.
If Rasmussen raises his arms in triumph on July 29 on the Champs Elysees in Paris, at the Tour's end, it could turn be a very costly victory for the Tour.
In addition to his missing two doping tests (because of an "administrative error," he said), Rasmussen has been accused, by an American mountain bike rider named Whitney Richards, of trying to dupe him into transporting a human blood substitute to Europe in 2002. Rasmussen said he could not "confirm" the statement, which was made on the Internet site Velo-News.
The controversy followed the revelation that German rider Patrik Sinkewitz had tested positive for an illegally high level of testosterone before the Tour started.
meant to ping you to #27 also.
Seems like the thing’s imploding. As others have said, the stupidity is staggering. The whole entire thing has been an utter waste of our time...other than entertainment value, I suppose. It’s like watching Paris and Lindsay and Britney and Nicole. Who’s taking drugs now, and getting caught? Oh, Vinokourov. pfft.
The thing is when they get caught, they only get a two year suspension. The dopers should just be thrown out of the sport entirely & banned for life.
However, note the difference between this case and Landis - this time it is blood doping, something that certainly can enhance endurance. Note also that it occurred on the time trial stage. Then he had a very bad day, followed by an excellent day. Now as a stage winner I would assume he would automatically be tested. It will therefore be very interesting to see if he showed up positive also on yesterday’s stage. If not, well.....I am worried about the standard of both the testing institutes and some of the tests.
The amount of background work to find out if certain substances have a large diurnal rhythm, show up more or less after extreme exercise and fatigue, the effect of altitude exposure, etc, etc is tremendous. I know that in a lot of blood screening tests carried out in a clinical setting this work has never really been carried out to the full extent needed. That said, I do not know anything about this particular blood test.
Anyway, my idea to save the Tour is to ban all injections, venous infusions etc. Any rider who needs venous infusion during the race is sick and should be taken out of the race for health reasons. This will cause the race time to go up because the riders would really need to husband their reserves, but the race would not lose its excitement. To make sure - or at least reduce the chances of tampering with the riders - during the race they should all eat in and sleep in big halls - with the teams mixed.
I’m sure this would appear very primitive to most of the riders, but it could actually enhance the status of the race.
Of course it would not reduce the risk of doping during the preparation for the Tour nor would it be impossible to hinder someone taking drugs orally.
Sad day, really sad day.
Neither do I. From the IHT:
First revealing the news about Vinokourov on Tuesday, a rest day in the race, a French sports newspaper, l'Equipe, said on its Web site that the analysis of his blood was conducted by the Chatenay-Malabry laboratory outside of Paris.
It said that two distinctive types of red blood cells were found in the A, or first, test of his blood and showed that Vinokourov received a transfusion from a compatible donor shortly before the time trial in Albi.
Fresh blood augments the number of red corpuscles, which carry oxygen to depleted muscles.
Blood taken from a rider and then returned to his body cannot be detected but blood from a donor can be - a new test first caught Tyler Hamilton, the American winner of the Olympic time trial in Athens in 2004, when it was administered in Spain weeks after his triumph.
Bags of blood for transfusion back into the donor rider are at the heart of the Operación Puerto scandal in Madrid, which has implicated some of bicycle racing's stars."
[Vino's team manager Marc Biver "denies having manipulated his blood," The Associated Press reported from Pau & Biver added that the rider believed that "blood anomalies in his body" might have resulted from a crash he was involved in last week.]
If he were going to cheat this way, why wouldn't he have just brought some of his own blood for that purpose? Crazy!
It's tragic. And surely not everybody on the tour is doing it now. But those that aren't must be kicking themselves because they might just as well have been doping these past two weeks - nobody will ever believe that they didn't now.
What you say - is absolutely an utterly right -
everyone a bit involved into the sport knew, that latest since the days of Indurain a medical team is behind every athlet in the tour and what they did was treating inflamations with corticoids treating short breath with budesonid - treating restricted blood flow with aspirine - all these syptoms you get - you know if you cicyle up a mountain at tour speed. They didn’t look at it as doping - it was treatment and the efford to keep the athlet in shape.
And then came medicine against low levels of erythrocytes against to less muscle tissue against low spirit and depression.
All symptoms of fatigue could be seen as medical issue and you have to look at the sport scientifically to win don’t you ?
Even in indurains times there were doping rules but the testing organisations where far underfunded to follow the guys through their training camps on fuerte ventura for 1 month, in argentinia for another, then south africa etc..
... they are still today.
Indu even had a nose surgeon to widen the diameter of his breathing tracts - since mouth breathing shows your opponents you’re under stress and nose breathing moistens the air wich is more bening for the lung.
They where certainly all in it - noone in the business thought it was wrong.
They wake up today. Perhaps.
Lol - this now has a different meaning doesn’t it ?
Everything I said has a COMPLETELY new meaning now.
:-(
GRRR!
If all riders were proportionally slower, I don't think the race would lose any of its excitement. Maybe the super long rides are too much for any undoped human and should be shortened.
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