It seems in vogue to let riders testify behind closed doors about their doping sins. While I can understand the benefits during an active investigation, I fail to see how it helps anybody but the rider after that.

We’ll see what happens eventually in the USADA case and if all the statements will become public, but for now let’s use Basso as an example. Here is what he told cyclingnews.com recently:

Asked directly who put him in contact with Fuentes, and whether it was Riis, he said: ‘I told the Italian Olympic Committee how I contacted Fuentes, and I told the truth. A person of 27 or 28 years of age can find things out for himself…”

No, you can’t find out things for yourself when you’re looking for help with blood transfusions – it’s not in the Yellow Pages. And no, you can’t find out things for yourself if you’re known as a pro rider who needs to consult an agent or manager for even the simplest tasks.

But isn’t that handy, the secret statements come to the rescue. He’s already told everything behind closed doors, so we should shower him with gifts and not bother him with pesky questions.

Even if he didn’t say a word to CONI, we can’t prove what happened behind closed doors, allowing riders to simply keep on lying to fans like they always have.

How do I know he wasn’t completely open to CONI? Well, there are three indications:

1. He got a 2 year ban, so no reduction for being helpful.
2. Nobody seems to have been charged after Basso’s statements to CONI
3. His own lawyer confirmed Basso didn’t name any names.

As always, Basso wants to have it both ways. Just like he merely “attempted to dope” without ever succeeding, just like he only extracted blood from his body without ever putting it back in, he now wants his colleagues to believe he didn’t name any names and his fans to believe that he was completely forthcoming with CONI.

Unfortunately for Basso, while he may not have changed in the past ten years, the fans’ appetite for fairytales has.

This was something I didn’t see coming, somebody out of Tyler’s confessional turning into a cult hero. Motoman, the character who allegedly shuttled EPO in refrigerated panniers during the Tour de France.

Motoman would have been nothing but a funny name had it not been for the fact that he and his bike shop appear in photos with Sean Yates, a Team Sky car, various Radioshack riders and Lance anno 1999. Now everybody sees sinister connections.

While I love a good conspiracy, this “evidence” is a total joke in my view. Although it may be completely accurate that all these people had some funny business together, the photos don’t prove anything (nor do they prove the connections are innocent, BTW).

If a photo of Sean Yates or these riders and a guy (allegedly) involved in doping in some way constitutes proof, then surely the thousands of photos of any of them with Bjarne Riis, Johan Bruyneel, Lance Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton, Ivan Basso, etc, etc, etc would have “proven that point” already. What’s so special about Motoman, other than that it actually means less, since you can very plausibly say you had no idea who he is and what he does/has done?

The guy is a Trek dealer, that much is clear. And if you ride a Trek bike for a living and a Trek dealer asks you to pose for a photo with him, you oblige. Pretty logical I think. You don’t first run a background check to make sure the guy is in fact a bike dealer and not a drug dealer. So the photos of him with Radioshack riders at various races seem pretty normal to me.

The photos in front of his shop are a bit different, at least those people must have made an effort to get there. But again, it doesn’t have to mean anything. The bike shop seems to be a legitimate business, so it’s difficult to ascertain whether these riders or Yates go there because it’s a bike shop or because of Motoman’s side business.

What is worrisome is that nobody is commenting. If you don’t have anything to hide, why hide?

The failure of many sports governing bodies to treat the drug problem more seriously and to take more effective means to detect and deter the use of drugs has contributed in large measure to the extensive use of drugs by athletes. Added to the laxity of enforcement has been a laxity of investigation.

Sounds pretty current, doesn’t it? It’s actually from the Dubin report from 1989 (the Canadian investigation coming out of the Ben Johnson schandal). He also says:

When an athletes was detected using performance enhancing drugs, only the athlete was disciplined and the incident was treated as an aberration. No enquiries were made about the circumstances under which the athlete took drugs and whether responsibility should also attach to coaches, physicians, or indeed the athletic organisations themselves.

Current as ever. I came across these quotes and much more interesting information while reading “The dirtiest race in history” by Richard Moore (@richardmoore73). I highly recommend the book.

