While , on the surface, this seems like a good idea, what assets would SD go after? Most of these teams rely soley on sponsorship to ride. Their insurers would likely not cover the legal costs as it arose out of what is considered criminal activity so what would they get? Their money back....Too late, already spent.
Unfortunately, not much of a threat if you ask me. I have however, been known to wrong from time to time.
j

I think I'm right in saying that athletes caught doping have had to pay back prize money won while they were doped. In some cases this has left them pretty much penniless as the money has already been spent and they have to sell the house, etc.

Be interesting to see S-D go personally after anybody they believed was doping. The money they got back might be fairly trivial to them but the threat to other would-be dopers of not just being banned from the sport, but also losing your home and all your belongings might just make them think a bit harder about what they're doing.

I sincerely hope you are correct.
j

Yes, it might make you (a presumably educated, comfortably middle-class working person) think a bit harder. But as was pointed out in another thread, many people in the pro ranks come from very different backgrounds, where their prospects include things like working on the farm or in the local factory. Dope so they have a shot at a great life on the off chance they might get caught? Back to square one, no big deal.

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"Go yell at an M&M"

Sadly, you're probably right, certainly regarding the riders. Might work a bit better on team management, doctors etc. who are complicit in supplying the drugs or at least not exercising sufficient duty of care to ensure the riders aren't doping. The more accountability and transparency there is the better.

Not really b/c I don't think the vast majority of the doping going on today is organized by the team.

It will work in the sense that it is another sign that the sponsors are getting tired of this. Once it looks like the money may really dry up, that is when there will start to be a shift in thinking in the peleton. And that is the only way the sport will get clean enough to keep going.

Cycling will be on the road to recovery once most doping is taken care of by the clean guys on a team beating the crap out of a doping teammate (either literally or just metaphorically). That will start to happen as more and more guys see their livelihood on the line even if they don't dope.

Despite all the dishing on MLB and the NFL in other threads, my hunch is that no major league player these days could get away with having a vial in the locker room or even admitting he was using. Some players may dope but they aren't going to let their teammates know. There is a shame to it that just doesn't seem to be present in cycling yet. The clean guys in the NFL or MLB may not go to the authorities but my guess is if the doper was a starter on the team, there would be some serious off the record "discussions" about what a risk to the team his behavior was.

My hunch is that cycling is still in the stage that even if a clean teammate sees evidence of doping by a teammate, nothing is said. The serious threat of loss of sponsorships will eventually change that.

maybe SD isn't out to recover money, but by sueing, it may show that they will not stand for doping. This maybe more of a public relations/perception thing(which leads to money) than an all out attempt to recoup money from the riders/Drs/team management themselves.

I wonder if drying up sponsorship dollars solves the problem or makes it worse. First, most riders are not publicizing the steps they are taking to get ahead (legal or illegal) so being policed by your own team may not be possible. Also, based on the team mentality, it would be tough to convince a rider to turn another in knowing that they might all lose in the end and, at the very least, they would divide the team. Second, fewer dollars to go around is just going to increase the pressure to get the dollars that are available.

I agree with you because at the end of the day, whenever they talk about the case, while they mention Riccardo Ricco, they also mention Saunier-Duval as in team Saunier-Duval which definitively does NOT look good from a PR perspective: "Saunier-Duval team withdrew due to doping"...

Fred.

That could happen. The alternative to cleaning the sport up enough that it at least has an aura of cleanliness suffient to continue to appeal to quality big dollar sponsors is that the sport just devolves into a minor sport where the average pro riding in the Tour makes $40K per year and typical team is sponsored by some local car dealer. Doping may actually increase but, no one will care since no one will be paying any attention.

'devolves'?? How much do you think the 'average pro riding in the TDF' is actually making? I believe the current minimum salary is what, 20,000 euros?

I would like to see the grand tour organizers/owners only inviting teams that take a pro-active stance when it comes to doping...ala Garmin-Chipotle. This system won't be perfect, but at this point-in-time, one can argue that any team that doesn't test their riders and have a doping policy, full of procedures, checks and balances, etc., is one way shape or form, turning a blind eye. Even if they thought 2009 was too aggressive, you can announce it today and say starting in 2010, the teams must earn the invite and one of the main criteria is a fully documented, and public, doping policy.

