Tour de France

[Biowatch]

Athletic enhancement: Breathe it in

An obscure gas improves athletes’ performance
The Economist, Feb 8th 2014

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21595890-obscure-gas-improves-athletes-performance-breathe-it

Always something new to make athletes just a bit better...

XENON is one of the shyest members of the periodic table of the elements. Chemically, it is almost inert, and physically, it makes up only 0.000009% of the atmosphere, so it is not surprising that it was among the last of the naturally occurring elements to be identified, in 1898. [IMHO This means that the world's supply could be used up if used heavily, just as the more common Helium is becoming thinly available.] Biologically, however, it is not shy at all. In some countries, notably Russia, it is used as an anaesthetic. It is also known to protect body tissues from the effects of low temperatures, lack of oxygen and even physical trauma. In particular, it increases levels of erythropoietin, also known as EPO, a hormone that encourages the formation of red blood cells.

Xenon’s protective and EPO-boosting properties mean it is being investigated as a treatment for babies whose brains have accidentally been starved of oxygen during birth, and of adults who have had heart attacks. But it is also, in Russia, being used as a way to improve athletic performance.

Xenon works its magic by activating production of a protein called Hif-1 alpha. This acts as a transcription factor: a chemical switch that turns on production of a variety of other proteins, one of which is EPO. Artificially raising levels of EPO, by injecting synthetic versions of the hormone or by taking so-called Hif stabilisers (drugs that discourage the breakdown of Hif-1 alpha), is illegal under the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Other methods of boosting the hormone, however, are permissible—and that fact has not gone unnoticed by the Russian sports authorities. Athletes are allowed to live or train at altitude, or sleep in a low-oxygen tent, in order to stimulate red-cell production. If xenon treatment is merely replicating low-oxygen environments by replacing oxygen with xenon, then its use to enhance athletic performance is permissible.

The use of xenon by athletes certainly has government blessing. A document produced in 2010 by the State Research Institute of the Ministry of Defence sets out guidelines for the administration of the gas to athletes. It advises using it before competitions to correct listlessness and sleep disruption, and afterwards to improve physical recovery. The recommended dose is a 50:50 mixture of xenon and oxygen, inhaled for a few minutes, ideally before going to bed. The gas’s action, the manual states, continues for 48-72 hours, so repeating every few days is a good idea. And for last-minute jitters, a quick hit an hour before the starting gun can help.

The benefits, the manual suggests, include increasing heart and lung capacity, preventing muscle fatigue, boosting testosterone and improving an athlete’s mood. Similar benefits have been noted in papers in Russian scientific journals, and in conference presentations describing tests of xenon on mountain climbers, paddlers, soldiers and pilots.

And the gas appears to have been used in past Olympics. The website of Atom Medical Centre, a Russian medical-xenon producer, cites national honours the company received for its efforts in preparing athletes for the 2004 summer Olympics and the 2006 winter games.

Something the published Russian reports do not go into, however, are measurements of EPO or Hif-1 alpha. Yet animal studies elsewhere have demonstrated xenon’s dramatic effects on both. One such, carried out in 2009 by Mervyn Maze at Imperial College, London, found that exposing mice to a mixture of 70% xenon and 30% oxygen for two hours more than doubled the animals’ EPO levels a day later. Another, by Xiaoqiang Ding of Fudan University in Shanghai, found that Hif-1 alpha levels in mice stayed high for up to 48 hours after treatment. By contrast, mice put in a low-oxygen enclosure saw an EPO increase that lasted less than two hours.

Similar physiological effects may take place in people. In healthy adults, two hours in a low-oxygen chamber raises EPO levels by 50%, and the effect disappears (as in mice) within a few hours. The Russian manual indicates, by contrast, that xenon’s benefits last for days—as might be expected if they were caused by the sort of Hif-1 alpha response seen in mice.

Whether xenon treatment will pass muster if and when WADA scrutinises it remains to be seen—and will no doubt depend on the finer points of the gas’s biological action, many of which are still muddy. In the meantime, sports trainers around the world might be tempted to follow Russia’s example, and reap xenon’s benefits before the regulators catch up.

[BullNBear52]

Amid Tears, Armstrong Leaves Unanswered Questions

By JULIET MACUR and IAN AUSTEN


In an extensive interview with Oprah Winfrey that was shown over two nights, Lance Armstrong admitted publicly for the first time that he doped throughout his cycling career. He revealed that all seven of his Tour de France victories were fueled by doping, that he never felt bad about cheating, and that he had covered up a positive drug test at the 1999 Tour with a backdated doctor’s prescription for banned cortisone.

Armstrong, the once defiant cyclist, also became choked up when he discussed how he told his oldest child that the rumors about Armstrong’s doping were true.

Even with all that, the interview will most likely be remembered for what it was missing.

Armstrong had not subjected himself to questioning from anyone in the news media since United States antidoping officials laid out their case against him in October. He chose not to appeal their ruling, leaving him with a lifetime ban from Olympic sports.

He personally chose Winfrey for his big reveal, and it went predictably. Winfrey allowed him to share his thoughts and elicited emotions from him, but she consistently failed to ask critical follow-up questions that would have addressed the most vexing aspects of Armstrong’s deception.

She did not press him on who helped him dope or cover up his drug use for more than a decade. Nor did she ask him why he chose to take banned performance-enhancing substances even after cancer had threatened his life.

Winfrey also did not push him to answer whether he had admitted to doctors in an Indianapolis hospital in 1996 that he had used performance-enhancing drugs, a confession a former teammate and his wife claimed they overheard that day. To get to the bottom of his deceit, antidoping officials said, Armstrong has to be willing to provide more details.

“He spoke to a talk-show host,” David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said from Montreal on Friday. “I don’t think any of it amounted to assistance to the antidoping community, let alone substantial assistance. You bundle it all up and say, ‘So what?’

Jeffrey M. Tillotson, the lawyer for an insurance company that unsuccessfully withheld a $5 million bonus from Armstrong on the basis that he had cheated to win the Tour de France in 2004, said his client would make a decision over the weekend about whether to sue Armstrong. If it proceeds, the company, SCA Promotions, will seek $12 million, the total it paid Armstrong in bonuses and legal fees.

“It seemed to us that he was more sorry that he had been caught than for what he had done,” Tillotson said. “If he’s serious about rehabbing himself, he needs to start making amends to the people he bullied and vilified, and he needs to start paying money back.”

Armstrong, who said he once believed himself to be invincible, explained in the portion of the interview broadcast Friday night that he started to take steps toward redemption last month. Then, after dozens of questions had already been lobbed his way, he became emotional when he described how he told his 13-year-old son, Luke, that yes, his father had cheated by doping. That talk happened last month over the holidays, Armstrong said as he fought back tears.

“I said, listen, there’s been a lot of questions about your dad, my career, whether I doped or did not dope, and I’ve always denied, I’ve always been ruthless and defiant about that, which is probably why you trusted me, which makes it even sicker,” Armstrong said he told his son, the oldest of his five children. “I want you to know it’s true.”

At times, Winfrey’s interview seemed more like a therapy session than an inquisition, with Armstrong admitting that he was narcissistic and had been in therapy — and that he should be in therapy regularly because his life was so complicated.

In the end, the interview most likely accomplished what Armstrong had hoped: it was the vehicle through which he admitted to the public that he had cheated by doping, which he had lied about for more than a decade. But his answers were just the first step to clawing back his once stellar reputation.

On Friday, Armstrong appeared more contrite than he had during the part of the interview that was shown Thursday, yet he still insisted that he was clean when he made his comeback to cycling in 2009 after a brief retirement, an assertion the United States Anti-Doping Agency said was untrue. He also implied that his lifetime ban from all Olympic sports was unfair because some of his former teammates who testified about their doping and the doping on Armstrong’s teams received only six-month bans.

Richard Pound, the founding chairman of WADA and a member of the International Olympic Committee, said he was unmoved by Armstrong’s televised mea culpa.

“If what he’s looking for is some kind of reconstruction of his image, instead of providing entertainment with Oprah Winfrey, he’s got a long way to go,” Pound said Friday from his Montreal office.

Armstrong acknowledged to Winfrey during Friday’s broadcast that he has a long way to go before winning back the public’s trust. He said he understood why people recently turned on him because they felt angry and betrayed.

“I lied to you and I’m sorry,” he said before acknowledging that he might have lost many of his supporters for good. “I am committed to spending as long as I have to to make amends, knowing full well that I won’t get very many back.”

Armstrong also said that the scandal has cost him $75 million in lost sponsors, all of whom abandoned him last fall after Usada made public 1,000 pages of evidence that Armstrong had doped.

“In a way, I just assumed we would get to that point,” he said of his sponsors’ leaving. “The story was getting out of control.”

In closing her interview, Winfrey asked Armstrong a question that left him perplexed.

“Will you rise again?” she said.

Armstrong said: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s out there.”

Then, as the interview drew to a close, Armstrong said: “The ultimate crime is the betrayal of these people that supported me and believed in me.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/sports/cycling/amid-tears-lance-armstrong-leaves-unanswered-questions-in-oprah-winfrey-interview.html?ref=sports&pagewanted=print

[BullNBear52]

Langostino was way ahead of the curve! From a post on the baseball board here on Ihub back in 2009.

The IM link below is something to read.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=37786585

"A question on Armstrong: How has he been able to avoid detection"

Not to be trite, but by being always 1 step ahead. In 1999 when Lance returned to cycling, a test for EPO did not exist. So he (and his team) used EPO with impunity through 2000. This was confirmed in embarrassing detail when samples he gave during the 1999 Tour were later tested (after the EPO test was finally developed) and he was positive on all 6 samples from that year's Tour.

Then came a return to autologous blood doping. With no out-of-competition testing, the game became to dope the heck out of yourself in the off-season, and during early season races where you knew you wouldn't finish high enough in the standings to be tested. The equivalent in baseball was to dope in the off-season. Then, you maintain what you've gained by "micro-dosing". You continue on, but keep your dosages low enough to be below threshold. In the case of blood doping, mid-race, you re-inject.

You would be surprised at how easily blood (and urine) values can be toyed with, in a matter of hours. You can destroy a urine test by putting a little lye on your finger and making sure that gets into the sample, and boom, you've washed out the EPO test, for example.

Rather than carrying on in detail, here's a little IM chat between former Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreau with current Team Slipstream-Garmin manager Jonathon Vaughters.

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/indepth/landis/instantmessage.html

As for your question whether his anti-cancer regimen helped him avoid detection, the answer is yes, for a while. The biggest scam in doping, is that you can LEGALLY dope -- all you need is a TUE (therapeutic use exemption). Lance carried TUEs for corticosteroids and other "medications" for the first three of his yellow jersey performances (and made good use of them).

But here again, he's hardly alone. Would it surprise you to learn that more than 70% of the riders in the European pro peloton have been diagnosed by their doctors as severe asthmatics? So severe they cannot be treated with mild medication, but instead require a TUE for Salbuterol or other steroid based medication? Yes, this is a scam. Give any cyclist a big hit of salbuterol prior to a 30 minute maximum effort time trial and give them unnaturally large dilation of the bronchii and voila, they can process more oxygen input to the bloodstream and produce a superior result.

You are absolutely correct, behind it all, there are sophisticated networks that make this all work. Dr. Fuentes alone had at least 300 clients, and was responsible for countless gold medals, several World Cups, scores of World Championships, etc. And he was just one of the Spanish based networks (granted he had "houses" all over Europe so his clients could get dosed no matter where they were competing). Italy's Francesco Conconi and his pupils Michele Ferrari (Armstrong's guy), Checcini, etc. have the longest and most "distinguished" record, dating back to the early 80s.

BALCO was just one of the U.S. based "outlets". If you go back, you'll find it wasn't just Bonds, Giambi and a handful of MLB guys, it was Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, and a host of elite track and field athletes, it was NFL greats, tennis players, and so on. BALCO alone produced literally dozens of Olympic medals for the U.S.