Oh what torture to sift through all the non-responses following Lance’s lifetime ban. Current riders, ex-riders, it seems as if they all hired the same lousy PR agency. I understand they don’t want to say anything, it’s not fun, but not everything in life is.

I blame it partially on the race radio; the sport has raised a generation of riders unaccustomed to think for themselves. In combination with the sport’s history and a generation of team management raised in the EPO-era, this is a dangerous cocktail – but that’s for another time.

What really irks me are riders saying “I prefer to concentrate on the future, not the past”. Firstly, 2009 and 2010 isn’t that far in the past. Secondly and more importantly, why don’t they understand that this case is all about the future?

Sure, the past grabs the attention with the seven stripped Tour wins, but we all know that’s meaningless with none of the new winners any more deserving than the old one.

The future part, the outcome that will affect current and future riders, is much larger:

1. Two doctors banned for life worldwide in all sports. Ferrari may be the most famous – I had never heard of Del Moral until last year – but by some accounts it’s a pretty tight battle to determine who is worse.
2. A third doctor likely to be banned for life soon. This is not just some hypothetical score for anti-doping, this is a doctor who is currently employed by Radioshack-Nissan-Trek and treating riders.
3. A cycling manager may be banned for life soon too. Again not a hypothetical win, but somebody who till this day deals with cyclists on a daily basis at the same team.
4. The fact that Lance cannot compete in triathlons going forward is also very much “future” and not “past”.
5. No doubt this whole affaire will have ramifications for WADA, USADA and the UCI. It may provide the impetus to change how we organize anti-doping efforts. Other sports have had the same problem, but with cycling as everybody’s favorite whipping boy, the powers that be may now spring into action.

So tell the world you think Lance is God, or the devil, or even walk away with a meaningless “no comment”. But don’t say it’s all in the past and you prefer to focus on the future. This is the future.

More coming soon, so make it easy on yourself and subscribe to this blog.

Jonathan Vaughters’ interview with Bicycling had this interesting section about anti-doping efforts:

Vaughters called for better anti-doping enforcement. I ask what he meant by that.

“Money,” he says. Money funds better testing, and research for better tests, so that anti-doping authorities can keep up with advances in cheating.

Even though teams do fund most anti-doping, they’re resistant to paying more, too. But to hear Vaughters tell it, the obstacle isn’t the cost alone, or even the specter that with more testing comes more positives and, in the short term, more pain.

The problem is trust.

“When I go to the other team managers and say we should put in more money, I almost get spit in the face,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Fuck that. Why would I put in more money to an organization that only seeks to hurt my team?’”

Well, if that is the problem, then I honestly don’t understand why the teams haven’t solved it yet. This is how to do it.

• So you don’t trust the UCI? That’s fine, do it yourself.
• Over the past few years, several teams have had an internal anti-doping program.
• Ironically, teams with an internal anti-doping program can make a better biological passport profile than the UCI can, if they want to (and don’t have the program just for PR or worse). You see, such teams have their own test results AND the UCI test results. So they have more data points than the UCI and hence a tighter profile.
• Take this idea but use it across all teams and organize it centrally.
• Start a Rider Anti Doping Institute – Cyclists As Leaders (RADICAL). This institute can be owned by the riders and the teams, or some foundation, whatever construction teams and riders trust (so not the UCI according to Vaughters). It doesn’t matter.
• Have the teams put money into RADICAL, the money they would be willing to spend extra on anti-doping if only they trusted the UCI.
• If the teams are smart, they will understand the amount doesn’t matter for their budget. As long as they are all putting it in, it will come off of the only variable they really have: rider salaries.
• Nowadays WorldTour teams pay a 120,000 Euro fee for the Biological Passport (somehow this sounds low, but it’s in this UCI bulletin). As most WorldTour budgets are 10-20M Euro, that’s nothing. The fee paid to RADICAL could slowly increase from 200k to 1M per year.
• You’d have a total of around 30 teams participating (WorldTour and those ProConti teams who want to race a Monument)
• When you have a 6M Euro fund for anti-doping measurements (already much more than the current bio pass budget, and the two together makes close to 10M), increasing to 30M+ (an insane amount).
• Now you can really do some research to keep up with the dopers. You can also increase the frequency of testing which makes the passport more effective. It may not prevent somebody doping, but it does reduce the level of doping and therefore the effectiveness, making the playing field more level.
• Teams should also agree to a few simple measures to make sure their money goes as far as possible. For example, ban training camps in faraway places. If all teams agree, it affects everybody equally so it won’t make a real difference, and you avoid people training on Sicily or Tenerife who can either not be tested at all or only at great cost.

