So on Thursday we had the news about “the USADA five“, and what struck me most was not the article but the response. Here’s Levi Leipheimer, on velonation:

“I really don’t have anything to say. All I can say is that I am here at the Tour de France, I am 100 percent focussed on this race. So far I am still in the hunt for the classification. That is all I have to say,”

Here’s a snippet of Hincapie on velonation:

“Right now I am here to do my job and I am just going to try to focus on that. Cadel obviously is focussed on winning the Tour and I am here to try to help him do that. I am going to continue to do that and to try not to let anything get in my mind beside that.”

Here’s Slipstream’s statement (I left out the generic mission statement part):

“We expect that anyone in our organization who is contacted by any anti-doping or government authority will be open and honest with that authority but at this moment, we – our organization, our riders and our staff – are focused on the Tour de France. We won our first Grand Tour in May and to achieve similar success here, we need to focus on that.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, these are HORRIBLE statements. “Oh, I love to talk to the press and tweet about trivial stuff, I really liked it when you asked me about my favorite TV show the other day. And that bit about my pets, good stuff. But if you have a tough question, then I must say that I am very focused on this race so, aw shucks, I can’t really give a response right now. Focus, focus, focus. What’s that? Can’t hear you, lalalalalalalalalala. But we’re doing well on GC, how about that, can’t you focus on that? Please?”

I understand the Tour is the biggest race of the year, but if you have time for two meaningless sentences, you also have time for two with substance. And to introduce completely irrelevant elements into the discussion (“we won our first Grand Tour in May” or “Cadel is focused on winning the Tour”) is just cringeworthy.

I don’t believe in “selective transparency”; the more open you are the less you have to worry. Maybe there are conditions agreed to with USADA, but you can always say something (even if it is “The whole thing is a lie” or “We’re not allowed to say anything from USADA”. People would understand that).

Coming up next is a 100% USADA-free post, so don’t forget to subscribe if you’re in the mood for a change.

Dutch newspaper “de Telegraaf” published a spectacular story, claiming to have identified at least five witnesses for the USADA in the Lance case (aside from the already obvious Floyd, Tyler and Frankie).

Of course none of these five (Hincapie, Leipheimer, Zabriskie, Vandevelde and Vaughters) are confirmed by USADA or themselves, but it can’t be too big a shock. If the charge is that Lance, Bruyneel et al set up a doping program and forced their teammates to participate, you would expect supporting witness statements to come from those teammates, not from the local butcher or a Miss World contestant.

I suspect the story is not 100% accurate, in particular the claim that those who admitted to doping have been given a 6 month sentence to be served in the off-season. If that were to be true, it would be a travesty. I can imagine cases where people receive a reduced sentence in exchange for their cooperation, I can even imagine situations where people receive full immunity. But I cannot imagine that an anti-doping agency would pretend to sentence an athlete, yet do it in a way that it doesn’t affect him. That would be so cynical and an insult to the public’s intelligence.

Additionally, I would find it hard to believe that USADA would give Leipheimer (for whom this would be his second doping violation) the same penalty as the others for whom it would be their first offense. So all in all, I find that part of the story hard to believe.

Anyway, as those involved deny they got suspensions but don’t deny they gave testimony, maybe that tells us something. Nothing “beyond reasonable doubt”, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to conclude that if the whole story were false, they would deny everything. Now that they deny only a detail, it’s likely that detail is in fact incorrect and the rest is not. Frankly, the “miraculously delayed suspensions” sound a bit Fabianesque.

But of course, all of this is speculation.

To be continued Monday, you can subscribe to this blog if you don’t want to miss it.

