Oh what a surprise, CAS has sided with Katusha in their appeal to being denied a WorldTour license. UCI loses another battle. And as usual, the solution to one problem creates a problem. What now? 19 teams with WorldTour licenses? Demote another WorldTour team to Pro Continental level?

Of course, the UCI will claim it is not responsible. Expect phrases such as “The License committee is completely independent, therefore we are not responsible for their decisions. But look at the wider picture:

1. The License committee works under the guidelines of the UCI. So if the UCI sets the four criteria (sporting, ethical, financial, organizational) without a proper framework of how to judge those criteria, you end up with decisions that – while they may be correct – are easily challenged.
2. After the License committee made its decision to deny Katusha its license, everybody knew it would be challenged at CAS. What else was Katusha – the Global Cycling Project – going to do. Fold? So the UCI knew there was a chance CAS would reinstate Katusha.
3. Given that opportunity, the prudent course of action would be to hand out 17 WorldTour licenses, wait for CAS and then give the 18th license to Katusha or somebody else. By giving the 18th license to somebody else immediately, it created the potential for a mess.
4. What’s the big deal with 19 WorldTour teams? Races like to pick teams themselves, based on local favorites or other business considerations. With 22 teams in the Grand Tours, having 19 instead of 18 WorldTour teams guaranteed a spot means they can only pick 3 wildcard teams themselves. This is why ultimately the number 18 was picked, it was the compromise between the UCI and the big race organizers on how many teams they could pick themselves. Depending on how big a stink they want to create, race organizers are unlikely to accept 19 WorldTour teams, or they may say to the UCI that it can give out 19 licenses but they will only invite 18 of those 19.
5. Is there nothing fans can look forward to? Actually there is. Aside from the possibility that the race organizers will put a bomb under the UCI by flatly refusing the 19th WorldTour team to their races, there is another compromise possible which could even make the racing more exciting: They may decide to reduce the team size from 9 to 8. If they do that, then you can fit 25 teams into a 200 man peloton, meaning they could invite all 19 WorldTour teams plus 6 (six!) wildcards. More teams, less control, bring it on.

Lots more in the upcoming weeks, so subscribe here to not miss anything.

This particular war of words makes for good reading. You really get an inside view into the process (or lack thereof) that governs the biological passport. It’s best to google it and read the whole exchange so you can see for yourself which side you choose to believe.

The brazenness of the UCI is staggering. With every strike they receive, they hit back without considering the wider implications of their statements. Take the assertion from the UCI that Lance’s profile was sent to the bio pass expert panel on May 4, 2009 and that the panel didn’t see anything suspicious. It further claims that the bio pass software didn’t pick up any anomalies after May 4, 2009 so that Armstrong’s values were never sent to the experts after that date. This is troubling for two reasons:

1. Of course there is nothing suspicious in his tests up to May 4, 2009. That’s before the Giro had even started. Those tests couldn’t have been much more than establishing his bandwidth, so whether the values are regular or suspicious, you would have to be a complete idiot to violate the bio pass constraints that early on. In short; it proves nothing. If I, with my (according to the UCI) “very weak understanding of this very complex subject”, know this, then so does the UCI.
   
   To explain in very simplistic terms, the biological passport is an ever narrowing noose, as the test values that are picked up along the way create a profile of what is “normal” for this particular athlete. So if you’re tested the first time, a value for a human may be anywhere form 0 to 100. If you score 75 on that first test, then we can safely say you should never be below 50. So now your bandwidth for the second test goes from 50-100 instead of from 0-100 as it was for the first test. If that second test is 80, then we know the first test was not an anomaly;  you are in fact in that 75-80 range. So for test 3, we may accept only a value from 65-90. And so on.
2. The claim that the bio pass software didn’t pick up any anomalies after May 4, 2009 is actually very troubling. If that is true, and this is the software by which all samples are judged, then the whole bio pass system is a complete and utter waste because it obviously doesn’t pick up anything. It may explain why there are so few bio pass cases.Ignore whether you think the values from Lance’s 2009 Tour de France prove he doped. What everybody – believers and non-believers – should be able to agree on is that the values are at least suspicious. Or if you insist on an even more benign word: atypical. And the process should be that the software picks out profiles that are suspicious, or atypical, so that the committee can analyze them further.There’s lot to dislike about that process even if it does work properly, but the UCI seems to now state that suspicious profiles don’t even make it to the committee because the software fails to detect them. So in a panicked attempt to explain away their inexplicables, they are now throwing their own biological passport under the USPS team bus.

