L’Equipe has always been out to get Lance. No doubt.
But, this situation will go down just like the rest of the dope accusations against Lance.
Those like threemae will see it as more evidence to throw on the pile and concluded with all these smoking guns, one must have been fired.
Others will be able to poke holes in it and mentally toss it away as they have the accusations by the journalists, the trainers, the cleaning ladies, etc. etc. etc.
As far as I’m concerned, this newest story doesn’t change the “lance/drug atmostphere” at all, and so I say. . .“whatever.”
Personally I suspect they’re all on something, and I really couldn’t care less. But I don’t like the way Lance Armstrong gets singled out as the only rider worthy of suspicion when everyone who finishes in the top 10 of a grand Tour is doing things just as amazing (from a “distance from the mean” perspective) as him. Why are Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich, et al. beyond suspicion?
As for this latest “revelation”, I have serious doubts, for all the same reasons everyone else has brought up.
Airman, meet Richard Virenque, a massively popular French cyclist who was busted.
Funny thing is, now the French (so I’ve heard) have welcomed him back with open arms. He does the French language broadcasts of TdF and is popular (I read an article about it, probably velonews but I’ll be damned if I’ll track it down).
Lance has even said as much, “you love and cheer for Virenque, but you ridicule me and I’ve never tested positive.”
I’m not blaming the FRENCH (I like France) but there’s definitely an element in that country that is really out to discredit Lance. You don’t see this kind of press in Spain, Italy or Germany. Granted, Lance doesn’t usually race there, but it still appears to be some people’s goal in life to nail Lance.
You guys that think this is an anti-American thing need to rethink. Yes they’re gunning for Lance but that’s because he has made himself the big target. Not only is he the unquestioned leader of the sport he his also one of the most outspoken about drugs. Add to that the whole demigod thing that happened after the cancer and you’ve got a man with a HUGE target on his back. Stories about Lance sell copies.
Much like the press would have loved to get Carl Lewis the want Armstrong. I’ve been following this story on TV news and radio talk shows. I do watch the Tour De France but that’s my only glimpse of the world of cycling. I have noticed though that a lot of cycling journalists and sport analysts seem to come down on the side that he’s almost certainly guilty but the current circumstantial and hard evidence isn’t strong enough to actually prove it.
I haven’t seen that. However, my understanding is that to determine the probability that Lance was doping given one positive test, you’d need to know more than just the false positive rate on the test. You’d also need to know the incidence of doping in the underlying population.
It would be like the classic taxi problem from stats class.
That’s basically my assumption (I might be flamed for that). I take for granted that every one of them is doped to the eyes, just using methods that currently aren’t detectable (it’s not like the big guys can’t afford the best advisors on this topic).
The point mentionned by the OP (the “undoped rider” 's wife caught with stockpiles of EPO) is quite telling IMO.
Someone asked about french riders testing positive though I’m not interested in cycling I couldn’t have missed on case involving a famous french rider who was doped, but…err…unknowingly… He just didn’t know. They didn’t tell him. His stance and his poor command of french made the days of comic shows ( “on m’a dopé à l’insu de mon plein gré”…untranslatable), so I couldn’t ignore it.
I would add that I don’t understand why french people would have specifically wanted to oust Armstrong. It’s not like lacking him, a french rider would have won instead. If someone has a beef in this story, it should be the americans, for the obvious reason, not the french. What difference would it make whether the winner is an American, a German or an Uzbek? Though it seems to me that the general belief in France is that he was doped.
Nice thread title, threemae. So, who are the “bitches”? Are we all the “bitches”? Well, if you’re in fact addressing your fellow denizens of the SDMB, then, yes, you have “told us so”, many times. What you haven’t done is to prove anything. Bitch.
It means that in one stage of the Tour, a breakaway formed at the front (i.e. several riders broke free of the main group, or peloton), one of whom was Filip Simeoni. Lance Armstrong had a beef with Simeoni (who was testifying re: EPO against a former Armstrong associate), so he rode down the breakaway group. Breakaways have to cooperate to stay in front, and any breakaway containing an overall Tour contender (i.e. Lance) is more likely to get ridden down by competing teams, who don’t want a Tour contender to make time on the rest of the field. So basically, by joining the breakaway with Simeoni in it, Armstrong made it certain that the group would get caught. However, he made it clear that he’d drop back if Simeoni did so too. Basically, he was making sure that Simeoni didn’t get a stage win, because Simeoni had pissed him (and a lot of other people) off.
Of course the lab that did the testing cannot make the match, and it absolutely shouldn’t be able to either. How else would it be possible to carry out annonymous testing? The samples are provided to the lab labeled only with numbers and so their results will only be in terms of numbers not names. Providing the results according to sample number was a requirement of WADA to allow the lab permission to run the tests.
This was a lab that had just published in Nature for essentially doing the exact same research with the 1998 Tour samples. The lab had no interest in naming individual riders, just doing research into the feasability of a modern isoform differentiation EPO test on urine frozen for six or seven years. They started with 1998 because of the Festina scandal of that year and found that they could indeed still detect EPO after that time period, identifying it in a larger number of samples, around 20 or so. Again, this research got published in Nature, the most prestigious and important general science refereed journal in the world. They simply did a repeat of the research with the 1999 samples and provided results listed by sample numbers as required by WADA to access the samples.
Gangster Octopus, this research group has obviously proven that one can test for EPO in urine frozen for even longer than 1999, and they got published in Nature for it. That researcher from the Canadian lab was only commenting on the feasability, and said: "Ayotte, director of the World Anti-Doping Agency-certified lab closest to WADA headquarters in Montreal, said she wasn’t surprised that Doctor Jacques de Ceaurriz, director of the French national anti-doping laboratory at Châtenay-Malabry, was confident in the methods, but only that an older sample could be so readily tested.
“I don’t dispute their findings,” Ayotte said. “If there’s residual EPO after five years, it was properly identified. We are not that lucky here.”
De Ceaurriz and Ayotte agree that if enough Erythropoietin - synthetic or natural - remains in a sample, distinguishing the two is not an issue. Such degradation, both said, does not lead to false positives.
“One of two things happens,” De Ceaurriz said. “Either EPO, which is a protein, degrades as time passes and becomes undetectable. In that case we have a negative test result or, as in this case, the EPO persists as it is. We have therefore no doubt about the validity of our results.” "
I trust the accuracy of the LNDD analyses 100% - and having followed the development of both EPO testing and Blood Doping testing since the Sydney Olympics quite closely, I’ve kept quite a timeline of refinements in both testing procedures at hand for future reference.
My position is this - 12 accuracte retrospective EPO positives have been detected by the LNDD from urine samples from 1999. This is a great breakthrough in technology which should be applauded.
However, the tests were conducted purely as research with a view to improving retrospective accuracy. There was NOT the normal protection of anonymity in place, and more importantly, there was NOT the normal presumption of innocence which is provided by having a direct 1 to 1 matching extra sample per day. Accordingly, to have released Lance Armstrong’s name without those corroborating extra samples was wholly unethical on the part of L’Equipe. Wholly unethical.
In sport, no one is guilty until a postive 2nd sample is proven. Anonymity is guaranteed up until that point to protect the innocent.