1. If there is new evidence in the form of doping test or biological passport data, the witness statements could also be substantiated and become a lot stronger. If you wonder why no action would have been taken on such evidence before, the answer may be less conspiracy and more to do with the simple math of #2. It’s one thing to take on Bertogliati or even Contador, but quite another to take on Lance, a German soccer player or an NFL quarterback.
2. Most of the focus is on Lance, but the people who should probably really be worried are Bruyneel and especially the doctors. After all, if the ten witness statements include not only “I saw Lance and doctor X do …” (which could be easily discarded) but also “doctor X and I did …”, well, then doctor X is probably screwed. Same with Bruyneel, if it comes out that riders were pressured to “follow this regime or you won’t ride”. However, we don’t know officially if such statements even exist.
3. What to make of these ten witnesses? If they’re telling the truth about what happened and the extent of the program, they have been witness to one of the biggest sporting frauds in history. Yet only some of them spoke out before the federal prosecutors came knocking, the rest were content to let it be (or even participate). That doesn’t make them liars or bad people necessarily (doesn’t make them honest either), but at the very least it would show how messed up your world view can become when you live in a bubble.
4. The legal setting is one thing, the court of public opinion quite another. It seems the pro- and anti-Lance camps are pretty dug in, and I don’t think too many people will change their opinion either way. It would take a truly shocking event (such as Lance’s big buddy Hincapie testifying against him or Paul Kimmage coming out saying Lance was always clean) to make a dent into those positions, otherwise any legal outcome will be seen as vindication by one group and a cover-up/framing by the other.
5. Right now, the only certainty is that the conspiracy theorists – for once – are right. Maybe  there it’s a conspiracy of prosecutors, USADA and the French (every good conspiracy needs a foreign villain, if not extra-terrestrial) to nail an innocent Armstrong. Maybe it’s a conspiracy of Armstrong Inc to win 7 Tours and then use his political cloud to fend off prosecution. Either way it’s a conspiracy, the question is if we’ll ever know which one it is and if anybody is still going to be swayed from their current position on Lance.

Much has been said already about the latest action against Lance Armstrong, this time by USADA. My 10 thoughts are split in two parts, the second part follows Monday:

1. USADA is aiming very high with statements about data “fully consistent with EPO and/or blood doping”. I think data is rarely that clear-cut.
2. Lance’s people are aiming quite high too, going for the “same liars telling the same lies” defense when it is clear there must be new people and new stories to the USADA approach – assuming there are indeed ten witness statements.
3. I would think any case against Lance will be difficult. Having ten witness statements of the type that “Lance told me …” or “I saw Lance and doctor X do …” isn’t really that strong, without corroborating evidence.
4. On top of that, Lance could bankrupt any agency that takes him on. That’s the irony of modern pro sports, the top athletes are a lot wealthier than the organizations policing them. Think about it, WADA’s excess of income over expenses, cummulative, is about 22M USD. Some athletes make that in a year.
5. On the other side, any statements by the anti-doping laboratory that they were pressured to suppress a positive test by Lance in the Tour de Suisse would potentially be a lot more damaging – this person would have been directly involved in the exchanges. But of course right now it’s only hearsay that such statements even exist.

OK, there are a gazillion things you can say about the latest Lance doping story, the repitition of moves between both sides is getting a bit stale, but I can’t help to call bullshit on Horner. In an interview with cyclingnews.com he says two things:

“I don’t believe Armstrong has cheated in any way to win those victories and he’s gone through an insane amount of testing.”

“There’s so much more that the drug agencies can be doing with the tax payers’ money on cleaning the sport up from this point on,”

So which is it, do riders go through an insane amount of testing making cheating impossible, or should the agencies be doing much more than they are? You can’t have it both ways, using the agencies’ testing to demonstrate Lance is clean but then say their testing sucks. None of this proves innocence or guilt, it’s just another example of the silly arguments flying around, on both sides.

Horner further questions the reliability of those making the statements against Lance. That’s fair enough, although I am not aware of anybody in history making false doping allegations against a teammate under oath. It just doesn’t seem worth it to lie under oath about what somebody else has done, especially for those who are already retired and have nothing to gain from immunity. But, Horner may be right and of course his reaction is to be expected. I mean, what would really have been shocking is if he would have come out and said “Yes, I think my buddy conspired with my current boss to cheat”. That probably wouldn’t help his chances of being picked for the Tour.

Speaking of which, some speculated Horner wasn’t on the Radioshack longlist because the team knows it can’t win and so they don’t need his support rider strengths. But Horner is not just a support rider, he’s won more races than many others on that longlist (including probably the since-injured Andy Schleck). So if you want stage wins, I think Horner is a good guy to have jumping into break-aways in the moutains and staying clear.

I guess I can’t avoid saying something about the Lance thing, so I’ll do that next week. Subscribe at the top left of this page if you want to receive that one automatically.