But here's the toughest part ... the U.S. Olympic committee itself has fostered and covered up doping since the late 1950s when it began the development of modern anabolic steroids. There is a load of evidence that Lance Armstrong was indoctrinated into doping when he entered the U.S. national team as a teenager, and there is a logical case to be made that his testicular cancer was a result of that doping. (More than 50% of his former teammates on the jr. national team suffer from bizarre autoimmune and endocrine diseases and issues, and three of the 5 elite members of that team ultimately sued the US Cycling Federation, which paid out substantial settlements to them, of course with the obligatory gag provision so they couldn't talk).

Ultimately, when you begin to understand the limits of testing, the advances in ways to manipulate body chemistry, and the ways in which sophisticated doctors can help athletes evade detection, one begins to wonder how anyone but the "little fish," who can't afford the expensive programs, ever gets caught.

Ironically, much as in business, where better capitalized businesses can capitalize on economies of scale and their bigger bankrolls to crush smaller competition, so too can the elite athletes use money as a competitive advantage in the doping arena, buying more sophisticated doping regimens that produce better results, and ... get by with stuff the competition can afford to buy.

[BullNBear52]

Lance Armstrong, arrogant and unaware, did little to repair his image in mea culpa with Oprah
6 hours ago


Across 90 minutes with Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong did more than admit he cheated to win his seven Tour de France titles. He revealed a measure of the man that he is and this much is certain: If you never met this jerk, well, count your blessings.

Defiant, distant, difficult.

Arrogant, unaware, flippant.

Oh, Lance had a plan to try to look open and honest, and that was what was so obvious: It was a plan. It sounded rehearsed. But when he went off script, well, that's when he went off the rails.

He apologized, and that's worth something, worth a lot to those of us who aren't outraged anymore over doping in sports. But in doing so, in tuning into the Oprah Winfrey Network, you could only marvel at that personality on display, the same one that while we celebrated his victories was, behind the scenes, leaving a path of personal destruction in its wake.

This was a glimmer of the true Lance Armstrong coming out. No Nike commercial edits. No press conference sound bites. No glowing magazine profiles. This was the guy who left scores and scores of people cursing that their paths ever crossed.

It's not about the bike, indeed. This was about Lance's sociopathic spectacle.

At one point during the interview, he couldn't recall how many people he'd sued. Really. He not only didn't know the number, he couldn't even be sure when asked about specific individuals that his mighty, powerful legal team relentlessly tried to bury.

It's worth noting that many of the people he's sued through the years in an effort to protect his lies and glory were one-time close friends, roommates, teammates, business partners and associates.

Is there another person in America who has sued so many people he once liked – for telling the truth, mind you – that he can't remember all of them? Anyone?

What you and your bank account and those sleepless nights you can't forget -- he can't remember.

Good Lord, what a guy.

At one point Armstrong addressed Betsy Andreu, the wife of a former teammate Frankie Andreu, who testified that while lying in a hospital bed in 1996 Armstrong told his doctor that he had doped.

Over the years Lance and his henchman bullied and bruised Betsy relentlessly. They called her names. They tried to wipe her out. They, according to Betsy, blackballed her husband's career. She kept standing up and speaking out. There was even a voicemail from an Armstrong associate who said he hoped "somebody breaks a baseball bat over your head."

Lance knows he was terrible to Betsy so he said he called her the other day to begin making amends. You know for, among other things, calling her "crazy." He decided to tell Oprah about it, including what is apparently his idea of a sense of humor.

"I did call her crazy," he said. "I did. I did … I think she'd be OK with me saying this, I said, 'Listen, I called you crazy; I called you a bitch; I called you all of these things, but I never called you fat.' "


Then he smirked.

Now that's a novel way to gain forgiveness: make a fat joke about a woman on national television.

Needless to say, Betsy wasn't OK with him saying it.

"I guess we know why I was [a bitch] all these years, putting up with that," Betsy said on CNN on Thursday night after watching the clip. "How was I supposed to act? Sweet as apple pie? … That exchange right there, it has me furious."

Take a number Betsy.

Across the spectrum there is fury and regret. Mike Anderson, a former personal assistant who claims Lance tried to ruin him, avoided watching the interview. Then he inadvertently was exposed to a replayed segment while waiting to comment on CNN.

"I didn't want to hear his voice ever again," Anderson said.

Fellow riders say they wish they'd never hooked on with him. Support staff claim they wish they'd never taken a job. Sponsors are lining up to sue. Journalists who carried his water for years are writing they wish they'd never bought the lie.

The more Armstrong talked Thursday, the more it became obvious: This seems like the last and least likable individual you'd want to hang around.

He was, and likely remains, nothing but a machine of personal glorification, no concept of his real place in the world. Now that the truth is out, it's not about the cheating so much as it's about the way he fought dirty to protect the cheating.

"I was a bully," he acknowledged. "In the sense that I tried to control the narrative, and if I didn't like what somebody said, I tried to control that and say that's a lie."

Except he didn't stop at saying "that's a lie." He'd start there, then go on the attack, often trying to ruin his accusers professionally and, perhaps, personally, maybe legally and certainly financially.

Emma O'Reilly tends to Kevin Livingstone during the 1999 Tour de France. (AP)Consider Emma O'Reilly, an Irish massage therapist who began working for his team while in her 20s. She later told the truth about Lance and drugs. For that she's testified Team Armstrong responded by calling her a whore and a drunk. But Armstrong didn't stop there. No, he tried to sue into oblivion this woman of limited financial means.

What did Armstrong say of Emma? He couldn't remember if he even attempted legal action against her.

"To be honest Oprah," he chuckled lightly, "we sued so many people, I'm sure we did."

You sure?

"She's one of those people I have to apologize to," Armstrong said.

You think?

"She got run over, got bullied," he continued. He was in the wrong tense then. She got run over, got bullied. Not, "I ran her over. I bullied her." Because make no mistake, it was him. It was only him.

On and on it went.

"Look at this arrogant prick," he said as he watched video of his 2005 testimony when he denied he'd ever used performance-enhancing drugs, and, well, on that he was telling the truth.

Armstrong admitted that it was "too late" to come clean and for that he may be correct. Some won't ever forgive or forget. Those who know the ins and outs of the case in detail were quickly picking apart his comments with ease, suggesting he was still lying, or forgetting, or conveniently misremembering all sorts of details.

Oprah did a fine job drilling down on pertinent issues. For most of us, though, the specifics barely mattered. It wasn't about whether he cheated or not; it was that awful, unavoidable personality.

And there's still another hour to go with Oprah (Friday, 9 p.m. ET).

After the first session the only question left unanswered is how he ever found so many friends to stab in the back in the first place.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/lance-armstrong--arrogant-and-unaware--did-little-to-repair-his-image-in-mea-culpa-with-oprah-062222144.html

[BullNBear52]

No Closure for Family of Armstrong’s Former Teammate
By JULIET MACUR


Betsy Andreu, the wife of one of Lance Armstrong’s former teammates, watched his interview with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday, and waited for Armstrong to admit it.

She was not waiting for his doping confession. She was waiting for Armstrong to announce that she and her husband, Frankie, were not liars when they said Armstrong in 1996 had admitted to doping.

But the acknowledgment that Betsy Andreu had long anticipated never came.

“He owed it to me,” Betsy Andreu, on the verge of tears, said Thursday night on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. “You owed it to me, Lance, and you dropped the ball. After what you’ve done to me and what you’ve done to my family, and you couldn’t own up to it? Now we’re supposed to believe you? You had one chance at the truth, and this was it.”

The Andreus claim that they overheard two doctors in an Indianapolis hospital room in 1996 ask Armstrong if he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs. They said Armstrong, who was battling cancer then, rattled off: testosterone, EPO, growth hormone, cortisone and steroids.

But for years, Armstrong vehemently criticized them for their claims, saying they made up the story because they were jealous and vindictive, and that Betsy Andreu hated him.

Yet when Armstrong told Winfrey in an interview that aired Thursday that he had doped throughout most of his cycling career, he failed to say that the Andreus’ hospital room story was true.

“I’m not going to take that on,” he said when Winfrey asked about it. “I’m laying down on that one.”

Winfrey did not press him on it.

For years, the Andreus were silent about the alleged hospital room confession. But in 2005, they were forced to testify in a civil lawsuit about it, and Armstrong began his attack.

The Andreus said Armstrong blackballed Frankie Andreu from jobs in the sport, and shortly thereafter Frankie was let go from his job as a team director of a squad based in the United States. Andreu, who was once the captain of Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team and commanded respect in the peloton, then struggled to continue his career in the sport because Armstrong threatened to ostracize anyone who would hire him, the Andreus said.

Armstrong also publicly excoriated Betsy Andreu, who over the years became increasingly vocal with her doping accusations against Armstrong, eventually calling him “the Bernie Madoff of sport” because she considered him to be perpetuating a gigantic fraud.

In turn, Armstrong called Betsy Andreu crazy, and he acknowledged that name-calling during his interview with Winfrey. He fought off a smirk when he explained it.

“I called you all these things,” he said about Betsy, “but I never called you fat.”

Armstrong told Winfrey that he had reached out to apologize to the Andreus and had a 40-minute conversation with them. She asked him if he had made peace with them and, for a moment, he fell silent before speaking.

“No,” he said, “because they’ve been hurt too badly.”

Betsy Andreu wouldn’t elaborate on the conversation she and Frankie had with Armstrong earlier this week. She said it was “just too emotional” to go into the details.

“He was our good friend once, but he tried to destroy this family,” she said in a telephone interview, sounding as if she was crying. “It’s just so hard to deal with this.”

On CNN on Thursday, she appeared to toughen up. She questioned Armstrong’s motivation and honesty during his interview with Winfrey.

“If he can’t say the hospital room happened, how are we to believe everything else he said?” she said, still teary-eyed. “I want to believe that Lance wants to come clean, but this is an indication that I can’t.”

“This is a guy who used to be my friend, who decimated me,” she said. “He could have come clean. He owed it to me. He owes it to the sport that he destroyed.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/sports/cycling/in-armstrong-interview-no-closure-for-andreus.html?ref=sports&_r=0&pagewanted=print

[BullNBear52]

The Banker Who Put His Faith in Armstrong

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN


When Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah Winfrey about his suspected use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs is broadcast on Thursday, an investment banker will most likely be watching it very carefully (and nervously): Thomas Weisel.

Mr. Weisel is a legend in finance and Silicon Valley. He was the banker behind Yahoo's public offering and some of the biggest deals during the dot-com bubble. He famously sold the firm he ran, Montgomery Securities, for $1.2 billion in 1997. And he sold his next firm, Thomas Weisel Partners, for $300 million to Stifel Financial in 2010.

But it is Mr. Weisel's extracurricular activity that connects him to the news of the moment: he was Mr. Armstrong's biggest financial backer and the single individual most responsible for the money machine that propelled Mr. Armstrong's career.

Depending on what Mr. Armstrong says in the interview about his purported doping, Mr. Weisel, who was a co-owner of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team through a cycling management firm that he helped found called Tailwind Sports, could be subject along with his partners to lawsuits from corporate sponsors seeking millions of dollars. Already, there is a False Claims Act case contending that Mr. Armstrong and the team defrauded the Postal Service.

Perhaps more anxiety-producing is what Mr. Weisel may have known, or should have known, about a team that for years ran "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen," according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency.

Its report last year did not name Mr. Weisel, but did say that Mr. Armstrong was assisted by a "small army of enablers, including doping doctors, drug smugglers, and others within and outside the sport and on his team."

Mr. Armstrong is expected to admit to doping in an effort to persuade officials to lift his lifetime ban from Olympic sports. To do so, however, he would probably need to lay out in explicit detail how the program worked and implicate those who were part of it. Late Monday, The New York Times reported that Mr. Armstrong had confessed in the interview with Ms. Winfrey that he used performance-enhancing drugs. The Times also reported that he was in discussions with the Justice Department to possibly testify in a federal whistle-blower case against several team officials and owners, including Mr. Weisel.

Mr. Weisel is currently not talking. When I called Mr. Weisel seeking a comment, his assistant told me: "He's not commenting. And he's not returning any calls."

