I’ve collected lots of little bits and pieces of post-season stuff, so thought I’d throw a few together:
Each rider will be submitted to at least eight tests in order to gain a biological passport next year.
UCI chief Pat McQuaid has come out with a statement that frankly beggars belief regarding retrospective testing:
“If we’re going to start rejigging the podium of every major international race over the past two or three years, by finding new tests for new products, and going back to the organizer and saying ‘you’ve got to rejig your podium’ .. it makes a complete mockery of sport,” he said. “You need very good information in order to do that in the first place.”
You mean a worse mockery of sport than we have now Pat? You’ve got to be kidding! This is tantamount to saying, ‘good luck to them, they were clever enough to use stuff that was undetectable at the time, the scamps’. We’re not giving out gold stars for ingenuity here, we’re talking about the decaying integrity of an entire sport. What a fucking idiotic thing for the president of the UCI to be saying publicly.
Velonews have published a two-part interview with Garmin boss Jonathan Vaughters. In part one he’s asked about the cancellation of the Tour of Germany and suggests that “more patience on the sponsor’s part would have been good in this situation.” But how long can you reasonably expect them to wait for the sport to be cleaned up? Perhaps they’re just fed up of being taken for mugs time after time, and have decided to show some backbone.
In part two, Vaughters hails retro-active testing as “a massive deterrent and a really positive development. Because now you can’t say, oh, I have some drugs that no one knows about it. Three or four years from now, they’re going to know about it, and in another 18 months after that they will have a test for it, and they can go back and test it. I think now that that precedent has been set for retroactive testing, it’s going to be one of the greatest developments in anti-doping and a really strong deterrent for anything — even autologous transfusions.”
That contrasts noticeably with McQuaid’s earlier comments and also reminded me of an old interview from 2004 that Michael Ashenden gave about how truly repulsive blood transfusions without medical necessity are. He also offered the tantalising prospect of retrospectively testing for homologous transfusions eight years into the future. It goes into a lot of detail, so if you’re a bit squeamish (like me) you might not make it to the end of the article. I really had to force myself.
And finally, Michael Rasmussen will be up in front of the CAS on 13th November. While we’re on the subject of blood transfusions, let’s not forget the allegations made about Rasmussen that he was prepared to use a blood product only licensed for veterinary purposes, which consisted of red blood cells extracted from cows.
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