Kiwirider posted some interesting questions to me as a response to the Frei blog. Since the questions were long (and the answers too) I’m turning it into a blog. I have summarized his questions, for the full questions you can check here. For the final installment of “a bit of Frei and Gerry”, subscribe to this blog as I will discuss the email exchange between Frei and myself next week.

1) Have I put pressure on riders to perform, directly or indirectly?

Whether I have ever indirectly put pressure on a rider, that’s obviously difficult to answer as it depends on how indirectly you want to go. No doubt in some team we have sponsored in 15 years, somebody has told somebody else “you should win this race”. As far as I can remember, we only once signed a team to a contract that had some performance bonuses. They were pretty unrealistic ones anyway so it didn’t really matter, but still I didn’t particularly like it so I haven’t done it since.

Regardless, your influence as a sponsor – no matter how large – is limited in most teams. You can decide to sponsor or not to sponsor and that’s about it. With regard to sponsoring or not sponsoring, we obviously decided to sponsor Riis’ team. Not a man associated with clean cycling back as a rider, but at that time I saw his team as a way to make amends. For example, at the same time we joined the team, Rasmussen was sent packing. The team didn’t trust him and they even warned Rabobank about him. That move gave me confidence at the time.

With the Basso case, I started to have some the doubts, but the team also started a program that eventually formed the basis for the biological passport. So what’s the overall judgment at that time, positive or negative? The “revelation” in 2007 that Riis has used EPO was probably the least shocking news ever, and aside from the poor way it was communicated it didn’t affect my thoughts. It actually fit well with my reasoning for why the team existed to begin with. In 2008, our comfort level decreased for several reasons, but even at that point it was difficult to make a clear decision. However, when the decision was taken, and every possible option was in front of us, it was quite easy to go for the TestTeam idea.

As for whether I applied pressure as a team owner of the TestTeam, you will find that I constantly reinforced I didn’t care about winning, in face-to-face meetings with riders & staff as well as in the media. Sometimes to the annoyance of the riders actually. But this was not just some act, I truly don’t care particularly about the winning. Of course if given the choice between first and second, I’ll choose first. But at the basis, the goal was to create the environment where riders could perform to their maximum ability, and if you achieve that, it’s not so relevant if there are a few faster riders out there or not.

Would I have made any of those decisions differently in retrospect? A rather pointless question as you can’t see all these decisions as isolated. Without the six years of experience at Team CSC, we wouldn’t have been able to come up with the TestTeam. It’s the history on which we build the future.

2) The delta between minimum wage and the stars in cycling is large, an incentive to cheat. Can you as a sponsor reduce the delta?

To be honest, I don’t even think that as a team you can affect that. It’s supply and demand, and with the exception of teams like BMC, no team is sitting on extra cash wondering what to do with it. So they need to pay market rate for their star riders or face oblivion, and then the money left hopefully covers the entry level salaries. Even if more money would flow to the teams, more than likely it would go disproportionally to the stars. Because the simple fact is that there are more riders who can fill those entry-level slots than there are positions available.

The only way I can really see it can be changed is if the minimum wage changes. If all teams are forced to pay their entry-level riders more, then it will come off the top salaries. That gets us back into the whole free-market discussion from a few months ago.

3) Riders spend their formative years racing instead of picking up skills for their life after cycling. What have you done about this?

The lack of understanding about how the real world works among cyclists (and management actually) is shocking. I once asked a group of 30 riders “Why does a sponsor pay you?” and couldn’t get an answer. The “why would they stop paying you?” didn’t yield much better results although one did say “doping”.

So you have to start with very basic things. We did this with the TestTeam, at least we started to discuss questions such as the above. The problem with cycling is that riders and teams think that sponsors pay for “winning”. They don’t. Again, everybody will prefer winning over losing, but that’s not why sponsors come or go. They leave because they are treated poorly by the teams, and because of doping. I like to use the example of Gerolsteiner. For years they won next to nothing, yet the sponsor happily stayed. Once they started winning, the sponsor was gone. Indeed, doping. Anyway, that’s for another time.

