moneydog59 wrote:
Indeed I saw it, I took it as a "tongue in cheek" type comment, my bad. The vitriol with which some sanctioned dopers are treated here with sometimes astounds me, while this swim, bike and running pharmacy store of a human being doesn't seem to catch as much flak. I am surprised, that's all.
I THINK Vino kinda gets off the hook because when he was busted, he just "sat out" made no apologies, made no fake "I never did it"...he just shut up and dissappeared for 2 years served his time. He comes back, probably doped to the gills and even takes the London Olympics gold, but he likely treated doping like 70.3 pro treat the draft pack at 70.3 World's riding on the edge of being busted to get to T2 with the least energy usage. . From his Khazak context he played within the informal "rules of engagement" of pro cycling just like greyline drafting 70.3 pros do. I THINK for him the way the system works is he is supposed to dope to the point of not getting caught, and he does not really even hide it. It's almost a "come and catch me" type of bank robber approach to robbing the bank. The diff between Vino and the rest is that he's not trying to claim he is a choir boy. He's basically saying he's there to rob the bank (steal the London Gold from under Queen Elizabeth's nose) and he's gonna do the max dope program that all the other guys will do and if you want to bust him then bust him in the mean time, he's doing it all.
I don't think we can understand his thinking with our western middle class white collar mind set. He's coming from a different hard nose Russian-Khazakh mind set where winning at whatever cost with whatever you can get away with is the RIGHT way to engage.
To some degree I respect (if we can call it that) Vino more than Brailsford and his crew. I don't really care that he's racing age group...I do care that IM Copenhagen used him in their marketing. I think that is over the top given how IM used Lance for their marketing until it all blew up.