Liberty Seguros - now a Portuguese team - is back with the dope stuff.

No less than three... count that .. three riders have tested positive for CERA in the run-up to Volta a Portugal. The culprits are:

Nuno Ribiero, stage 9 and overall winner of the VP. He's an ex-rider of former Liberty Seguros, who got busted for high hematocrit. He was selected for the Spanish Worlds squad.

Hector Guerra, stage 10 winner at the VP. Was also selected for the Spanish World's squad.

Isidro Nozal, who hardly needs an introoduction (Liberty Seguros rider from 1999 - 2006).

Liberty Seguros has, according to reports, decided to end all Cycling sponsorships as a result of this latest scandal.

Deja Vu all over again.

Here is a summary of OP, back in 2006. Note the identical/parallel story lines:

March 2004 Jesus Manzano, a former cyclist with the Kelme team, alleges blood doping took place in the squad. An Italian magistrate passes his testimony to the Spanish authorities

...

October 2004 Santi Pérez (Phonak) is banned for blood doping

May-June 2005 Nuno Ribeiro and Isidro Nozal (Liberty Seguros) are prevented from competing following abnormal blood tests

Sept 2005 The Tour of Spain winner Roberto Heras (Liberty Seguros) tests positive for erythropoietin and is banned for two years

Feb 2006 Start of 'Operation Puerto', the surveillance of a Madrid apartment allegedly used for blood doping

May 23 2006 Five arrests including Manolo Saiz, director of Liberty Seguros, Fuentes and Jose-Luis Merino, who runs a laboratory

May 27 2006 Liberty withdraws from sponsorship

Source: Guardian News & Media, Published: 5/31/2006

You really think it is for real this time?

If you answered yes, then allow me to add this quote from the same article

"If we get the evidence we will move on it and complete the process no matter how painful," the UCI head Pat McQuaid told the Guardian. "It has to be done for the integrity of the sport. The message has to get out to anyone who thinks they can get away with [doping] that there are other means to catch people and [a police investigation] is one of them."

Anyone see how Valv.piti is doing in the Vuelta by the way?

Dave.

Thanks to Uncle Pat, cycling is clean as the driven snow. Maybe even cleaner.

I am sure this is all just a series of errors by incompetent labs and corrupt anti-doping officials. Nobody is STUPID enough to take CERA anymore!!

Olaf Pollack has declared he is surprised by his positive and denies using banned substances. I am sure he can speak on behalf of all supposed dopers. Rebellin and Schumacher can attest to the purity of the peloton. Floyd says he never knew of doping – a beer lover would never lie!

Where are Suh and Jacobs when you really need them to defend human rights and INNOCENT victims of witch hunts and manipulation.

All further donations to the UCI should go to establishing a global Fairness Fund for defending these helpless victims of corruption instead of purchasing useless testing equipment.

The "DPF presented by The Red Lobster" team will only use homard and root beer and drive Volkswagens instead of Ferraris.

Free the innocent!

I'm dying.

Crying.

Get me off the floor.

Dav.e

Isidro Nozal ... that is one rider who has always puzzled me.
I recently reviewed the 2003 Vuelta which I find one of the more interesting races of recent years. There was young Nozal, almost accidentally in the lead after a breakaway, accidentally increases his lead after a huge TT win and almost pulls it off, winning the other TT by an equally huge margin but slowly crumbling in the mountains and getting toppled by Heras in the final uphill TT.
It's as though he spent the rest of his career paying for those efforts. Not like one would think he first resorted to doping after the race but he is one rider I would love to hear tell his story.

My assumption is that when he found himself in such a promising position, he got upgraded from the dometique-doping program to the team-leader program. That was probably still at the time when one could do homologous blood doping still, no?

Then I think he found he didn't like the pressure or requirements of being a big rider and settled for a career as a domestique.

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/ribeiro-accuses-team-doctors

These are interesting comments from Nuno Ribeiro.



Either he is just another doper/liar in an incredibly long succession of doper/liars, or he is about the stupidist pro cyclist ever known to man accepting to be injected with unknown substances by team staff after all the doping scandals the past few decades.

Even if there was organised team doping with active participation by team "doctors", at some point the riders have to take some responsibility for their actions.

I vote for none of the above. Perhaps it's not the best analogy, but consider the amphetamine problem in Thailand. Most estimates are that 80+% of the labor force there is hopped up on amphetamine. It's so pervasive that the wink/nod from employers is that if you can't keep up with the other laborers going 48 hours straight, then you don't get a job. That being the case, the laborers make the assumption it's just the way it is, it's a practical job requirement, sources are provided through the workplace, and for the most part, nobody ever gets busted. So you do what you gotta do for a job that will pay you several times what you could otherwise make, if you could even get another job at all.

