And so it goes. I figured they’d give Contador a token 4 month suspension and take away his 2010 Tour de France victory, but I think he miscalculated and pushed his “innocence” too far. My guess is that he could have cut a deal early on, but went for broke. Maybe he could have skated free if not for the plasticizers they found in his blood (plasticizers being something you pick up from a blood bag during a transfusion, and there are no longer any legally-permissible reasons for transfusions short of one supervised by a doctor for medical conditions that must be documented and demonstrated to be extremely serious).
While looking through links on the New York Times Contador article, I came across their Tour de France page here.
What’s sad is to go through the links for the various teams (found well down the page, on the right-hand side), many of which are gone. For example-
At least they have a page saying good-bye. Many others simply go 404.
Question: If Contador did take a blood transfusion, why did it not trigger an abnormality on his WADA blood passport? Or maybe it did and that information wasn’t released?
The UCI Biological Passport (WADA has access to the data but it isn’t their program) isn’t a daily benchmarking of the athlete’s blood values, but rather something done often enough through the year to establish trends and baselines. The plasticizers and clenbuterol that triggered a positive finding might be detectable over a period of a few days, so the odds would be against them showing up in a Biological Passport test. There’s also a question of whether they’re even testing for drugs at all, or just looking for the effects of drugs. I suspect the samples are stored for later examination though.
There is really only one solution to the issue of the pervasive use of PED’s in all Professional Sports. That is for all of the governing bodies to, 1. allow the use of any substance by the athletes without any consequence, or 2. have a defined list of banned substances and if you test positive once you are banned from the sport for life.
End of story. With any other solution we will continue to see an uneven playing field in all sports as some athletes will continue to “cheat”, and others will continue to abide by the existing rules.
I would like to see the rule where you test once for a banned substance and you are finished with that sport. That would send a more positive message to the young people out there participating in sports.
Also, there is life after their competitive professional career is over. You want the athletes to have a good quality of life after sport, and tinkering with the very complex human body with man made drugs leads to a short life span for many professional athletes.
I’m in total agreement with Syl Pascale’s thoughts on this. Hey Syl, drop me a line if you get a chance. I’m still running and slowly getting back into cycling here in the Olympia area. Steve
Alberto loses the 2010 title. No surprise and probably deserved. But was Andy clean? Very unlikely. And number 3, 4, 5…….? Unlikely.
The best solution would probably be to say: “okay guys, drink, eat & do whatever you want and may the best man win….”