In the end, there are only two possible conclusions:

1. Armstrong’s profile was flagged by the software, a sign the tool may be useful, but the UCI decided not to forward the profile to the expert panel for review.
2. Armstrong’s profile was not flagged by the software, which means the software and therefore the whole protocol is useless.

For the people involved it matters little. Either they knowingly withheld a suspicious profile or they have lied about the effectiveness of the biological passport process they use (you remember, the process that proves they are doing a good job and that cycling is getting cleaner). Either way the blame lays with them.

Expect two things from the UCI in the next few days:

1. McQuaid will make his trademark switch from “I’m in control, trust me, it’s getting better” to “It’s not my area of expertise, you should ask the experts, the passport is actually the work of WADA”.
2. Silence

It’s hard to keep track of the public wars of words, isn’t it?

UCI vs. USADA

UCI vs. WADA

UCI vs. UCIIC

UCI vs. CCN

UCI vs. Ashenden

UCI vs. Kimmage

UCI vs. yours truly

If only there was a common theme to these wordfeuds so that people can figure out what is really going on? Hm.

Jonathan wrote a long rant for cyclingnews. And I don’t say this often, but I think you should read it. Unlike his op-ed in the New York Times (“riders are just looking for a level playing field and wouldn’t dope if they didn’t have to”, that sort of stuff) which I didn’t like, this rant is actually clear and quite concise. I really like it and I even agree with most of it:

• Indeed the problem is all of cycling, not Lance, or a team, or a president. It’s (nearly) everybody and everything. Either by their actions or their lack of action.
• While I wouldn’t say it applies to every top athlete, I think there is little doubt that the selection process to get to the pro ranks of any sport favor those who want to win at all costs, and although doping is maybe not their favorite “cost” to win, it is more tempting than to the average human being (you know, the one who was waded out of the selection process for pro sports when he skipped gym class on the second day). It doesn’t make them any better or worse, other people are tempted by other things (tax evasion, shop lifting, infidelity, whatever).
• It doesn’t mean every athlete would cheat if they had the chance, far from it, but it does mean that relying on everybody respecting a level playing field when doping would “unlevel” it in your favor is naive.
• Funding is a bottleneck in anti-doping and it needn’t be. Vaughters commented before that asking teams to pay more to the UCI – an organization they have issues with – is a non-starter and that this hampered anti-doping efforts. I thought this issue is easily solved (give the money for anti-doping to somebody else) and Vaughters makes the same point here. In fact where I dreamed of 18 million, he shoots for 40. Fine by me.
• This may be the best and strongest current in cycling right now, the push to get a completely independent anti-doping process set up. Independent from the federation, and one would hope independent from the national federations which frustrate an expedient and believable resolution of any doping violation.
• Even better, it’s not really something the teams need to wait on the UCI for. Anti-doping enforcement can be integrated into the employment relationship between team and rider, and as long as every team agrees and deals with it uniformly, it can be done in a way that protects the riders too (and doesn’t favor riders of one team over another). It will take some time to implement, as I am not a fan of breaking open existing employment contracts, but we need to have the long view on this problem anyway. There are no quick fixes.

One issue not really resolved in the end is that – whether you like it or not – you have to decide what to do with the people. If everybody is to blame, what do you do? It’s too simple to say “everybody was wrong but we’ll now have independent doping monitoring so it doesn’t matter”. Maybe that works, but it works in the way East-Germany worked. Repression can only survive for so long.

To achieve more permanent change in the mind-set inside the sport, some people will have to leave. You need fresh blood (no pun intended) to tip the balance. A very simplistic bit of logic: If you have 20 teams and 15 want to cheat, the remaining five will lose out. If 15 want to play by the rules, they will be able to pressure the other five. As I’ve said many times, right now cycling claims that “everything has changed”. Everything, except the people. That is not believable or sustainable.

You could achieve this by replacing absolutely everybody. Toss out all bureaucrats, all team management, all riders, sponsors, everybody. Don’t say it can’t be done, that you need the expertise. You don’t, a sport only requires fans. The rest will follow.