What percentage of pro cyclists who avail themselves of doping do you figure get busted? And lose their jobs as a result? I'd put it at less than 1%. Even for those guys, by the time they do get busted, they've made more money in a few years than they'd make in a lifetime at the next best job they could get hired to do. And they've gotten the joy of a job they dreamed of. From a health perspective, perhaps stupid. From a chasing-the-dream, employment standpoint, in real-world, accepting the world as it is, not how we wish it was, hardly.

What do these young cyclists know? They know when the come to a team the team has a program. They know the program keeps the large majority of guys clear of any problems with authorities. Beyond that, they know if they're not on the program, they won't be on the team long. (Just like the Thai worker whose expected to go 48 hours straight without sleeping knows he won't be in that job for very long going about it "naturally").

Is this guy really "stupid"? I'd say not. He's doing what he needs to do to have the job he dreams of. He's doing what hundreds and hundreds of other guys do every day. You can hang a moral judgment on him, but as for the rationality of his actions, it seems what constitutes "stupid" depends on life circumstance and individual position in life.

Is he really "a liar" when he says he simply held his arm out and let the doctors apply the program? Or a liar when he says at some point when you're in that position, on some level you've got to simply trust the doctors? I think not. I think that's the absolute truth, and I think that same truth applies in one way or another to all of us in some arena or facet of our lives.

Yeah, I'd do it differently in his shoes, but that doesn't mean I'm "smart" and he's "stupid," and it doesn't make him "a liar" because the nature of his business was set up to maintain plausible deniability for people in his position, and he went along with the exact same set of unwritten rules as the overwhelming majority of guys in his industry, and all the guys in his own company.

If we're honest about it, there is all kinds of cheating, stealing, and illegality all over the world in most businesses, and the institutions themselves set up a similar model of plausible deniability.









May I take a crack at translation?

"If we get the evidence we will move on it ..." => We ain't doin' squat until I find out how I can play this thing. Gotta call up the powers that be and pay my salary and find out whether I should protect these small fry or whether covering up for them isn't worth the effort.

"... no matter how painful." => ... no matter how much I'd rather be off sipping roostertails on the French Riviera instead of stuck fooling around with pointless paperwork.

"It has to be done for the integrity of the sport." => It has to be done to keep up the con job of integrity in our anti-doping public relations campaign. And at the moment, I'm thinking the big-boys in my club (read: ProTour team owners and management) won't mind if I throw out a sacrificial lamb from among the Continental team ranks.

"The message has to get out ..." => The message I want you to print on my behalf and circulate to the world as principal aim in my con-job p.r. campaign is ...

+1: see Wall Street.

In this case, we actually have a doctor being banned. How refreshing. Normally it's the riders (dopers) that incur the penalties while the management (dealers) slip away.

Dave.

Great post FC. But I notice that your inner fanboy (I’m not being nasty here; I have one too, but I try to muzzle him a bit more) just can’t help but find some sympathy for the doping rider, yet has absolutely none for the UCI leadership. A regime which, by any measure, has done far, far more than has ever been done about doping in cycling.

An alternative second section comes to mind:

Is it reasonable for McQuaid to shorten the reins on the dopers as soon as he can, boot them as soon as their reticulocytes go the wrong way, their hct stays up at in the range the experts say is within the allowable range, early in the history of passports? His reality is that he has only about 100 people who elect him every term, those being the national federation presidents.

These people are, even more than you or me, bike racing fans that love rubbing shoulders with top pros, never mind depending on sponsors because those pros are on their team for worlds. (I'll leave aside the presidents with business relationships in the sport.) These NF’s also accept their cut of entry and membership fees when the masses start riding because some anti-cancer god inspires it.

Is it reasonable for the UCI to axe the sugar daddies of the electorate? Even if McQuaid was Dick Pound in disguise, it's arguable that a massive crackdown would soon lead to his 'removal', and end any chance of pursuing an anti-doping agenda. Given that he is probably not living solely to end doping, this is not likely, (as say if I were UCI president and positively relish going down in a blaze of glory...) as his history as a race organizer (no doubt his races got the most coverage when the best dopers were there), or his friendship with Hein Verbruggen indicates.

From an anti-doping perspective, the UCI is perhaps timid. But from a managing the myth, holding the vapour together standpoint, in the real-world, accepting that change isn’t as fast as we would like it, hardly.

And let me also offer a translation: "Listen up boneheads, there are laws now, the cops are on to us, and if we don't smarten up, there won't be any vapour to hold together."

Hi Lister, I am still with Pandora and holding onto hope.

But, a little evidence now and then would be helpful.

Dave.