For a glimpse of the way Mr. Weisel thinks about performance-enhancing drugs in cycling, here's what he had to say about the matter four years ago: "Handle the problem below the surface and keep the image of the sport clean," he told The Wall Street Journal. "In the U.S. sports - baseball, basketball, football - most fans couldn't care less."

For Mr. Weisel, the team and Mr. Armstrong were an all-consuming passion. He would go every year to the Tour de France and at times travel in the team's pacer car, occasionally yelling instructions to Mr. Armstrong over the radio system. He rode the team's bus, ate meals with them and ultimately celebrated each year's victory. On the wall of his office in San Francisco, he displayed Mr. Armstrong's yellow jerseys.

Always the consummate banker, Mr. Weisel even tried to help Mr. Armstrong raise funds to buy the Tour de France itself. (The effort never went anywhere.)

Mr. Weisel's name has occasionally come up in connection with accusations of doping on the team.

The wife of the famed cyclist Greg LeMond, Kathy, reportedly testified under oath in a deposition in 2006 that she had been told by one of Mr. Armstrong's mechanics that Mr. Weisel, along with Nike, paid $500,000 though a Swiss bank account to the honorary president of the International Cycling Union to silence a drug test Mr. Armstrong purportedly failed in 1999.

Nike has vehemently denied the contention. So far, Mr. Weisel has not commented publicly.

When Floyd Landis, one of Mr. Armstrong's former teammates, tested positive in 2006, he denied using performance-enhancing drugs under pressure from Mr. Armstrong. Soon after, Mr. Weisel set up the Floyd Fairness Fund with some of Tailwind's co-owners to help pay his legal bills. Mr. Landis later confessed to doping in 2010.

Mr. Weisel, a longtime athlete who was a champion speed skater as a teenager, became a cycling enthusiast in the 1980s and took up racing himself. Sports dominated his life: he often said that he liked to hire athletes to work for him at the bank because of their competitive instincts. He was also the chairman of the United States Ski Team Foundation. In 1987, while still working as a banker, he started Montgomery Sports, to begin his first cycling team. In the early 1990s the team was called Subaru-Montgomery; it later became Montgomery-Bell (Bell Sports was a client that he took public) and then was renamed for the Postal Service. (Yahoo, another client, was also a sponsor of the team.)

According to a biography of Mr. Weisel, "Capital Instincts: Life as an Entrepreneur, Financier and Athlete," he invested more than $5 million in the early teams and lost money on the investment. Mr. Armstrong was one of Mr. Weisel's early riders for the Subaru-Montgomery team. He later left the team to join the Motorola team. After his bout with cancer, Mr. Armstrong joined what was the Postal Service team in 1998.

Tyler Hamilton, another former teammate of Mr. Armstrong, told "60 Minutes" that the team was pushing performance-enhancing drugs on its cyclists long before Mr. Armstrong battled cancer and then in 1998 rejoined the team.

"I remember seeing some of the stronger guys in the team getting handed these white lunch bags," Mr. Hamilton said on "60 Minutes" about when he joined the team in 1995. "So finally I, you know, started puttin' two and two together and you know, basically there were doping products in those white lunch bags."

Given how widespread the doping now appears to have been on the Postal Service team based on testimony of 11 teammates, and charges against the team's director and several of its doctors, you wonder how much due diligence its founding banker did on the most prominent deal of his career.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/armstrong-benefactor-is-holding-his-breath/?pagewanted=print

[BullNBear52]

Looking Upstream in Doping Cases
By CLAUDIO GATTI

The case against Lance Armstrong by antidoping officials detailed how Armstrong, as the leader of his professional cycling team, used performance-enhancing drugs over many years to fuel his run as a seven-time Tour de France champion. It detailed the lengths that many teammates, trainers, doctors and other associates went to enable him to pull off what was called the most sophisticated doping program in the sport’s history.

A prominent part of the cycling scene that received less attention, however, was the corporate sponsors that paid handsomely to hitch their brands to a global star.

No one has accused Armstrong’s sponsors of being directly involved with his doping program, and none of his sponsors are accused of having actual knowledge of his use of banned substances. But as Armstrong begins confessing to doping during his career — first in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that will be shown Thursday night — some critics have seized on another possible dynamic at play throughout sports: companies that endorse athletes might prefer to stand by quietly if they know an athlete is doping, appreciating the benefits of his success rather than moving to expose their pitchman.

“In recent years, the antidoping movement has recognized the need to look upstream of sophisticated dopers toward the traffickers and facilitators who form an integral component of doping networks,” said Dr. Michael Ashenden, an adviser to the World Anti-Doping Agency and the director of the research organization, Science and Industry Against Blood Doping. “My opinion is that networks should be seen to comprise not just those who directly aid and abet dopers, but also those support staff, agents and sponsors who choose to turn a blind eye rather than undertake due diligence. Those passive actors become part of the problem because athletes quickly assess the boundaries and subsequently know what they can expect to get away with.”

The release of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s report on Armstrong compelled Nike, Anheuser-Busch, Trek Bicycle Corporation and other sponsors to sever their association with him. The United States Postal Service, which ended its role as Armstrong’s chief team sponsor in 2004, said in an e-mail that it was aware of the doping accusations against Armstrong and other riders, but had no further comment.

“Maybe U.S. Postal didn’t know about doping, or maybe they didn’t want to know, but you would have to keep your head in the sand not to know,” said Tyler Hamilton, a former member of Armstrong’s inner circle who described parts of the team’s doping program in the book “The Secret Race.”

One of Armstrong’s lawyers, Tim Herman, cited a study commissioned by the Postal Service that showed it spent $32.27 million on Armstrong’s team from 2001 to 2004 and in return received marketing benefits of $103.63 million.

According to Herman, anyone who receives a 320 percent return on investment in four years has no reason to complain. But Armstrong is seeking to repay several millions of dollars to the Postal Service as part of his cooperation as a witness in a federal whistle-blower case, according to someone with knowledge of the matter.

“Each new doping scandal follows the same pattern,” Jörg Jaksche, a former pro cyclist from Germany, said in a telephone interview. “When someone is caught, the system acts shocked and upset, declares its absolute rejection of doping and depicts the athlete as a black sheep that deserves to be slaughtered. After that, everything continues like before. But the fact is that they slaughter a scapegoat, not a black sheep, and nobody ever looks at the shepherd’s responsibility. I’m talking about those in the higher levels, those who govern the sports and, most importantly, those who provide the money that fuels everything.

“For the sponsors, this system has no downside. If nobody is caught doping, they gain all the commercial benefits of the visibility generated by great performances. If somebody is caught, they have a swift exit strategy — they declare their disappointment and receive the extra benefit of the good publicity gained for being righteous. It’s the win-win situation. That’s why nothing ever changed.”

Jaksche, 36, is among the riders trying to break the wall of silence, known as omertà, that has long muffled any discussion of doping in cycling. He is studying economics at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and said his education helped him understand what he experienced as a cyclist.

“Corporate sponsors, like all companies, are looking for high return on investment,” he said. “In sports, winning provides that return, and doping increases the chances of winning. So the message that, directly or indirectly, sponsors give athletes is simple: we want you to win, and in order to do that you can do whatever you want. As long as you don’t get caught.”

Jaksche’s cycling team was sponsored by Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile. In 1997, the team’s lead rider, Jan Ullrich, became the first German to win the Tour de France. Less than two years later, in June 1999, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published an article suggesting Ullrich and his team had engaged in systematic doping.

“We had just finished the Tour of Germany and were driving to Switzerland for the Swiss Tour when the article hit the newsstands,” Jaksche said. “I was in a car with Ullrich and the press officer that Telekom assigned to us, and I remember him telling us how to handle the press. They did not want to find out if Der Spiegel’s accusations were true or false. They never made any attempt to verify the allegations. In fact, they must have assumed they were right, because the only countermeasure they took was to make sure that none of us would say anything compromising.

“It was omertà all the way. The reason? With Ullrich’s success in the Tour, a relatively small amount of money had produced a huge marketing return. For them, it was an extraordinarily successful business model and they didn’t want to change it or, worse, ruin it.”

Jaksche testified to the German authorities that doping was team policy. Riders who wanted the banned blood-booster EPO, steroids or growth hormones could ask the team doctors. According to the cyclist’s sworn testimony, the team manager, Walter Godefroot, was aware of this. Nobody asked Jaksche if the sponsor knew that doping was systematic, but a prosecutor in Bavaria opened an investigation against him for suspected fraud. In his report, the prosecutor withdrew the charge, stating that all the parties involved — the team and the sponsor — must have known about doping, so there could not have been any fraud.

In a statement, Deutsche Telekom said: “As a sports sponsor, Deutsche Telekom fundamentally disapproves of any type of doping. Therefore, in 2007, we decided to discontinue our involvement in cycling, as we, as a sponsor, had to realize that cycling was unable to come to terms with the doping issue. Deutsche Telekom, as a sponsor, was at no time informed about any doping activities.”

Although a special independent committee that investigated the matter was unable to determine whether the top executives of Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile knew about doping in the team, the committee’s report criticized the company.

“What interested the sponsor in the first place was not a doping-free sport,” the report said. The contract was terminated, it said, “only when it stopped enhancing the corporate image.”

“When the two leading riders, Jan Ullrich and Óscar Sevilla, along with Ullrich’s carer Rudy Pevenage, were suspended, the limit had not yet been reached. When Sergie Honchar was suspended on 11 May 2007 and Patrik Sinkewitz’s blood test was found positive on 8 June 2007, nothing happened. It was not until 27 November 2007 that Deutsche Telekom announced that its executive board was terminating its sponsorship arrangement. Deutsche Telekom, which had been involved in professional cycling since 1991, had decided to put its money elsewhere.”

A July 2008 report on the Ullrich affair by the B.K.A., the equivalent of the F.B.I. in Germany, concluded that “it can be assumed” that T-Mobile was informed of doping within the team.

The antidoping officials’ case against Armstrong, published in October, included statements from several cyclists who admitted taking banned substances. The testimony of the American Levi Leipheimer, the bronze medalist in the 2008 Olympics, was among them. He admitted to using EPO since 1999, when he rode with the Saturn team, but also described the following years with the team sponsored by the Dutch banking group Rabobank.

“I continued to use EPO while with Rabobank in 2002, 2003 and 2004, and was also assisted in using it by the Rabobank team doctor, from whom I purchased EPO,” Leipheimer said. “During my time at Rabobank, I was aware that [another] rider was using EPO, and on several occasions, we discussed his EPO use.”

A few days after that affidavit was made public by Usada, Rabobank announced that it was withdrawing from cycling because it “was no longer convinced that the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport.”

But for years, riders on the cycling team sponsored by Rabobank were linked to doping.

The former team director Theo de Rooij recently told a Dutch newspaper that while he was there, riders were allowed to arrange for their own medical care and it was their responsibility to determine “how far they wanted to go.” In the years that de Rooij managed the team, the Rabobank riders Thomas Dekker, Denis Menchov, Michael Boogerd and Michael Rasmussen were named in connection to doping investigations. They all denied taking any illegal substances.

Rabobank has said that things changed with the departure of de Rooij in the summer of 2007. But soon after he left, Dekker was found to have abnormal blood values, and in 2010 Menchov was caught talking to his manager about the need to have his teammates treated by a notorious doping expert. In December 2012, the international cycling union opened a doping case against Carlos Barredo, accusing him of having used performance-enhancing drugs.

“In my entire career, I never had a sponsor asking me any question about doping,” Jaksche said. “They are only good at covering their back, for example through contracts with built-in deniability.”

Rabobank cyclists were asked to sign a contract said that included a confidentiality clause pertaining to doping. It said that the rider “will not at present nor in the future make any disclosure to third parties except with the explicit permission of the employer about any matter directly or indirectly tied to ... the alleged use of banned substances.”

The contract clause, Rabobank said in a statement Monday, “is a standard clause, which is intended to prevent leakage of company secrets.”

“Rabobank Cycling Teams (now called Blanco Procycling Team) relieve employees from this confidentiality clause with respect to statements to research bodies on doping.”


