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What image are they trying to project.
I saw that and said what the hell? What image are they trying to project.
I just put new tubes and tires on my Fugi 12 speed sport. Watching the Olympic cycling time trials today what a difference the handle bars are. Not sure I could control the bike with the new handle bars.
Julien Bernard Fined for Kissing Wife [and son] During 2024 Tour De France Time Trial
He says it was worth it.
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10127317-julien-bernard-fined-for-kissing-wife-during-2024-tour-de-france-time-trial
Julien Bernard found out the hard way what happens when you show affection to your family during the Tour de France.
Per Reuters, the International Cycling Union fined Bernard 200 Swiss francs ($223 U.S. dollars) for stopping to kiss his wife and son during the time trial seventh stage of the event on Friday.
The moment happened early in the time trial, which took place in Bernard's home region in Burgundy, amid a sea of supporters. Bernard spotted his wife, who was holding the couple's son, and kissed them both before resuming his ride.
Reuters noted the International Cycling Union said in a statement that Bernard's actions were inappropriate and damaged the image of the sport.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
Bradley Wiggins was hit by a car. He received some broken ribs but should be ready to defend his title.
GLTA
Bob
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
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
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