Just my 2cents.

I wish you spent as much time suggesting solutions, as you do talking about physio and aero stuff ;-)

The interesting thing with the current team-driven anti-doping efforts is that positive tests may be indicated by a deviation from an individual's "biological baseline" as revealed by a range of values established by over time testing. If you are already doping when you start or if you introduce the doping very gradually, whether you are actually doping could be tough to ascertain assuming that you don't test positive for the known banned substances and stay within the thresholds for variance.

My point here is that team testing is still not a solution it just adds a level of complexity to the evasion process. That said, if you start testing early and often, the biological baseline approach may offer a better long term solution and, at the very least, would reveal some interesting data about highly trained athletes that I would love to see.

Oh, I already have a solution that makes sense and would work. I just don't think it would be accepted because it doesn't involve pillories or crucifixion, and that's what people seem to want.

I'm all ears> I won't tell anybody...

You're even smarter than I realized--or incredibly naive. Cheating has been around as long as sport itself, so suggesting you know what 'would work' seems a bit questionable to me. Even if one were to legalize most forms of doping, there will still have to be a line in the sand--and people will always cross it.

Sigh.

Well, first let's explain why my solution won't work: it doesn't call for lifetime bans, or imprisonment, or death by a thousand cuts. It's not cruel enough to satisfy the bloodlust of the morally outraged.

Okay. Basically, the problem is that the benefit/cost of doping is high because the risk of getting caught is relatively low. The normal response is to jack the cost up higher and higher by introducing more draconian penalties. However, if you follow criminal justice research at all, you know that increased penalties don't deter as well as increasing the probability of getting caught. In addition, in those rare cases where a rider does get caught, the penalty falls on the wrong party. Teams just say they're shocked (shocked!) to learn that the rider has been doping despite swearing on his dog's soul or his mother's head. Then they say the rider did it on his own, it was an isolated incident, they fire his ass, and then replace the rider with someone else to whom they say, "your contract next year depends on how well you perform this year."

So the solution is both to increase the probability of getting caught, and to switch the penalties around so the teams don't have an incentive to turn a blind eye to doping behavior.

In auto racing, when a team cheats, they get fined and put back to the back row -- they don't toss the driver out and blackball him for two years and leave the team unpunished. In hockey, a player gets sent to the penalty box for a specified amount of time so the team plays a man short. In football, the team gets penalized in distance to the goal line. So part one: if there's a positive, recognize that doping is a sporting violation so put your moral outrage aside and impose a sporting penalty. Impose a time penalty for the next stage (or the next race). Hold on. I'm not done. So part two: have all the riders of a team pee into the same flask. Test the collective pee. The labs say they can detect levels of drugs so low that they're not ergogenic, so the dilution shouldn't be a problem (unless the labs have been lying) and this increases the probability of getting caught by, like, a factor of nine. Now back to part one: if there's a positive, you don't care who it is. You impose the time penalty on every rider on the team. The team doesn't get to fire a single rider and replace him to get rid of the problem. The clean riders on a team will put pressure on the dirty rider to straighten up his act or else they all will bear the penalty. Unlike now, the team management will have to take care not to send doping riders to races. You can get creative on how much of a time penalty, and where it will be assessed. The other teams won't complain as much -- they'll always complain but not so much -- because if the sporting violation is performance enhancement, the appropriate punishment is performance de-enhancement, i.e., a time penalty.

This solution aligns incentives so that teams will look to send clean riders to races -- but in addition, if there is a doping positive, there's already a structure in place to keep the sporting violation a sporting violation and not an auto da fe that hits the front page. Sponsors will appreciate that.

ok, maybe you are even smarter than I realized...

the 'collective pee' idea, while, well, unsettling....seems as though it would be a great idea

"The clean guys in the NFL "

There has to be a couple, right...?

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"one eye doubles my eyesight, so things don't look half bad" John Hiatt

Actually, I really like this idea!