Just a minor quibble, and in the light of the Armstrong evidence by no means intended to suggest anything much, but...


how come in none of the coverage of Frankie Dettori's 'drugs ban' have we been told what he was taking?

Today's Guardian says that it is "believed to be cocaine", and I think that I've seen French and Italian stories that were less equivocal.

Cocaine would seem to fit with other things that have been said.
According to this BBC story from last month, the rules of the French horse racing authorities explain the lack of clarity. Presumably once the process is definitively closed they will say what the test found.

Janik wrote:


The re-analysis of the tests done in 2005 on the B-samples from the '99 tour was unequivocal. Of all those tested, one rider and one rider alone was using EPO.

The fact that they ostracised a "soup-spitter" for calling them all dirty doesn't necessarily mean they were still dirty. I don't see what the UCI business has to do with it, bar that their evident willingness to turn a blind eye to Armstrong's piss-taking ensured that everyone else would dope to try and keep up.

But for one year there, yes, the peloton was with one notable exception virtually drug-free.

Brandenburger Toro wrote:


There is still no test for microdosing of testosterone, and the testosterone tests are still done after the race, by which time it will have worn off.

Honestly, this is all detailed in Hamilton's book. Remember, he cheated for years and years without ever getting caught. He only got caught in the end because his doctor got careless when labelling blood bags.

It really is incredible to think, that after all that has come out, that there are some people still buying the "no positive test = no doping" bullshit.

Yes, because my point was that there was a test rather than that you were blindly asserting as fact the unsupported contents of your thalamus.

I don't have time for this, I have stuff to do. Good luck to you.

Toro, if Armstrong went for a solid decade doing test after test and not getting caught, what does that say about the tests and what they look for?

Janik wrote:


Sure, but he asks a few pertinent questions of Sky/Wiggins success and makes statements like "it defies logic for me".

I've heard a fair amount of stuff leveled at Sky/Wiggins, and it seems like a concise version of them, but coming from a man with a fairly decent reputation like Kimmage, it feels far more notable. I have liked Wiggins/Team Sky as much as the next fanboy, but when I read Kimmage talking about them in a way in which I would dismiss if it was (almost anyone else, I have to sit up. I cant dismiss them as easy.

Having said that, the one problem I can see with Kimmage's Wiggins comments are

"And how outspoken he was about doping at that time compared to now! It doesn’t make sense. If he was as outspoken five years ago, why aren’t you saying the same things now?".

Well Wiggins did didn't he? He wrote this piece during the TDF, which seemed to outline his position fairly well.

Maybe it's just a another symptom of the tragedy of cycling. That being that those have been right in the past (sometimes by insinuation) can seem to be right now (by insinuation), when they are still as susceptible to being wrong as everyone else.

AB2 wrote:


Well, we know that dopers adjust their patterns to the testing technology. The whole point of the leaked study was to ascertain whether there was a change in doping behaviour between 1999, when a basic test for EPO was known by the riders to have been developed but not yet authorised, and 2000.

So it was a re-test done in 2005; the dopers were still ahead in the "arms race" at that point, but testing had certainly caught up to what the dopers were doing six years previously. The same way the Irish Army won't win many wars today, but I'd fancy our chances against the Vikings.

It's also anecdotally supported by the riders' testimonies; bar US Postal guys (who other than Armstrong would deliberately avoid finishing in positions which required an automatic test), nobody has talked about being doped that season.

The thing you have to remember about Kimmage is that, as one of those links says, he's a fanatic. The whole sport, and everyone in it, are primarily elements in a passion play about Him, and his Broken Dreams.

That narcissistic obsession has produced stunningly important work, and it makes him a tremendously brave advocate and moral force in the sport. But it also means he can't be taken as remotely objective.

Brandenburger Toro wrote:


Agree, but who is? I guessing someone like David Walsh would be considered more objective (chapéu to him btw), but I'm guessing most of those involved in cycling tend to fall on one side or another of objectivity.

Saying that it can't be proved that the Tour wasn't clean in 1999 is like saying you can't prove that God doesn't exist.

Sure, they could have doped themselves up to the eyeballs in the 1998/99 off-season, they could have done testosterone during the 1999 race and not gotten caught, even by today's testing standards. But since nobody has the ultimate proof, anybody that suggests that 1999 was doping business as usual is talking out of their Thalamus. Apparently.

The Top-10 in the 1999 Tour is riddled with riders who were caught before or after 1999 and who have worked with doping doctors. But we must believe that that is just happen-stance. We must believe the good word of these cheats that they were clean in 1999 and that Armstrong was the only one doping. To suggest anything else is ignoring the facts of who did and didn't test positive at that particular time.

Bollocks to that.

No, the reason Armstrong got his titles stripped from 1998 onwards is not because they suddenly found positive tests for every single race for which they stripped him of his titles. No, USADA proved beyond reasonable doubt that he was a serial doper involved in a culture of serial doping. So they decided to strip him of his titles. And that same USADA logic is what I'm using to say that there was cheating going on in the 1999 Tour, a Tour which was filled with known cheats.

Bryaniek wrote:


Do you read anything I write before replying to it, or just imagine what I probably wrote in your head?



You're right, they probably all decided not to take the much more effective thing they'd all been using the previous few years, for which they knew there wasn't a test, and use less effective drugs that year. Because obviously. And you totally aren't conflating at least three completely different conversations there.



This is both completely true and completely irrelevant to the point made.



Or we could look at the evidence.



Or we could look at the evidence.



I have no idea who or what you imagine you are arguing against here.

Maybe I'm being really thick here, but why would druggie cyclists just suddenly and temporarily stop cheating for the most prestigious and lucrative race in the world, the one that they most want to win?

Good question, that.

AB2 wrote:


Yeah, I should have been clearer about that. In a word, Festina.

Because there really was, after 1998, a chance that the professional sport would collapse, and they would lose their livelihoods. The sport as a whole was genuinely terrified that another high profile doping case would see the Tour abandoned, the sponsors flee in droves. And knowing that everybody else felt like that, there was a suspicion that there could actually be a level playing-field, that it would be possible to compete on the merits.

Then two things happened; Armstrong came in juiced up and took the piss, scotching the hope of competitive equality, and restoring the "just to keep up" excuse. And, crucially and predictably, ASO and the UCI indicated by their inaction that precisely because another doping scandal could sink the Tour and the sport there was no way they were going to let it happen, giving the riders impunity to dope again.

I see, so in 1999 the Peloton set what was then the fastest ever average speed in the history of the Tour while riding pan y agua. Impressive.

A shame that Pantani didn't get the message of post-Festina cycling having been cleaned up when was suspended at the Giro in the Spring of 1999 for having too high a hematocrit. Or was the gentlemen's agreement for the Peloton to ride clean only to be applied to the Tour de France?

Have I inadvertently activated the long-awaited "ignore poster" function, and simply can't see who's writing these posts that you're responding to?

No, you're not getting away that easily.

You said the sport cleaned itself up after Festina '98 and that it was Lance taking them for fools at the Tour de France in '99 that opened up the doping arms race again.

But in the Giro in May 1999, a race which happened a couple of months before the Tour de France and which Lance Armstrong didn't even race in, they kicked out the race leader, Marco Pantani, for having too high a red blood cell count. Doesn't seem like he was a very clean rider to me.

Or did this clean peloton you speak of happen sometime after May 1999 and last until Lance took them for fools in July 1999? Shaky ground you are standing on there. But I know you will defend it to the very last.