Claudio Gatti is an investigative reporter for Il Sole 24 Ore, a daily business newspaper in Italy. He is based in New York. This article is being published by The Times and Il Sole 24 Ore.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/sports/cycling/critics-take-a-look-upstream-in-doping-scandals.html?ref=sports&pagewanted=print

[BullNBear52]

That smell of burning rubber is Livestrong wristbands. No I didn't own one.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=83385559

I find it really pathetic how some "sportswriters" think Bonds and Clemens belong in the HoF because the likes of Ty Cobb are in it.

The problem is as much of a jerk Cobb might have been he didn't cheat.

[Biowatch]

The Doper Lance Armstrong says, "I'm sorry."

Thanks for the lies. You've lived well. Is Amgen still your sponsor? Are they sorry?"

I really enjoyed watching you race until it got so obvious. Your team gave you phenomenal support.

Doping has been with cycling for decades. It's educational to watch the cat and mouse game between the dopers and the testers.

Confessing your sins on Oprah seems more a headline grab and ticket back to more paychecks than a sincere apology.

[Bob22701]

Bradley Wiggins was hit by a car. He received some broken ribs but should be ready to defend his title.

GLTA
Bob

[Bob22701]

I just read the pdf files of testimony by Hincapie and Leipheimer that was posted by USADA. It isn't a pretty picture. Here is the link:

http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/

GLTA
Bob

[Bob22701]

Rabobank pulled out of the sport on Friday. I expect that more team sponsors will follow suit. If there was less money in the sport doping would be less incentivized.

GLTA
Bob

[BullNBear52]

Lance Armstrong Is Stripped of His 7 Tour de France Titles

By JULIET MACUR


The International Cycling Union announced on Monday that it would not appeal the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s ruling to bar Lance Armstrong for life from Olympic sports for doping and for playing an instrumental role in the teamwide doping on his Tour de France-winning cycling squads.

The decision to waive the right to take Armstrong’s case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest court in sports, formally strips Armstrong of the Tour titles he won from 1999-2005. The Amaury Sport Organization, the company that organizes the Tour de France, will erase Armstrong’s name from its record books.

“We’ve come too far in the fight against doping to go back to the past,” Pat McQuaid, the president of the cycling union, said in a news conference on Monday in Switzerland. “Something like this must never happen again.”

He added that Armstrong, the sport’s biggest star for more than a decade, “has no place in cycling.”

Christian Prudhomme, the race director of the Tour, has said the organization would not give the victories to the runners-up at the races Armstrong won because so many of those riders have been linked to doping as well. He said those Tours simply would have no official winner.

The World Anti-Doping Agency now has 21 days to decide whether it will appeal the ruling. If it does not, Armstrong’s hotly contested case is over.

Armstrong, who vehemently denies ever doping, was charged in June with using banned performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions, and with encouraging their use among his teammates, to help him win races. He initially contested the charges, but backed down in August, saying he dropped out of the fight to spare his family and his foundation any stress or damage.

Nearly two weeks ago, the antidoping agency publicly released the evidence it had on Armstrong, including testimony from nearly a dozen of his former teammates who said there was widespread, team-organized doping on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service and Discovery Channel cycling teams.

Armstrong, a cancer survivor, stepped down last week as chairman of his Livestrong charity and lost nearly all of his endorsements. But in light of the cycling union’s decision not to appeal, more bad news might be on its way for Armstrong.

The International Olympic Committee is reviewing his case and now will likely strip him of the bronze medal he won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

SCA Promotions, an insurance company based in Dallas, will probably start the process of trying to recoup the bonus money it awarded Armstrong for winning Tour after Tour.

Armstrong sued the company in 2005 to force it to pay him the bonus he was owed for winning the 2004 Tour. The company had withheld that bonus because of accusations in the book, “L.A. Confidentiel,” published only in French, which said Armstrong had doped and cheated to win. The two parties reached a settlement, with the insurance company paying Armstrong $7.5 million.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/sports/cycling/armstrong-stripped-of-his-7-tour-de-france-titles.html?hp&pagewanted=print

[BullNBear52]

Armstrong Aide Talks of Doping And Price Paid

By MARY PILON


The job title is soigneur, an elegant sounding name for the person on a professional cycling team who is assigned some unglamorous work: massaging the muscles of the cyclists, laundering their clothes, booking their hotel rooms and preparing their food. Discretion and loyalty are also part of the job.

For Emma O’Reilly, a young, onetime electrician from Dublin, the chance in 1996 to be a soigneur for the United States Postal Service cycling team was an extraordinary opportunity. She had raced some as a teenager in Ireland, and served as an assistant on that country’s national cycling team. But the Postal Service team was a rising power, with its sights set on the Tour de France.

In short order, however, it became clear to Ms. O’Reilly that her tasks with the team would hardly be limited to kneading leg muscles and doing laundry. In an interview this week, Ms. O’Reilly said she became a regular player in the team’s doping program, one that investigators have charged took on its most sinister and far-reaching dimensions with the arrival of Lance Armstrong in 1998. Ms. O’Reilly, then not yet 30, said she wound up transporting doping material across borders, disposing of drugs and syringes when the authorities were lurking, and distributing performance-enhancing substances to the team’s riders whenever they needed them.

Discretion and loyalty, she said she came to understand, were not just valued qualities. They were paramount.

“It was prevalent, but discreet,” Ms. O’Reilly said of the team’s doping. “The drugs were just part and parcel of things. You didn’t analyze it at the time. It was just part of things.”

And so, she said, she once traveled from France to Spain and back to fetch illegal pills for Mr. Armstrong and delivered them to him in a McDonald’s parking lot outside Nice. Another time, she said, she took a package of testosterone and got it in the hands of another rider.

Ms. O’Reilly said she provided ice to the riders who had containers full of doping materials they needed to keep from spoiling. She spoke of using her talents with makeup to disguise bruising on the arms of the riders from needles.

Some of it made her ashamed, she said, and all of it made her anxious. But the truly hard part was to come: talking about it publicly.

“The traumatizing part,” she said in the telephone interview from Manchester, England, “was dealing with telling the truth.”

Ms. O’Reilly first went public in 2003, when she was paid to cooperate on a book, “L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong,” that sought to expose Mr. Armstrong as a drug cheat. Mr. Armstrong sued her for libel.

Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong demonized her as a prostitute with a drinking problem, and had her hauled into court in England. Ultimately, a legal settlement was reached, and Ms. O’Reilly tried to pick up her life, sometimes talking about Mr. Armstrong and drugs, but to little notice.

Until now. This year Ms. O’Reilly, 42, gave a sworn account of her years with the Postal service team to American doping investigators. Her testimony, along with that of more than two dozen others, including many of the cyclists Ms. O’Reilly worked with on the team, is at the heart of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s formal case against Mr. Armstrong, one that seeks to ban him from the sport forever.

“Talking about it made me feel like I was being disloyal in a sense, like I was breaking the code,” Ms. O’Reilly said of her early efforts to blow the whistle on Mr. Armstrong. “Lance tried to make my life a living hell.”

Mr. Armstrong, over many years now, has steadfastly denied doping. Citing what he called a witch hunt by American doping authorities, he declined to defend himself against the formal charges that were made public this week. He has refused to comment on Usada’s case against him — a brief that includes hundreds of pages of accusations, sworn affidavits, medical records, test results and e-mail correspondence.

“I have to admit,” Ms. O’Reilly said, “I didn’t think it would come out with so much detail like this.”

It was Ms. O’Reilly’s brother who introduced her to cycling. In her spare time she began taking massage courses.

“It was just a hobby, really,” Ms. O’Reilly said. “Then it just escalated and escalated.”

Ms. O’Reilly worked with the Irish national team and later with an American-based cycling team. Then, the Postal Service team came knocking. She was initially hired on a contract basis, as one of the junior soigneurs.

From the start, Ms. O’Reilly told investigators, it was apparent that the team was involved with doping. She said riders even complained that the team was not aggressive enough in its use of banned substances.


She said she saw one rider fill a syringe from a vial of clear liquid. Another learned she was traveling to Belgium, she said, and asked her to pick up a package for him. She was told to bring the package directly to the rider, George Hincapie, and to avoid bringing it to the United States.

“It is testosterone, and you do not want to transport it yourself,” she said she was told.

Ms. O’Reilly said the use of the drugs was rarely, if ever, openly discussed by the riders themselves. And she said she tried to feign ignorance or indifference.

And so, she said, she did not ask questions when pictures were removed from hotel room walls, taking it to mean that riders were using the hooks on the wall to hang their bags full of helpful blood. When riders worried about their telltale bruises, she said, she worked a little magic with makeup.

And she tried to keep a sense of humor.

Ms. O’Reilly testified that when the team was competing in the Tour de France one summer, and doping authorities were on the prowl, she learned that $25,000 worth of doping products had been flushed down the toilet of the Postal Service team’s bus and discharged into a field not far from a French village where a time trial was taking place.

“I remember saying to one of the other staff members that $25,000 worth of doping products probably does not make very good fertilizer,” she said in her affidavit, “and that the team should come back to the field in a few years to check out the grass.”

Ms. O’Reilly said she was once in a room giving Mr. Armstrong a massage when he and officials on the team fabricated a story to conceal a positive drug test result. Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong told her, “You know enough to bring me down.”

After resigning from the team in 2000, Ms. O’Reilly was contacted by journalists to talk about her experiences, requests she said she turned down for years because she was concerned about being perceived as disloyal and about the reactions of Mr. Armstrong and the team.

But as the headlines about cycling and the deaths of riders increased, Ms. O’Reilly said she changed her mind. Contacted by David Walsh, a journalist, she spoke out. Her comments were published in “L.A. Confidentiel,” written by Mr. Walsh and Pierre Ballester.

“By not saying anything, you’re part of the problem,” she said at the time.

Ms. O’Reilly said she was slightly nervous before the publication of the interviews, but had no idea that the retaliation from Mr. Armstrong and others would be so strong.

Mr. Armstrong sued Ms. O’Reilly and The Sunday Times of London, which had excerpted the book. The legal battle lasted three years.

“He was suing me for more than I was worth,” Ms. O’Reilly said. “I was worried he would bankrupt me.”

In the end, as part of a settlement, The Sunday Times wrote an apology. Ms. O’Reilly paid no money, she said.

“Emma suffered from the lawsuit the most,” Mr. Walsh said in an interview this week. “This woman was an opponent of Lance Armstrong and was completely vilified. Now, everyone wants to know. But where were they in 2004?”

Today, Ms. O’Reilly works as a massage therapist and at a clinic in Manchester, England.

“Cycling isn’t part of my life at all,” she said.

Or it wasn’t until the investigators took her statement this year. The formal affidavit runs more than 20 pages.

“Talking about it now opened the wound a bit,” she said. “But I think in the long run it will be good, because something needed to be done.”

“I wanted to clean up cycling,” she added. “There was intimidation, bullying and stress. You try and get on with your life. I was only speaking the truth.”




http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/sports/cycling/lance-armstrongs-former-massesue-tells-of-doping.html?hp&pagewanted=print

[Biowatch]

Toolbox: Living With the Risk of Crashing
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 10:45:25 AM PT

http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=9342






















Knew someone who cycled from the East coast to within a hundred miles of the West coast when they hit a cow grate, flipped over, broke their nose and perhaps a rib, and had to call it quits in the hospital. So close, yet so far.

[Biowatch]

The Tour de Crash -- Painful to watch.

I've never seen so many cyclists taken down in collisions so soon.

The general newspapers had photos of yesterday's crash at the finish, but skipped the huge pile-up on a sharp turn near the end, and barely mentioned the dog running into the pack earlier.

Coverage of the tiny hilly road in today's rainy race did mention that the support cars had trouble getting through the peleton pile-up to bring new wheels or bikes to their teams or leaders, which changes the race dynamics considerably.

This Tour course is hillier than many, which favors some riders over others, but with so many accidents so soon, it's more the luck of the draw and whether the rider or team knows enough to avoid a potentially bad situation and injury.