I am sure there are reasons why people say this won’t work, but why not think about reasons it will work?Let me know your thoughts? To be continued, so subscribe to this blog if you don’t want to miss it.

Monday I wrote part 1 of my commentary regarding Vaughters’ opinion piece in the NYT, here’s part 2.

Aside from the personal experience he’s had, the key subject of the article was that it’s important to keep up the anti-doping efforts. Athletes just want a level playing field, if they think they have that they won’t cheat. The goal is to never put the athlete in the position where they have to choose between giving up their dream or doping, to create an environment where this is simply not an issue.

I thought the article was a bit lean on specifics of how that was to be achieved so there isn’t that much to comment on.

In my opinion,  it’s a bit too simplistic that athletes don’t want to cheat and only want a level playing field. There’s good research that most people will cheat a little when given the chance (The (honest) truth about dishonesty from Dan Ariely is very interesting and an easy read on this topic).

But it’s probably true that most people don’t want to mess around with needles and blood bags unless their environment encourages it and makes it feel “normal”. The choice to cheat seems to come from two sources which reinforce each other:

1. The overall athlete population (the playing field). If the top-100 dope then you have to resign to coming 101st or dope or quit.
2. Your immediate surrounding (your parents, trainers, and in particular: your team). Does this environment try to keep you on the right path or offer you the doping “solution”. This doesn’t mean the athlete is not responsible for their own actions, but it would be silly to deny that people are influenced by other people.

Surroundings that discourage doping have always existed in cycling. Even in the dark years when “everybody was doping”, some riders and in fact entire teams were not. There is the famous chat session between Vaughters and Andreu from mid-2005 where the former explains that Credit Agricole was completely clean (“believe me, as carzy [sic] as it sounds – Moreau was on nothing. Hct of 39%”). The whole chat is an interesting read.

The playing field you can affect in two ways:

1. Hunt the dopers. This is what most anti-doping efforts are based on, with doping tests in- and out-of-competition, whereabouts,  internal team tests, biological passports, etc. One can argue about the effectiveness.
2. Increase the number of immediate environments that are clean. If there are five clean teams on a playing field with 20 teams, that playing field isn’t very level. And dopers don’t really stand out. If 15 out of 20 are clean, it’s much easier to pick out the cheaters and there is enough mental support within the clean group to sustain the effort.

With regards to hunting the dopers, despite all its shortcomings, cycling has done a reasonable job. Especially in comparison to other sports. But if Vaughters truly finds it important to keep pushing these anti-doping efforts, then it’s hard to understand why fewer and fewer teams hire independent testers like Don Catlin to really find out what their riders are doing. Or why no team makes any public statements regarding the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the biological passport and other efforts. Especially since Vaughters is the president of the team association AIGCP, you would expect him to spend more time talking about these issues.

One gets the feeling the teams don’t mind paying for the bulk of the program as a marketing exercise and are not too concerned how effective it is. That may very well be a general anti-doping problem – how do you prevent the athletes from always being one step ahead.

Unfortunately I don’t know the answer, but the closer you monitor, the more you restrict the doping practices and therefore level the playing field (some may still be doping but less, for a reduced gain, and therefore the clean athlete has a better chance).

As for the number of teams that are clean, there’s definitely been an improvement too. But it’s hard to know if they have been responding to the testing or if the teams are true believers. especially because many of the people are still the same as in the dark years, it’s fair to have your doubts.