What is amazing to me about all the events and statements surrounding the Landis issue, is the number of people of high position with various sporting organizations who have made statements condemning Landis and Cylcing, before the results are in and he has had a chance to clear his name. Did they not learn anything from Davis & Beloki et al in Operación Puerto?
Five riders judged guilty, then cleared, but only after preventing them from riding the Tour and thereby taking an entire team (Astaná) out of the Tour. A team, I might add, that had good chances for the maillot jaune (Vinokourov), maillot vert (Vinokourov & Davis) and maillot blanc (Cantador). Wow!
In last year’s Tour, Astaná had riders in the top 7 of each jersey competition, and they were the 7th team in the team competition, barred from competing this year. Ok, hind sight is 20/20 and the Tour had to do what it could with information available at the time — I don’t blame them — but now we find out that the allegations from Operación Puerto are just that, allegations, some with no evidence, circumstancial or direct, to stand on. Does reacting strongly to this type of allegation hurt or help the sport?
While some of the sport’s authorities are at least paying lip service to waiting to see what retesting and B-sample tests reveal for Floyd, Dick Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and former vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, has once again painted the sport with a very broad brush:
“When is this going to end? What is the UCI going to do about it?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s always disappointing when you see something like this. If there is a positive test, what have you got? The guys who came second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth at last year’s event have been busted in the (Spanish investigation), and now the winner of this year’s event is busted in the race itself. … You build up and create a new hero, and he gets slapped down. It’s a serious blow.”
–Dick Pound as reported in Velonews
The only problem is he is blatantly wrong. He needs to get his facts straight. Yes, last year’s second place (Basso), thrid place (Ullrich) and fourth place (Mancebo) were implicated in Operación Puerto. They weren’t “busted” as the Spanish have no laws to “bust” them with. They may be “busted” later by their home sanctioning organizations and home nations, but not until the final results of the Operación Puerto investigation and rulings come out, if those results still implicate the riders. Even then each sanctioning organization and government would have to build it’s own case (probably after investigations) based on their own laws. Why am I hedging with if and may etc… because we have already seen five riders cleared of any wrong doing, and most of the evidence I have seen in the news (as untrustworthy a source as any) has been circumstancial.
Pound also said that the fifth (Vinokourov) and sixth (Leipheimer) placed riders were “busted”. Whoa, wait a minute, Dick…Vinokourov and Leipheimer were busted too? Their names never appeared on any list from Operación Puerto. Vinokourov was prevented from riding the tour because the “Astaná Five” were wrongly excluded from the Tour, and Astaná could not start because they had fewer than six starting riders as a result. As for Leipheimer, I know he wasn’t brilliant at the Tour, but he sure was there and did scrap his way back into a top 15 finish. He was never even mentioned in passing in the allegations surrounding Operación Puerto. Now Dick is putting Vino and Leipheimer in the same category as the riders implicated by Operación Puerto and then calling them categorically guilty of cheating and drug use when even Operación Puerto hasn’t done that and has been clearing some implicated riders of any wrong doing.
I’m sure Vino and Leipheimer are consulting with legal teams, as this type of careless allegation by a man in a position of authority can be very damaging to their team and individual sponsorships…which means their income and their honor. A dangerous and irresponsible man, that Dick.