[Biowatch]

BV was the right place to post. It's cutting edge science/medicine in all sorts of ways. This board has been moribund since 2007, when Landis was kicked out of the Tour, making it painfully obvious even to fans who enjoyed it that the Tour and cycling isn't clean.

It crossed a line drawn in sand between what's acceptable therapy for top athletes to keep fit in a grueling race, and what's punishment for entertainment.

[ghmm]

Thanks for directing me to this board (sorry if my post on BV was OT).

Obviously Landis has creditability issues but I believe what he says in general about the industry. He seems to have some personal issues/jealousy with Armstrong (though I don't doubt Armstrong used extraordinary assistance for at least some of his career).

One line I found funny was "...his new team, Phonak, didn't have a doping program." So I guess a good selling point of a sponsor would be our doping program is better then theirs .

[Biowatch]

Three page article in WSJ -- Landis on Tour

"Blood Brothers"
by Reed Alergotti and Vanessa O'Connell

Thanks guys in team postal. If true, you won, everyone else lost.

No wonder nobody posts here.

[gym gravity]

tour getting exciting. I like the stages with lots of mountains very little flat, and dangerous downhill finishes. Today and tomorrow are dangerous tactical races, a restful sprint stage is thursday, itt friday and stage to mont ventoux saturday are brute force separators, finally paris .

[gym gravity]

shucks.

[Biowatch]

Sheldon Brown: 1944 - 2008
02/03/08:
"Dear Harris Cyclery friends and customers,
It is with heavy hearts that we convey to you the news that Sheldon Brown has passed away. Our thoughts go out to his family at this time. The cycling community has lost one of its most passionate members."

http://sheldonbrown.com/harris/index.html

Alas, another whimsical (whim cycle?) note signs off for good.
Farewell.

[langostino]

Sign of the times


Looks like the Tour of California has come and gone. Didn't tune in to even a second of the "race". Why bother? No way to know who deserved to win, and who didn't. Without a level playing field, it's pointless.

I see ASO still holds the line that Astana won't be permitted to line up for the Tour. And Levi Leipwhiner has launched a website to petition ASO to reverse that decision.
http://letleviride.com

Classic Levi interview video on the site ... poor Levi can't imagine any reason ASO might take this action other than it just doesn't want Bruyneel and his riders to keep winning every year. Heh. Next we know, he'll be whining about how the sport has lost most of its casual fan base and is relevant only to a tiny niche that consigns the sport to oblivion in the North America.

Classic.

[langostino]

Adios, arivaderche T-Mobile

Auf Wiedersehen, Gute Nacht!
http://www.team-telekom.de

[BullNBear52]

An Agent Fighting Steroids Harvests Trash and Turmoil
By DUFF WILSON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Jeff Novitzky is an unlikely contender for the role of Eliot Ness of the steroids age. He is an I.R.S. special agent, a position that is rarely glamorous. The work is often tedious and dull, poring over bank records and tax returns, and writing reports.

Mr. Novitzky, an accomplished high school athlete who majored in accounting in college, is quiet, respectful and direct in his work for the Internal Revenue Service, and he enjoys getting out of the office to track his cases. He is not above going through people’s trash. Or listening in on their phone calls.

He has been known to take their trash home some nights, to keep working.

Now, Mr. Novitzky is front and center in the biggest investigation to hit baseball since Chicago’s Black Sox scandal in 1919. He dug up the evidence that a grand jury used last week to indict Barry Bonds, who became baseball’s career home run leader this year with the San Francisco Giants. Mr. Bonds faces five felony charges for perjury and obstruction of justice that could send him to prison for years.

It was clear almost immediately after the indictment was announced that Mr. Bonds would not be the only person on trial in San Francisco next year. Mr. Bonds’s lawyers are trying to base their defense on Mr. Novitzky and his methods. The very qualities that make Mr. Novitzky a respected investigator — his passion, aggressiveness and perseverance — are expected to be used against him in trying to have the case dismissed.

Over the past five years, the meticulous but little-known Mr. Novitzky has been dogging some of the world’s finest athletes and their coaches and the people who may have supplied them with performance-enhancing drugs.

Among government officials and antidoping authorities, Mr. Novitzky is heralded as a pioneer. They credit him with helping to change how the illegal distribution of performance-enhancing drugs is prosecuted. They describe him as a tenacious and methodical investigator whose work has always held up in court.

Mr. Novitzky’s work has cost the sprinter Marion Jones five Olympic medals and has helped obtain federal convictions of her and six others. He has persuaded many of the people who inhabit that world to save themselves by helping him — without ever raising his voice.

He urged the former Mets clubhouse worker Kirk Radomski, said to be the biggest supplier of steroids to Major League Baseball players until 2005, to become a government informant and wear a listening device as he went about his work for 16 months. Mr. Novitzky secured his cooperation after leading a surprise raid at Mr. Radomski’s home on Long Island.

George J. Mitchell, the former senator, is relying on information based on Mr. Novitzky’s legwork to provide details and evidence for his coming report on steroids in baseball.

No Shortage of Critics

Mr. Novitzky’s detractors, mainly the defendants and their lawyers, say he is biased and unfair. They say he has a vendetta against Mr. Bonds, is seeking fame and financial gain from the case, and puts words into suspects’ mouths. They say he has lied in sworn reports, including on the initial search warrant affidavit that kick-started the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative and its many famous clients.

Since May, Mr. Bonds’s lawyer, Michael Rains, has accused Mr. Novitzky of lying in the court documents used to obtain much of the evidence gathered against Mr. Bonds, according to letters obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Novitzky’s credibility, motives and methods have been the subject of correspondence between Mr. Rains and the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco.

“Cheating to win — the athletes did it; the government did it, too,” Victor Conte Jr., Balco’s founder and president, said in an interview. Mr. Conte spent four months in jail based on evidence Mr. Novitzky gathered.

Mr. Novitzky declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond specifically to assertions of his misconduct by Mr. Rains. He asked that his photograph not be published, explaining in an e-mail message, “The possibility of greatly diminishing my ability to investigate this case and others arises any time my picture and name are publicized.”

Growing up in Burlingame, Calif., Mr. Novitzky, the 6-foot-6 son of a high school basketball coach, starred in basketball and track at Mills High School, once setting a state record by clearing 7 feet in the high jump. But his collegiate career — at three universities over five years — was washed out by knee and back injuries.

“He was very clean-cut, yes-sir, no-sir, always there on time, hustle, and do everything you asked him to do,” Stan Morrison, the former San Jose State University basketball coach, said in an interview. “He was absolutely an Eagle Scout.”

Mr. Novitzky joined the I.R.S. in 1993. For nine years, he worked low-profile cases in the Bay Area as he and his wife, Stacy, a nurse, started their family. They have three daughters, ages 10, 8 and 2. Mr. Novitzky drives a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, coaches girls’ sports and plays fantasy football in a league with his high school buddies.

He lives around the corner from his parents, and his father said he would rather remain an agent to stay near home than be promoted and be subject to transfers. The I.R.S. refuses to say how much Mr. Novitzky makes, but the top salary for a special agent in San Jose is $145,400 a year.

The Balco case started in August 2002. At the time, using steroids without a prescription was a crime largely ignored by the authorities. The F.B.I. mostly stopped doing drug cases after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the Drug Enforcement Administration focused primarily on the biggest ones, involving heroin or cocaine. Rusty Payne, a D.E.A. spokesman, said the Bay Area steroids case was “from a D.E.A. standpoint, small potatoes.”

Mr. Novitzky lives less than a mile from Mr. Conte’s Balco office and the World Gym where Mr. Bonds pumped himself up during his home run spree in 2001, when he hit a record 73.

Assigned to the case after a tip, Mr. Novitzky started going through the Balco trash in September 2002. The reasons for the investigation are unclear. Collecting drug samples and financial records weekly, Mr. Novitzky identified more than a dozen famous clients.

“Most federal investigations are built on cooperating witnesses,” said Nanci L. Clarence, a San Francisco defense lawyer for athletes summoned to the grand jury. “More rarely do you see Dumpster diving.”

Mr. Novitzky also joined Mr. Bonds’s gym. Back in his office in San Jose, he teamed with Jeff Nedrow, an assistant United States attorney, and enlisted Don H. Catlin, then director of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, as his drug tutor.

Dr. Catlin recalled that Mr. Novitzky could not even pronounce eritropotin, a common steroid, when they first spoke. Years later, some people thought Mr. Novitzky had medical training, so commanding was his knowledge of performance-enhancing drugs.

Some Tactical Errors

But lawyers defending athletes are suspicious of Mr. Novitzky’s motives and describe him as out of control. They point to the many charges that have been dropped, the light sentences for those who have been convicted and the sluggish pace of the investigation. Of the seven people convicted in the Balco case, a lawyer who leaked grand jury testimony received the toughest sentence, two and a half years.

Mr. Novitzky made some tactical mistakes. He took Balco trash home to examine, then put the resealed bags in a trash container behind a building near his old high school that had no connection to the case. The owner of that building complained to Balco.

It was then, Mr. Conte said, that he knew someone was going through his trash. He also said he learned his mail was being opened and copied, and he said he once spotted somebody following him. Joyce Valente, a Balco employee, filed a police report about the “stolen” trash in August 2002, and the local weekly paper published an item about it. Three weeks later, forced to act quickly, Mr. Novitzky led 20 agents on the raid of Balco.

“They came in before they were ready to,” Mr. Conte said. “They’d blown their cover.”

Mr. Novitzky does not tape his interviews but writes detailed reports. Mr. Conte; Greg Anderson, Mr. Bonds’s personal trainer; James Valente, Balco’s former vice president; and the former pitcher Jason Grimsley are among those who have complained that Mr. Novitzky misstated some of what they said or attributed to them information he had collected elsewhere. Mr. Conte has filed sworn statements saying he had not even met 3 of the 27 athletes to whom Mr. Novitzky said he had admitted giving steroids.

Mr. Conte said Mr. Novitzky’s mistakes led the government to drop 40 of 42 charges against him. The prosecutors said that his was a fair outcome and that Mr. Novitzky had not erred.

In letters to Scott N. Schools, the interim United States attorney in San Francisco, Mr. Rains argued that the government should walk away from its investigation because of Mr. Novitzky’s “vendetta” against Mr. Bonds.

But Dwight Sparlin, a retired I.R.S. manager who led the San Francisco office when the Balco case started, said the original focus was on Mr. Conte.

“He wasn’t even looking at Barry Bonds,” Mr. Sparlin said in an interview. “What appears to be a small money-laundering case, you never know where it will go.”

Mr. Rains accused Mr. Novitzky of perjury in two sworn statements at the heart of the Balco case. Mr. Rains wrote that all evidence obtained from Balco and Mr. Anderson’s home against all defendants should be thrown out because Mr. Novitzky put a false statement in the original search warrant affidavit about the reliability of an informant.

Mr. Rains also said two members of the San Mateo narcotics task force, who worked with Mr. Novitzky early in the case, met with Mr. Nedrow, the assistant United States attorney, to express their concerns about what they said were the false statements by Mr. Novitzky. Mr. Rains wrote that Mr. Nedrow replied that he would deal with the problems later but never did. One member of the task force did not respond to specific questions by e-mail, and the other could not be identified.

In early 2003, Mr. Novitzky had a state narcotics agent go undercover in a gym to try to befriend Mr. Anderson. The agent, Iran White, later told Playboy magazine that Mr. Novitzky was obsessed with Mr. Bonds and talked about writing a book. One of the task force agents corroborated Mr. White’s account, according to Mr. Rains’s letters to Mr. Schools.

Mr. Novitzky signed a sworn statement in 2004 denying he had ever discussed a book deal. A response to Mr. Rains from Mr. Schools did not address the specific contentions about Mr. Novitzky, but said the government would continue the case against Mr. Bonds because it had “significant evidence that contradicts your client’s grand jury testimony.”

Mr. Conte said the government gave favorable sentences to the Balco defendants in plea negotiations after postponing a court hearing that was going to focus on Mr. Novitzky’s conduct.