Fans are not served by better race tactics or more clever governance, they are served by exciting sports. And the wisdom gathered by those in the sport isn’t necessary to properly entertain fans. Somebody dreamt up boarder-cross on a rainy afternoon and it got into the Olympics in a blink of an eye. Nobody said it couldn’t be done because they lacked experience.

There is a lot of knowledge people have in cycling, so tossing them out would mean the racing would be a lot less sophisticated and probably slower. But no less attractive to those watching, so in the end that knowledge is useless for the survival of the sport. It’s only useful in competition with for example teams run by people with similar knowledge. And that same knowledge is actually what has damaged it mostly in the past.

Now, I am not actually suggesting cycling has to go that far; it’s a solution but not necessary nor desirable. You do however need that shift in the balance, to get 15 out of 20 teams going in the right direction. So some will have to leave and be replaced by people without a history. In-breeding or nepotism are not the solutions.

Note: I speak about teams mostly as an example, the same applies to the other players in the sport.

It’s tough to decide which dumb statement to pick apart today – there’s so much choice. But in the end, it’s hard not to pick Ferrari. As cyclingnews points out, Ferrari wrote on his blog:

“Therefore Armstrong would have achieved the same level of performance without resorting to doping, also thanks to his talent which was far superior to the rivals of his era.”

So Ferrari is telling everybody that he’s a hack, that all the stuff he prescribed to Lance doesn’t work. Basically, he charged more than a million bucks for a placebo effect. You can’t make up stuff like this, can you?

Although it isn’t that far-fetched. Some experts say that four out of the five drugs Lance took were useless, only the EPO wasn’t.

A fine mud-slinging contest between these two. Great if you like a pseudo-witty back-and-forth, but unlikely to lead to anything useful. Whichever side first starts to act like a grown-up could really score points here.

It won’t shock anybody to hear I’m not the UCI’s biggest fan, but every time WADA accuses the UCI of not doing anything, I ask myself why WADA didn’t step in (other than publicly protesting that the UCI isn’t doing anything).

I also wonder why WADA thinks that it is possible for cycling to keep all these great doping doctors and doping techniques to itself, without any of those skills ever flowing over into other sports. Since they are the World Anti Doping Agency for all sports, should that not be of great interest to them? And we know from the Vienna investigation that it wasn’t only cyclists, we know from Puerto that it wasn’t only cyclists. WADA is right when it says:

By suggesting a wider truth and reconciliation process (for all endurance sports), the UCI is again attempting to deflect attention from its own responsibilities, which are for those of cycling.

But by the same token, I would say:

By suggesting a focus only on cycling, WADA is again attempting to deflect attention from its own responsibilities, which are for all sports.

So reportedly Armstrong confessed to Oprah that he doped throughout his career.

No doubt his PR team has worked countless hours to come up with a rationale that would make his cheating OK in the eyes of a large swath of the public. It will probably work, but only if he succeeds in narrowing the scope to the doping offenses.

Two things to consider:

1. “Everybody was doing it” will probably be good enough an excuse for mainstream America. It’s of course a new lie to cover up an old lie, but hey, who cares about the details. If you really believe the field was level because everybody was doing the same, then you have to  believe a mediocre time-trialer and climber can become best-in-class through chemotherapy. And you have to believe those US Postal helpers were all more talented than most other teams’ leaders.
2. Much more importantly, the doping is only a small aspect of Lance’s failings. And apologizing (fake or real) for that shouldn’t let him off-the-hook for the rest. 

Because where Lance was truly one-of-a-kind was not in his training, his focus, his climbing or time-trialing. It was not even in his doping. Where he was truly unique was in the havoc he wreaked on others during his ten-year reign. He didn’t just deny doping like so many of his contemporaries, he actively sought to ruin those who spoke out.

Something tells me Oprah won’t be asking about the countless lives he’s tried to destroy (ironically while protecting himself from scrutiny by wrapping himself in the blanket of ultimate cancer patient protector).

If the confession happens, I am happy for those who have spoken out for so long, that they will finally make the leap from “sad, cynical, jealous bitch/asshole” to “courageous individual” in the eyes of so many who still believe the lie.

But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this is about them; it’s about Mr. Armstrong positioning himself for the rest of his life. Given the willingness of sports fans to forgive and ignore the bigger picture, his odds are good.

Next up, “what would really warrant a ban reduction for Armstrong”. To receive it automatically, you can subscribe here.