Speardog wrote: "As to a couple of other reactions in this thread. One is the claim that you have to prove the team knew about the doping. I disagree. The WADA tests the athlete, if he’s positive, then the team and the athlete are punished. If everyone agrees to that upfront, then that’s it. The key here is that it changes the risk / reward situation with respect to the team. Now the team has an incentive to have clean riders.
The other comment was about the acceptability of convicting innocent parties. It may actually work out, that in this arrangement, that the burden of proof placed on the WADA could be very high. They might not get as many convictions on doping, but everyone could be very confident with the ones they do get, and the punishments would be farther reaching.
Again the key here is to change the risk / reward environment is such a way as to enlist the assistance of teams and teammates in controlling doping."
Two key points that eloquantly ecapsulated what I was trying to say: Risk-Reward Scenario Creating a worldwide army of anti doping policemen
Risk-Reward: Today the riders are like meat…only as good as their last race. If they lose they are no more use to a team than a guy who gets tossed for doping. So there are high rewards to be gained by doping and for the teams ZERO risk. The riders have a higher risk, but their their option is to ride in anonymity, as tier 2 domestiques, with miniscule contracts and eventually fade back to laying bricks in Flanders, or working in a cube farm at a call centre in Memphis. The teams need to have the risk factor jacked up big time so that they earnestly stop doping in its tracks long before a positive drug test.
Army of Anti Dope Policemen: If you threaten to ban the teams, then all team members, coaches, doctors and management have an incentive to nail their own riders before WADA even does a drug test. This alone raises the overall level of “cleanliness” of the peleton likely by several orders of magnitude. A guy can’t dope in isolation. There are doctors, agents, possibly teammates, coaches and management that are part of the picture…either actively or passively. The moment you threaten to fine or ban teams/management, suddenly, all those who are implicit in the doping culture flip the other way and go to WADA’s side and become anti doping policemen. Right now, the only ones fighting the fight are WADA and some outspoken athletes like Beckie Scott (wrong sport…XC skiing, but there are few like her so loud and vocal in cycling). If this makes the peleton cleaner, than riders might actually believe there is a chance to win sans dope and suddenly you have virtuous cycle with riders/teams policing themselves and more importantly riders believing they can win naturally!
Personally, I think Phonak’s team management should be nailed. First the Tyler Hamilton-Santiago Perez fiasco (did they get each other’s blood…) and now the Floyd fiasco.
The Tour de France is too big a prize to have tainted in this manner. Personally I hope that Floyd is clean. My 10 year old son asks about the latest on Floyd every day. We sat and watched that incredible stage 17. I told my son that it was the perfect example of working hard, fighting like a dog and never giving up. I left out the part of racing from the heart, which to me implies racing to the letter of the rules. Now we have to wait and see. That’s just 1 ten year old. To him, Floyd is still a hero, but that illusion is slipping. There are millions of kids in Europe and thousands of kids in North America who have had the illusion of a champion go up in smoke.