“We were going to nail him, big time,” Mr. Conte said, a threat now being repeated by Mr. Rains.

Kevin V. Ryan, the United States attorney in San Francisco until earlier this year, said none of the complaints had merit.

“He has taken a lot of unfair shots,” Mr. Ryan said of Mr. Novitzky in a telephone interview. “Most of the criticism, if not all, has been false or hyperbole or an effort to distract people’s attention from what is going on. There has not been a motion to suppress that has held up. Those that have been granted were reversed. Everything he has done has held up.”

Some antidoping advocates gush when they speak of Mr. Novitzky’s effect on sports.

“Agent Novitzky has been one of the pioneers in trying to rid an issue that is cancerlike in the world of sports,” Peter V. Ueberroth, the chairman of the United States Olympic Committee and former baseball commissioner, said in a phone interview.

Mr. Ryan put his work in even grander terms: “He has changed the face of sports.”

Trail of Confessions

Last month, Mr. Novitzky induced Ms. Jones, once the world’s most famous female athlete, to admit to steroid use after seven years of public denial. To extract her confession, he used the leverage of a more serious charge from an unrelated check-fraud scheme. No positive test result was needed. Ms. Jones pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents.

The world-class sprinters Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin were swayed by Mr. Novitzky to be informants. Their former coach, Trevor Graham, is also facing trial for lying to Mr. Novitzky, a charge Mr. Graham denies. Lawyers for Mr. Graham say Mr. Novitzky has been unfair, but lawyers for Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Gatlin praised him.

“Even in the range of federal law enforcement, his ability is high.” said Timothy J. Heaphy, a former federal prosecutor who is Montgomery’s lawyer. Mr. Heaphy described him as “respectful, polite and prepared.”

Mr. Novitzky confronted Mr. Gatlin with the evidence he had against him, and persuaded him to make more than a dozen undercover telephone calls, starting the day they met. Later, Mr. Novitzky testified for Mr. Gatlin at a track federation hearing.

Mr. Novitzky has “a very physical, imposing presence,” Ms. Clarence, the lawyer for athletes, said, adding that he is “good at putting the thumb on people, pressuring them to cooperate.”

His work has spawned inquiries beyond Balco. The D.E.A. is making major cases in part because Congress, influenced by the Balco case, enhanced the penalties for steroid distribution. More steroid cases are being prosecuted under state laws, too. The Albany County district attorney’s office in New York is pursuing Internet pharmacies in four states. That case has also made news for implicating professional athletes as customers.

Next month, Mr. Bonds will make his first appearance in federal court. Mr. Radomski is expected to be sentenced. The Mitchell report is due soon. Ms. Jones is to be sentenced Jan. 11.

After she pleaded guilty last month in White Plains, she admitted to cheating and lying about steroid use, sobbing on the courthouse steps.

Standing alone, away from the crowd, was the tall, bald I.R.S. agent waiting for a car to take him to the airport.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/sports/baseball/18agent.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

[BullNBear52]

Where have we heard this before?

Martina Hingis retires a 2nd time after revealing positive test for cocaine at Wimbledon

By HOWARD FENDRICH, AP Tennis Writer
November 1, 2007

Getty Images - Nov 1, 3:27 pm EDT
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In an out-of-nowhere end to Martina Hingis' comeback, the five-time Grand Slam champion revealed Thursday she tested positive for cocaine at Wimbledon and will retire for a second time rather than fight what she called a "horrendous" accusation.

"I am frustrated and angry," the 27-year-old Hingis said at a news conference in Zurich, Switzerland, her voice breaking as she fought back tears. "I believe that I am absolutely, 100 percent innocent."

She read a prepared statement ending with the vow, "I have never taken drugs," then left without taking questions.

WTA Tour chief executive Larry Scott said he recently found out about Hingis' doping test from the player's representatives -- word had not reached him through official channels because it's an ongoing case in which a hearing has yet to be held.

Although the formerly No. 1-ranked Hingis said she's retiring in part because she doesn't want to spend years dealing with the legal process, Scott said he expects the case to continue.

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"Like a lot of Martina's fans and friends and colleagues, (I am) saddened," Scott said in a telephone interview. "She's a great legend, one of the most well-liked players on the tour. But at the same time, I'm ... also mindful that the player has to be given the presumption of innocence until the process plays out until the end."

Hingis tested positive June 29, the day she lost in straight sets to Laura Granville of the United States in the third round at Wimbledon. That was her first tournament after missing 1 1/2 months with hip and back injuries.

"I just didn't want to miss Wimbledon," Hingis said at the time. "Probably at the end of the day, it wasn't, like, the smartest thing."

Although doping charges usually are announced by a sports league or event, athletes are told if a sample tests positive. A second, backup sample then is tested. Mario Widmer, Hingis' manager, said she learned of the first positive test result in mid-September and the second two or three weeks later.

"I find this accusation so horrendous, so monstrous, that I have decided to confront it head-on by talking to the press," Hingis' statement said.

She said she hired an attorney who found "various inconsistencies" with the urine sample from Wimbledon.

"He is also convinced that the doping officials mishandled the process and would not be able to prove that the urine that was tested for cocaine actually came from me," she said.

Tennis doping tests are handled by an independent agency, Sweden-based International Doping Tests & Management, Scott said.

Doping expert Dr. Gary Wadler said urine tests generally can detect cocaine up to five or six days after its use.


Getty Images - Nov 1, 2:12 pm EDT
More Photos


"They say that cocaine increases self-confidence and creates a type of euphoria. I don't know," Hingis said. "I only know that if I were to try to hit the ball while in any state of euphoria, it simply wouldn't work. I would think that it would be impossible for anyone to maintain the coordination required to play top class tennis while under the influence of drugs."

Wadler, who used to be the U.S. Open's head doctor, said that although cocaine is generally not thought of as a performance-enhancing drug, it theoretically could help.

"The acute effects of cocaine probably, overall, would impair and not enhance performance. But within a two-hour window, you may actually have some enhancement -- overcoming fatigue, reaction time, and so on," said Wadler, an associate professor of medicine at New York University and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Hingis said her family and management suggested she take a test that examines a person's hair to check for cocaine use and the result was negative, although she didn't say when or where she was tested. Wadler said hair tests usually are not used in sports because they don't necessarily show recent drug use.

In tennis, a first offense for cocaine draws a two-year suspension.

Only one woman has been suspended by the WTA because of cocaine: Lourdes Dominguez Lino of Spain in 2002. Two men, former No. 1 Mats Wilander and Karel Novacek, were banned after testing positive for the drug at the 1995 French Open.

Thursday's stunning retirement is not the first time Hingis walked away from the sport she once ruled, although the circumstances were far different. In 2002, she quit because of a series of foot and leg injuries and missed three years' worth of majors.

When she returned to the circuit full-time in 2006, Hingis reached two Grand Slam quarterfinals, won two smaller tournaments and finished the year ranked No. 7.

This season was more difficult, and she was ranked No. 19 this week.

At the height of her powers, Hingis was brilliant at controlling points and working every angle on a court. Nicknamed "The Swiss Miss," she became the youngest major champion of the 20th century when she won the 1997 Australian Open at 16, and later that year she became the youngest woman to top the rankings.

She went on to win Wimbledon and the U.S. Open that season, too, coming within a loss in the French Open final of a calendar-year Grand Slam.

"My weapon on the tennis court is and always was one single thing: the game, the ingenuity on court," Hingis said. "And for this style of tennis, there is only one performance enhancer -- the love of the game."

Associated Press Writer Sheila Norman-Culp in Zurich, Switzerland, contributed to this report.

[goodluck]

Now Marion Jones.


Jones Admits She’s a Tarnished Golden Girl
By HARVEY ARATON

A seven-year race to stay ahead of the performance-enhancement posse that long ago rounded up the flawed, opportunistic men in Marion Jones’s life is over. She was tripped up not by a snitch, not by a drug test, but by the floppy, loose laces of her own face-saving lie.

She did not believe she could come clean when she told federal agents in 2003 that she had not used the designer steroid THG, also known as the clear, in preparation for her five-medal harvest at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She could not plead ignorance by playing the flaxseed oil card she has turned over now, the way her Balco compatriot Barry Bonds did in front of a grand jury investigating the case.

Because unlike baseball, which played deaf, dumb and blind to the culture of sports pharmacology until 2002, the Olympics was long into chasing down cheaters. Jones, in a desperate coverup to protect her legacy, has finally been confirmed as one of them.

She will plead guilty in federal court in New York today to lying to federal agents about her drug use and to an unrelated financial matter. Given the international suspicion that has attached itself to Jones in recent years, her three gold and two bronze medals will no doubt be stripped by the International Olympic Committee, as well they should be.

•

“Is Marion Jones a bad person?” Victor Conte, the brains behind Balco, said last night in a telephone interview. “No. Marion made mistakes. The pain and suffering she is about to endure in public is going to be devastating to her.”

In the summer of 2006, when Jones was dealing with a questionable drug test that turned out to be a false alarm, I still found myself wishing for her to be remembered as the beautiful blur in silver shoes she was in Sydney, guilty of questionable associations. Admittedly, that sentiment reflected a double standard, an indication that keeping tabs on elite athletes peeing into cups was in itself something of a spectator sport.

Root for some while demonstrating indifference if not downright intolerance for others. We are all human, captivated by some storybooks more so than others.

But an admission makes it virtually impossible to cast Jones anymore as Conte would, as a sympathetic victim. No man in her life — not Conte or her one-time coach Trevor Graham, who allegedly supplied Jones the clear, or her former husband C. J. Hunter — made her do it.

Just like Bonds, she is claiming to have been unwittingly enhanced, but why would anyone give Jones, a college educated woman, the benefit of the doubt on that when her legacy has been built on lies? At the end of the day, she didn’t train or run by the rules in the summer of 2000. Her medals should be meaningless to all but her enablers.

“Marion wasn’t doing anything the others weren’t doing,” Conte said. “Was she on performance enhancers? Yes, but she was the superior athlete. You don’t just take performance enhancers and win gold medals.”

The problem with this rationale is that not everyone has been caught or even implicated. In a sport that bestows glory and wealth by virtue of eye blinks, would Jones have been America’s golden girl on the strength of her own natural gifts? Ben Johnson couldn’t prove he was the real deal after Seoul. Neither can Jones — too late and too bad.

For sprinters, the chance for Olympic greatness may come along once in a lifetime. Jones was 24 in Sydney, in the prime of her sprinting life. More than anyone, she cheated herself. She is reported to have said in her letter that she lied to the agents because she panicked, but it sounds like that was the case when she started using the clear in 1999.

•

In Sydney, she became the subject of suspicion when Hunter, her husband at the time and world champion shot putter in 1999, was revealed to have failed a drug test. At a news conference now immortalized by time and place and those in attendance (Conte and the renowned late attorney Johnnie Cochran, among them), Jones stood by Hunter, the way she would later stand by a boyfriend, Tim Montgomery, another of the track tainted who bore witness to Jones’s ability to choose well.

For all of his sympathy last night, Conte dogged her by volunteering revelatory information whenever he could. He happened to be right, which makes him no more a hero in any of this than the baseball snitch Jose Canseco, just more evidence of what happens when an infestation is under attack.

“I think at some point, someone, some athlete, has to step up and ask for forgiveness for all that has happened with Balco,” Conte said.

The way it looks, at least right now, it won’t have to be Bonds, unless his Balco middle man, the trainer Greg Anderson, decides to talk. As for Jones, forgiveness should not be out of the question, only retention of her medals.

E-mail: [e-mail]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/sports/othersports/05araton.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[BullNBear52]

Interesting. Giambi said pretty similar things about his dad and the pressure exerted on him by his old man; or the perceived desire to "win" to please his dad.

I think there probably is a certain amount of truth to that.

[BullNBear52]

If there are pros on the list they should name them all.

[goodluck]

Another take.

Armageddon for athletes

By Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports
September 24, 2007

They kicked in doors and seized computers. They raided laboratories in Mexico and operated in China. All around the globe they hauled in evidence and hauled off handcuffed criminals.

