Doping

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x282rah_les-guignols-enfoncent-une-nouvelle-fois-le-clou-sur-le-dopage-espagnol_fun

Was anyone in the team aware/complicit? Was she a willing cheat or pushed into it? Who made the motor? How long she'd been using it? Does she know of other riders using them? We know most of the details, but it'd be good to get the full skinny.

is the motor compatible with etap?

asking for a friend

How could the team mechanic not know? There's additional wires/buttons and cross bikes are going to be dismantled and cleaned more than most.

So if the mechanics have to know, so do the management and I'd guess this is something the UCI will be making enquiries about at the moment but again, are you ever going to get the full skinny unless the UCI incentivises this over the public appearance of zero tolerance? If they had a whisleblower scenario and the ability to protect someone from being permanently shunned from the sport I guess that's when we'd get the detail we need but the truth is its easier to hang it all on one 19 year old girl and try to make it go away as fast as possible as there's no easy way to displace the entire management of the national cross team and it's entourage.

Interesting comments from Wiggins on Sharapova picked up in this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2016/mar/11/maria-sharapova-aura-blemish-doubts-tennis

"Her own drug was unknown to most of us until this week. She took meldonium for 10 years, allegedly on prescription from her family doctor to treat a variety of ailments. But if there is one thing we know about athletes it is that even the non-cheats among them will explore any potential marginal gain in the effort to acquire an edge.

Bradley Wiggins gave an inadvertent glimpse into that mindset this week. Answering a question about Sharapova, he replied that he felt sorry for her but that there was no excuse for ignorance of the annual updates to the list of prohibited medications. Then he added: “British Cycling are really on the ball – Richard Freeman, the doctor – in terms of things that have been changed, saying: ‘Please don’t take this any more.’”

He was telling us that Britain’s top cyclists, famous for the zero-tolerance approach to doping imposed by their managers, are no strangers to substances that become banned. This might be thought to put them in a bracket with all those Russian skaters, ski jumpers and goodness knows who else who have been paying around £5 for a packet of 40 tablets of meldonium imported from Latvia for the last few years."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/35787956

Scottish Football setting the benchmark for testing.

CTT tested more people than that last year.

I wonder what the income of the CTT is compared to Scotland's soccerballfondling mob?

BC and have always been very ruthless in pursuit of success, I have little doubt they push the envelope in terms of 'treatments' and 'supplements'. Not cheating, but not always within the ethics of fair athletic competition.

Although not something that has seen 99 athletes get popped for it since it was added to the banned list.

If they had a whisleblower scenario and the ability to protect someone from being permanently shunned from the sport I guess that's when we'd get the detail we need but the truth is its easier to hang it all on one 19 year old girl and try to make it go away as fast as possible as there's no easy way to displace the entire management of the national cross team and it's entourage.

Yeah, nice summary. Seems like a very unsatisfactory ending.

Might not have ended yet.

Hopefully.

He was telling us that Britain’s top cyclists, famous for the zero-tolerance approach to doping imposed by their managers, are no strangers to substances that become banned.

You make that sound more suspicious than it needs to be. Let's say, for the sake of argument, the BC medical staff issue the riders with a list of approved OTC cold remedies to take if they get the sniffles during the winter. Would it not be wise, under those circumstances, to draw attention to anything which had to be deleted from the list as a result of a change of policy at WADA? Rather than just issue a new list each year and leave it to athlete to pay attention, actually issue a specific bulletin saying that if you have a particular product in your bathroom cabinet, bin it now because it's not on this years approved list.

And OTC remedies will have different ingredients in diff countries so someone needs to keep track of those too; Alan Baxter lost an Olympic bronze over a US Vicks inhaler.

Will endeavour to find out.

Italian court concludes that Pantani was setup by the Italian mafia: http://road.cc/content/news/182651-prosecutors-say-camorra-did-fix1999-giro-ditalia-so-marco-pantani-would-lose

I don't think anyone doubts that he was doping, but that was quite possibly the start of his downfall leading to his suicide 5 years later...

There are more holes in that judgement than in the crook of a junkie's elbow.

And in rare circumstances it goes the other way too. Caffeine for example was controlled until 2004. Now everyone smashes it

in rare circumstances it goes the other way too

True, I used to have to get a TUE for asthma drugs, now everybody can take them :-)

While I don't condone sharapova I do wonder why a drug created for heart problems was completely banned. Melodinium is meant to taken in 4-6week batches, a maximum of 3 times a year. If pros are still allowed to take steroids for colds with a TUE, then why can't athletes diagnosed with a heart problem be allowed to have CONTROLLED (in caps so you all don't get excited) access to this?

Do you really think the 99 elite level athletes caught since the beginning of the year have been taking it for their heart conditions?

Probably because of the extent of it's abuse as a PED. I find it hard to see how a dicky ticker and world class athletic performance stacks up

Edit- what AP said

Top athletes are known for having angina, didn;t you know?

I just remembered something from when I was about 14 in the school athletics team. A coach suggested it would be a good idea to fake asthma, would help with the airways. Hmm.

why can't athletes diagnosed with a heart problem be allowed to have CONTROLLED (in caps so you all don't get excited) access to this?

I think they can, if they can get a TUE. In WADA-speak, your "completely banned" becomes "prohibited at all times, except where permitted by the terms of TUE". You can get a TUE for EPO if you have the right disease.

I take it that being old, slow and fat sadly doesn't count as a disease for these purposes?

I take it that being old, slow and fat sadly doesn't count as a disease for these purposes?

'fraid not. You have to have had a kidney transplant to get a TUE for EPO.