At the TestTeam we stated 3 equal goals: Racing, Product Development and Fan Access. Of course at the start the riders only focused on the first, but I think that when you talk to some of our CTT-alumni now, they will tell you they learned more from goals 2 and 3, especially for their after-cycling career. Of course that doesn’t apply to everybody, probably not even to the majority of the riders who were on CTT, but it was a start (I was very pleasantly surprised when I ran into Theo Bos last month and he told me he wanted to meet up to brainstorm about a business idea he had. Made me a happy man to see he is thinking about that. He was also one of the riders who really “got it” when it came to product development and fan access).

Is it enough? No, it’s just a start. Can you influence this as a team sponsor? Not really (see above). But as a team owner or manager? Definitely. However, it’s tough if the team owner or manager has never lived in the “real world” himself.

4) As a North-American, I must be aware of the naive view on doping by various media yet my company advertises there. How do I reconcile this?

First, I am Dutch. While we owned Manhattan for a while, I wouldn’t classify the Dutch as North American. Second, I don’t have a company anymore, at least not one that advertises anywhere. Third, I think the media landscape is changing. Ten years ago virtually everybody was naive, and the media reflected that. Now there are outlets who are far more critical, and some that aren’t.

I am not sure which media in particular Kiwirider is referring to, but I would assume the TV stations which are indeed particularly uncritical. I am not a fan of advertising on OLN or whoever is the broadcaster of the Tour de France in North America nowadays, though not so much for anti-doping reasons as from a complete uselessness point of view. You make a good point though of aligning media buys with editorial stance, although within reason. We don’t want to flip it around either, where the media direction is dictated by the advertisers. But you’re absolutely right, more consideration could be given there.

5) Are bike companies funding research into doping and preventative measures?

Again, I don’t have a company anymore, other than the small mountain bike start-up but that one is not active in pro sports at all. I’d be very interested though in particularly which research you have in mind.

I agree with Kiwirider’s general assessment that anti-doping measures shouldn’t just (or even predominantly) be about chasing the athlete, that’s already way to late in the game. Start with education, work with the legitimate providers of oft-used drugs, coordinate with law-enforcement to chase higher up in the networks, change the process after positive doping tests to get to fast and credible resolutions, etc, etc. And for me the start of everything is the proper team environment and policies.

Stephen Roche gave an interview with cyclingnews that elicited strong responses. Many people dismissed them out of hand, in a way that really pisses me off. I know it would be easy to join the masses on this one, but as you may have seen on Twitter, I won’t.

You don’t have to agree or disagree with him 100% or even 1%, but why not discuss the issues? While I often disagree with Jonathan Vaughters, at least he had the decency to respond in a proper manner.

Many people were quick to point out “there are more important things to worry about in cycling”, a reference to doping. So what?

1. Does this mean that if you have several problems, you are not to talk about anything else until you have solved problem #1? Who in their right mind operates like that?
2. If there is a “much bigger problem”, what have the people criticizing Roche done about that then? I presume they didn’t want to spend time on Roche’s points because they were too busy dealing with “problem #1”, but I see little evidence of that in most cases (some exceptions notwithstanding).
3. The fact that most people refer to “much bigger problems” instead of saying “doping” already shows they are not dealing with it; if they cannot even properly name the problem, they’re still in denial.

This actually perfectly dovetails into an issue I have spoken out on frequently in the past few months. ALMOST NOBODY is talking about doping, so it’s disingenuous to say you can’t talk about other ways to improve cycling because you’re so busy discussing doping. My two main points:

1. Why is nobody talking about how well or how poorly the biological passport is working? Why do these riders have the time to comment on Roche’s thoughts, but not on the fact that there hasn’t been a biological passport case in so long? If that is such an important issue, why not use your 140 characters to speak out on that instead of commenting on something that you think is not important?
2. How many teams still have an active anti-doping program themselves? Look into that question and you’ll be shocked by the answer. Several teams have quietly stopped their independent anti-doping programs, sometimes without any type of announcement. No doubt, if you press them on it they will waffle about how the bio pass is now at a stage where you don’t need your own program anymore, but who believes that? Press them further on why they think the bio pass works so well, and you’ll likely get some version of “hey, did you see what Stephen Roche said?”

Aren’t some of the people who say Roche should focus on “the big issues” the same as those who droned on about race radios for the entire season last year? Pot, meet kettle.

I’ll discuss the actual points Roche made in a later blog. And I have a follow-up on the Frei blog coming up. To get them delivered automatically, just sign up here.