Over the past four days, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal authorities, in conjunction with nine other countries ranging from Canada to Thailand, unleashed a furious series of raids in "Operation Raw Deal." It was an 18-month effort to curb the global trade of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing drugs.

The DEA is calling it an unmitigated success, their largest steroids enforcement effort ever.

For the world of sports, it represents both the best- and worst-case scenarios in the fight against drug cheats. It is a potential historic breakthrough toward busting the offenders and cleaning up the games, but also a possible Armageddon of worst fears realized considering the scope of what might be discovered. The DEA says that due to the massive amount of evidence collected, they will be able to compile a centralized list and database of all the people linked to the case.

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Not just the dealers and distributors, but everyone who purchased or received even a single shipment of some kind of performance-enhancing drug linked to this investigation in the United States in the last two years.

The list, a DEA spokesperson said, should contain "hundreds of thousands of names."

For the major professional sports organizations such as the National Football League and Major League Baseball that list is both a dream come true and a potential nightmare.

Never before has so much evidence been collected. The list is exponentially longer than anything ever previously compiled. While, undoubtedly, it isn't the complete tally of every American involved in this, it is significant. And since the feds aren't even remotely done with the investigation, the list should grow in time.

The database could become the ultimate tool for the NFL and MLB. The leagues could input the names of players, trainers, team doctors, coaches and so on and see what hits.

Rather than the slow drip of leaked names and individual cases that have come to represent the fight against doping, this could be a tidal wave of busts, one giant cleansing of sport.

While the majority of the names on the federal list will have nothing to do with professional sports – amateur body builders or doctors catering to the elderly – common sense says some will be professional athletes.

How many is the question.

The potential numbers here are staggering, the potential impact difficult to fathom. This isn't a BALCO investigation, the busting of a single California lab which netted a couple dozen athletes yet still rocked sports to its core.

This is far greater. It is an opportunity to find out just how widespread doping is in American sports. Consider baseball: Is it five percent of the 1,500 Major League players? 15 percent? 50 percent? The worst-case scenarios are chilling. This is no longer about whether a handful of top players might get caught, although that alone could be devastating. It's about possibly finding out almost no one is legit.

What the leagues would do with the names and information is up to them. MLB might have trouble punishing anyone. Players deserve a presumption of innocence, retroactive punishments can be difficult and the powerful union likely would argue that receiving a shipment of steroids or HGH does not prove it was used.

The NFL, though, has already established a strict precedent. Its law-and-order commissioner, Roger Goodell, recently suspended New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison for four games not for failing a drug test, but simply for receiving a batch of HGH. That's known as a non-analytical positive, meaning he was found guilty without scientific proof of use.

If the NFL applies the same standard to every name that comes up, the suspension list could be staggering. One crooked team doctor could crush an entire season.

For Goodell, Selig, Olympics officials and others, pursuing that unknown truth is a mighty risk. But it is a risk they must take if they are to maintain any credibility on doping matters.

There is no choice, nowhere to hide. They can’t blame players unions for stopping them. Even if the government tries to be uncooperative and refuses to share the evidence, there is a clear path to strong-arming them.

Back in 2003, when the feds uncovered the athletes in the BALCO case, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency made an appeal for the details.

The Justice Department, however, rejected the request, claiming it was privileged information. But USADA, eager to do all it could to send a clean American team to the 2004 Athens Olympics, turned to Arizona Senator John McCain. He subpoenaed the information and handed it over.

If it comes to it, the NFL, MLB and others must do the same, they must take this as seriously as USADA at the first opportunity. McCain is running for President and almost certainly would welcome the significant publicity of championing the cause of cleaning up sports.

If for some reason he doesn't, there assuredly are other politicians who will.

The leagues have long thrown up their hands at trying to police this shady international underworld. They've claimed they are as diligent as possible given their limited resources. But deep down there was a measure of relief at not being able to discover the extent of the doping.

Well, the DEA may have done it for them.

Suddenly, here is the break that the leagues claimed publicly they always wanted, but privately must have feared.

Here comes the truth now, in all its potentially devastating, embarrassing and necessary glory. Hundreds of thousands of names linked to this stuff? How many of them play in the NFL, how many in MLB? How many are Olympians?

There's no excuse now but to find out.


Dan Wetzel is Yahoo! Sports' national columnist. Send Dan a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.


http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=dw-wetzelsteroids092407&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

[langostino]

Meet Geneviève Jeanson:




Girl next door
World Champion cyclist
Admitted doper

How far does the denial go? This deep: for years, through hundreds of interviews, she claimed her innocence. Even through the first three interviews for a recently released Canadian TV documentary, she indignantly protested her innocence. Then, finally, in the fourth interview, she finally gave up.

And yet, even then, she really couldn't admit it. It wasn't her, she said, but some other person that had taken over her life, the product of a coach and husband who placed too much pressure on her to win.

"It was not Geneviève that lied," she said in Thursday's interview. "It was someone else I did not know. It was something I was told to do and yes, I do regret it."

http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/13360.0.html
http://www.thestar.com/Sports/Olympics/article/259333

An interesting window into the psychology of the cheaters. Along similar lines, Floyd Landis' comment to his own mother when she asked him about cheating, to which he responded "It's not like that".

[langostino]

Mother of all PED busts

US DEA agents, leading an international operation, have arrested more than 120 people across the nation in the largest PED bust ever.

More than 50 underground labs across the country were raided. Chinese law enforcement is cooperating on going after 35 Chinese companies supplying raw materials. Substances ranged from steroids to hGH.

Seized in the raids:
11.5 million doses of steroids
Customer databases containing more than 100,000 names

Likely, the list will be covered up and held out of public view by the DEA while it negotiates with professional sports leagues (and hopefully the NCAA) on obtaining the leagues' cooperation in pursuing the investigation. Thus far, the DEA appears to want to shield any pro athletes involved in buying the stuff, claiming their focus is exclusively on taking the dealers off the street. But it's hard to believe at some point, there won't be names leaking out of this.

http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news;_ylt=AoScKx4geBNjfcly6F4Oizc5nYcB?slug=jo-steroids092407

[atout]

#msg-23103262

[BullNBear52]

Why would LeMond lie about taping the call. That sounds like a lousy thing to have done.

And Lance firing her and cutting off her healthcare. That is sleazy if true?

For every example like Stapleton's brush with unemployment or Korioth's deep freeze, there are instances of Armstrong reaching out and giving people a lift. Stephanie McIlvain has been his liaison at Oakley, his sunglasses sponsor, for 12 years. When her three-year-old son was diagnosed with autism two years ago, she quit so she could stay at home and care for him. Armstrong wouldn't have it. He told Oakley he wouldn't work with anyone else, so the company rehired her and let her work from home, with the sole responsibility of tending to Lance.

"He sent me this e-mail the other day that actually made me cry," she told me. "I don't remember why, but he just said, 'Steph, you're an awesome person, you're a great mother, and for that you're a hero.'

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200306/200306_lance_5.html

[langostino]

After all the fire

... of the initial battle and media tussle, this sure did conclude with a whimper. Hardly any media coverage at all.

Just listened to the recorded call between Greg LeMond and Stephanie McIlvain in which Stephanie clearly confirms she was at the hospital, in the room, and witness to Lance saying he was doped to the gills when asked by the doctors. Of course when Lance had Oakley threaten to fire her and cut off healthcare for her autistic child if she didn't cover for Lance, she subsequently lied during her deposition (during the SCA lawsuit). But the recording makes crystal clear what happened. Just sad all the way around. McIlvain was so fearful she asked LeMond if he was taping her, and he lied to her about that. Just all around sad and sorry pit into which cycling fell.

[Biowatch]

Panel: Landis must forfeit cycling title

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070920/ap_on_sp_ot/cyc_landis_decision

The ruling, handed down nearly four months after a bizarre and bitterly fought hearing, leaves the American with one final way to possibly salvage his title — an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. If Landis doesn't appeal, he'll be the first person in the 105-year history of the race to lose the title because of a doping offense.

[Biowatch]

TdF & biotech again, sigh: #msg-22649022

[zeta1961]

From the last paragraphy of the 'big hearts' that as a result, are even more susceptible to the dangers of epo Bove said that in athletes with bigger hearts, doping could prove potentially more dangerous than for normal people.

Athletes with bigger hearts have more red blood cells, which deliver oxygen around the body. These cells are thicker than normal cells. So if athletes decide to use an illegal agent like the blood-booster EPO, they run the risk of making their blood too thick. That puts them in danger of a clot, stroke, or heart attack.

"These athletes already have hearts that have increased in volume to adapt to their training workload," Bove said. "If they then go and use drugs, that could potentially erase the natural advantage they already have."

[Biowatch]

Tour de France cyclists have big hearts
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070903/ap_on_he_me/cyclists__hearts
>>

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer
Mon Sep 3, 12:56 PM ET

Riding the grueling Tour de France bike race takes strength, stamina — and perhaps a heart nearly 40 percent bigger than normal.

Researchers who examined the hearts of former Tour bikers found that the athletes' hearts were from 20 to 40 percent larger than average, said Dr. Francois Carre of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Rennes, France, speaking at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.

The difference is attributable largely to rigorous training that expands the cyclists' hearts. But researchers have not yet determined whether the athletes' hearts were larger to begin with.

"They are a special breed," said Dr. Richard Becker, a professor of medicine at Duke University and spokesman for the American Heart Association. Becker was not connected to Carre's study.

Scientists have long noticed the phenomenon of the "athlete's heart." Athletes who train hard in aerobic sports, such as cycling, running or swimming, tend to have a bigger heart that pumps more blood throughout the body.

The heart's walls become thicker to be able to handle the increased blood volume. That gives the athletes an edge by increasing their oxygen levels and improving their endurance.<<

etc.

[langostino]

More on the medical side of Joe Papp's case

http://www.velonews.com/train/articles/13149.0.html

[zeta1961]

It may have been Tyler's mom!..sorta appropo to your lamenting about the cycling woes crossing with biotech news..actually not..this talks about 'maternal microchimerism' where a few of mom's cells make it thru the placenta and could potentially be involved in bad autoimmune diseases like Lupus..

Chip Off the Old Block

When mom gives you some cells, she's probably just trying to help -- but Anne Stevens says it may not always work out that way.

LAB JOURNAL
By PETER LANDERS
August 22, 2007 [WSJ]

Some of the cells in your body may not really be yours at all. They may belong to mom.

A decade ago, that was just a far-out notion. But evidence is mounting that a handful of maternal cells slip through the placenta and make themselves at home in a developing fetus. They appear to stick around for decades, maybe for life.


Anne Stevens, pediatrician at Children's Hospital in Seattle.
Anne Stevens first heard about the idea in 1999, when she attended a talk by J. Lee Nelson, a pioneer in the field. After a stint in Dr. Nelson's lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Dr. Stevens opened her own lab at Children's Hospital in Seattle. Today, the 44-year-old pediatrician is a specialist in maternal microchimerism, the study of how we resemble, in a small way, the mythical monster called a chimera that featured body parts of many creatures.

Dr. Stevens is trying to figure out whether mothers' cells can trigger disease in their offspring. Most of the time, these maternal hand-me-downs seem to be harmless or maybe even helpful. But sometimes, she believes, the body's immune system may react violently against them. "Maternal cells are probably in all of us, in all tissues," Dr. Stevens says. "We don't know why the immune system loses tolerance."

Her research is part of the bigger quest to understand diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissue. Dr. Stevens sees the toll in her practice at Seattle Children's. Though rheumatoid arthritis is far more common in adults, a form of the disease strikes children too. "A lot of doctors don't recognize it," she notes.

The study of microchimerism is still in its infancy,[lol, at least it's beyond the fetal stage] and scientists debate whether the phenomenon is as widespread as Dr. Stevens believes. The field has yet to fully explain any autoimmune disease, much less lead to a cure.

One rare disease she has studied is neonatal lupus syndrome. In adults, lupus is usually found in women in their 20s. But antibodies passed by mothers to their unborn children to protect them against disease may play a role in triggering the neonatal syndrome, which can lead to a fatal heart condition.

