Since there has been a dearth of posts about endurance sports here, I thought I would comment about a great story from the recent Tour de France.
As you may or may not but should know, Floyd Landis won the 06 Tour de France, was found to have synthetic Testosterone in his blood (after an important stage win), and was stripped of his title. A while ago, Floyd Landis lost his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for sports. Now, Landis has maintained his innocence throughout the process meaning that he is a liar, or that he is the victim of foulplay. Interestingly, the Court of Arbitration has 3 judges, and the 1 dissenting judge noted:
"as this case demonstrates, even when an athlete proves there are serious errors in a laboratory’s document package that refute an adverse analytical finding, it will be extremely difficult for an athlete to prevail in these types of proceedings. Therefore, it is imperative that WADA Accredited Laboratories abide by the highest scientific standards." and "Given the plethora of laboratory errors in this case, there was certainly no reliable scientific evidence introduced to find that Mr. Landis committed a doping offence."
I would not discount the possibility of foulplay given that the French hate americans for dominating their sport, and that the anti-doping police are run by the French and target Americans 25-40% more than anyone else (I just made up that statistic arbitrarily, but it would be hard to disprove! See http://byudalton.blogspot.com/ for more arbitrary statistics). Cycling is holy and beloved to the French. It would be like a French football team beating our superbowl champs each year.
I'm not going to talk about Landis' case. I want to talk about a new American cycling team Slipstream. They were organized and committed to competing cleanly. Most pro teams are tested 10x a year--team Slipstream is tested about once a week. They are tested not only for illict drugs, but their hematocrit and hormone levels are also tracked to make sure there are no abnormalities.
They have been racing around the US and doing very well for years. This year they were invited to compete in the Tour de France, one of only 3 non-ProTour teams to get in. And even more amazingly led by an awesome cyclist Christian Vandevelde, they placed 5th overall, the top American team at the tour.
They are now sponsored by Garmin and Chipotle, and they are a team to watch. They could respresent the future of cycling and endurance sports, which is as much about changing the culture as it is about not doping.
This is a great article from Outside magazine about the team. Take a read:
http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200807/cycling-doping-slipstream-1.html
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6 comments:
Good post, so what do you think Ben, did he cheat? or is he a victim?
thanks for making a reference to my blatant use of arbitrary and self-serving statistics.
lengthy, but the article was good. it's sad that doping just became such an accepted and standard practice for a while there.
Not only team slipstream, but also American based team Columbia (used to be "Highroad") have an independent testing system. This team won 4 or 5 stages of this year's tour. The powerhouse CSC also has a testing system in place other than the normal controls.
This will be the future of Pro cycling, and I see the programs trickling into other team sports.
Cycling deserves the dirty tag it has received for the blatant doping of the 90's on, but it is also a sport that is testing and investing more to cleaning their sport than many others.
I think he cheated.
Thanks for the comment Nartker.
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