In 2003, Dr. Stevens and colleagues published an analysis in the medical journal Lancet of tissue taken from eight infants who had died. Four had lupus and four died from other causes. The examination showed that the damaged heart tissue of infants with lupus had many maternal cells. In one sample, more than one in 50 of the infant's heart cells were actually from its mother. In other children the figure was at most one in 1,000. The results suggested that the maternal cells could be triggering a lethal immune reaction.

Scientists, including Dr. Stevens, aren't sure why we have the maternal cells in the first place. If the cells were broadly harmful, it seems likely people would have evolved ways to get rid of them. One intriguing possibility is that mom is actually giving a helping hand by transferring some of her cells to her kids. They may be stem cells that pitch in to repair damaged tissue.

That hypothesis leads to another interpretation of the Lancet results. Perhaps a separate cause led the infants' immune system to attack their hearts, and the maternal cells rushed to repair the damage.

A team led by Dr. Nelson took a favorable view of the maternal cells' contribution in a study of type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder affecting pancreatic cells. The team showed this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that young people with the disease have an unusually large number of maternal cells in their blood. The team also analyzed maternal cells in the pancreatic tissue of deceased diabetes patients. The researchers suggested that the maternal microchimerism "most likely contributes to efforts to restore function and regenerate diseased tissue."

But Dr. Stevens is leaning a bit more toward the notion that the maternal cells can be troublemakers. Her lab has done work, still unpublished, suggesting that children with lupus produce more of certain immune-system proteins in response to maternal cells. That work is funded by the Arthritis Foundation, while some of her other work draws support from the National Institutes of Health.

She is testing her theories in mice. In these experiments, a mother's cells are manipulated to carry a gene that makes them glow green. Half her offspring do not inherit the gene, so any cells of the youngsters that glow green must have been passed directly on from mom. Dr. Stevens's team temporarily wounded the kidneys of the offspring and found that the maternal cells didn't rush to the kidney to regenerate tissue. That suggests maternal cells aren't part of the normal repair process.

Even as Dr. Stevens's and other researchers struggle to understand the role of the transferred maternal cells, the field is producing some interesting philosophical questions. What does it mean to be you, if 1% of your cells are your mother's? "It could be comforting or disturbing," says Dr. Stevens. She quotes the title of an article by Judith Hall of the University of British Columbia: "So you think your mother is always looking over your shoulder? --She may be in your shoulder!"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118773314342904520.html?mod=hps_us_editors_picks

[zeta1961]

I guess the '6 degrees of separation' theory may be right after all!

now I have to read about CNBC being compared to blood doping excuses.

[Biowatch]

Stocks, Cramer, & Le Tour...

"When we asked Cramer and CNBC for their own records of Mad Money's stock-picking performance, they had more excuses than a Tour de France cyclist dodging a blood test."

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB118681265755995100.html?mod=mktw

It's bad enough when I get more science news and info about biotech companies by reading this message board than reading the general newspapers, now I have to read about CNBC being compared to blood doping excuses.

[zeta1961]

Jenzzz wins Tour of Deutchland..very nice, indeed..

http://www.cyclingnews.com/photos/2007/aug07/germany07/index.php?id=/photos/2007/aug07/germany07/ger...

[zeta1961]

Meanwhile, organizers of Hamburg's Cyclassics - a ProTour event slated for August 19 - made it clear Wednesday that they will not welcome Contador to the race because of the Puerto connection.

http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/13062.0.html

God bless the Germans!..I have no idea of the politics to know the level of benevolence for humanity this all entails, but.......

[langostino]

It just keeps unfolding ...


Andrey Kashechkin (Astana's third man in its Big Three) has just tested positive for blood doping. It was an out of competition test taken when the vampires surprised him while he was hiding out in Turkey.

And now there is a press conference scheduled for Friday by Señor Contador. Bruyneel is reported to be present for that. And the notice to the media says he will read a prepared statement but will NOT answer any questions.

There are all sorts of things Contador could be there to reveal/announce, including a surprise entry into the Vuelta, a new contract extension with Discovery, etc. But the darker possibility is that he and Bruyneel have been tipped that the Operacion Puerto documents obtained by Werner Franke and turned over to authorities have caught him, and this is an attempt to get out ahead of the story and control the spin.

If that turns out to be the case, look for him to pull a Basso and make an admission that is strictly limited to only that which he thinks can be fully proven. Likely, he would claim to "one-time" use, claim that it made him sick so he stopped, and that Bruyneel was unaware of this when he came to Discovery, where he never, never ever doped.

Also, it looks as though, for time being, Anne Gripper and the UCI have figured out how to catch these guys in the act while they sneak off to their "training camps". I'm thinking she was incensed to see Astana boldly declare that it was going to enter the Vuelta despite the Vino situation and the other positives they had, and decided to specifically target Kashechkin, who fairly clearly was going to be Astana's #1 GC candidate and someone they thought could win that race. I wonder if she wasn't also a bit irritated that the Vuelta brazenly extended and invitation not only to Astana, but to Relax-Gan, the other primary refuge of the OP dopers. (Between them, Astana, Discovery and Relax-Gan employed the bulk of the highest profile names from the OP debacle).

Doubtless, in the future of this cat and mouse game, the dopers will realize they need to find an alternative to the homomlogous blood doping method, and that they'll need to figure something other than the crude method of geographically out of the way "training camps" and "vacations" to do their business.

Of course this will bring up another point -- what will the ASO/TDF clowns say now? After blaming the UCI for Rasmussen and Vino, they brayed on and on about having a clean podium and a great clean race, and that the positives of Vino and Mayo proved the testing was catching all the dirty ones.

[zeta1961]

I think the good news is that this is all being talked about..opening the dialogue for the young and developing riders, the high schoolers..your post should have been an editorial in a major cycling magazine..the youngsters esp. and fans need to hear arguments like this back and forth..why is it that blood doping and testosterone patches are equally wrong or are they?..upthread, I also took a 'have no mercy' kind of stand for blood dopers but upon further reflection, it's cheap moral relativism that does nothing to develop the rider's integrity that is needed to guide them throughout their very long life(hopefully) after the saddle..

I get angrier and angrier with the all the owners, trainers, DS's, and heroes like Merckx who created this culture..it appears that Simpson's death 40 years ago taught them how to be smart about ped regimes..and they've failed here too..as evidenced by the untimely deaths of so many guys..

But, I can't have not even a gota(drop) of mercy nor forgive the Ferrari's, Fuentes and other unnamed doctors..they betrayed the most sacred oath..

[langostino]

Eddie Merckx - perhaps greatest cyclist ever


But ZERO credibility on doping. And now a hypocrite to boot.

Merckx himself was busted for doping on three different occasions, so it's pretty ironic hearing talking about "no mercy" for other dopers. Equally ironic hearing him try and differentiate between different kinds of doping.

Here again we see the really twisted mental machinations of the old-school mindset:
(1) It's not doping unless there's a positive doping test
(2) It's not doping if you can con the officials into giving you an exemption
(3) Even if you violate the conditions of the exemption, it's still not doping because it's something legal, just a matter of degree
(4) The kind of doping the other guy does is cheating, the kind of doping I do is just for recovery.
(5) It is o.k. to trash-talk those who are retired, or have been caught by the doping tests, but it is verbotten to say a word about those who are riding and have not failed a test.
(6) If you must talk about doping, it's marginally acceptable to talk about someone on a rival team or from a rival nationality or ethnicity, but absolutely unacceptable to talk negatively about teammates, former teammates, fellow countrymen, and racers who use the same doctors or trainers.

Regrettably, we must remember this is the same Eddie Merckx who endorsed and assisted Lance Armstrong in his work with Michele Ferrari.

Petacchi, of course, was doping up on Salbuterol to gain a competitive advantage. How did he pull that off? Like many others in the peloton, he conspired with a doctor to make a bogus claim about being an asthmatic, so got a get out of jail free card for taking the stuff. That he had a medical certificate doesn't obscure the fact (a) he lied/cheated to get one (and therefore was in violation of the anti-doping rules), and (b) even then, he wanted a dose more than even the other cheaters could get via the bogus medical certificate game.

Ironically, Eddie betrays himself straight from the top with the characterization/rationalization that "there is doping and doping".

It's o.k. to cheat, just don't get caught. It's o.k. to cheat, just not too blatantly. It's o.k. to cheat, but not outside the bounds of the p.r. blanket and rationalizable defense.

[zeta1961]

"There is doping and doping. I wouldn't ban Alessandro Petacchi for a couple of sprays too many, particularly since he has a medical certificate. But I'd have no mercy for blood transfusions." [Eddie Merckx]

http://sports.yahoo.com/sc/news;_ylt=AiMMa5xcD6wG_IfoprRBn2V.grcF?slug=ap-doping-merckx&prov=ap&...

[zeta1961]

Sinkewitz passes on B sample testing..I'm impressed although the cynics[more experienced folk] on the cycling sites are taking a wait/see approach to assure it's a genuine mea culpa..I have no idea but nevertheless, I"m glad we won't be subjected to lies and rants about Pound, McQuaid, Lemonde, oh yeah, those awful lab techs that hate foreigners..

Sinkewitz fired after waiving right to B sample test

By Agence France Presse
Filed: July 31, 2007

The T-Mobile cycling team has fired Patrik Sinkewitz, the rider who failed a drugs test in the run up to the Tour de France, after he decided not to have a second urine sample analyzed.

The 26-year-old's decision means he accepts the test's result and concedes that he violated T-Mobile's Code of Conduct after he was found to have abnormal levels of testosterone following an out-of-competition test taken on June 8th by the German anti-doping agency (NADA).

the 2004 Tour of Germany winner said he had been using widely-available gel Testogel - a replacement therapy for low testosterone levels in men - to help recovery, which had cause the failed out-of-competition test taken on June 8th.

Now the rider has insisted on his website he will speak to the German Cycling Federation to explain his situation and wants to return to cycling as soon as possible.

"I have withdrawn my application for the opening of the B sample," he said. "I want to answer for what I have done and deal with the consequences of my actions. I do not want to hide, but explain the truth."

"I had been using a product called Testogel, which is supplied by the company Jenapharm, to balance testosterone deficits," he said. "The gel is applied on the skin and absorbed into the body. It helps the body to recover after hard training.

"Without thinking, in a moment of huge stupidy, I applied some to my upper arm in our training camp in France in the evening before the dope test. I did this instinctively and without thinking of the possible results. It has proved to be a huge mistake and lack of responsibility has let down the team, our sponsors and cycling as a sport.

"My actions have caused great distress and I have done exactly what T-Mobile is striving to avoid to act a role-model for others.

"I regret this profoundly. My admission should be my first step in my redemption. I will make myself available for the German Cycling Federation (BDR) and the independent committee it will set up.

"I want to do whatever I can, so cycling can exist without doping and all it's sporting fascinations can be realized. I wish that all bicycle teams, above all ‘my' T-Mobile team, will be allowed to continue and not discouraged by events. I am ready to take part in a new cycling. I am willing to take up this challenge."

After his firing, T-Mobile is also insisting Sinkewitz return a year's wages for his doping violation which breaks the team's Code of Conduct.

"He broke his commitment to us, so his contract has been terminated," said T-Mobile's boss Rolf Aldag. "Of course the positive doping test came as a shock to us, but it shows the effectiveness and importance of our internal testing and NADA's testing."

Christian Frommert, Deutsche Telekom's senior spokesman, welcomed the action.

"The fact that Mr. Sinkewitz passed on the opening of the B sample means that he is accepting the results of the A sample," Frommert said. "We thus have a clear-cut doping case."

According to Aldag, Sinkewitz will now face a two-year ban from competition - and will be obliged to repay a year's salary for a doping violation.

T-Mobile moved swiftly to sack Sinkewitz after he revealed his decision on Tuesday to not have his second urine sample analyzed.

Sinkewitz's positive test was announced on July 18, three days after he had abandoned this year's Tour after crashing into a spectator at the end of the eighth stage