sometimes i’m a little slow on the uptake. me, i’m the least litigious guy in the world. once i and another fellow racked up $25k in legal fees for a bill he owed me that amounted to less than a tenth of that amount. we each had our points of honor. that’s the extent of my litigating.
but one always has an eye out for the lawsuit that might be coming down the tracks. as you say, it’s like that guy who sued for $65 million because the dry cleaners misplaced his pants (i sure hope that guy gets taken to the cleaners).
No worries
I am with you. I guess that is the price we pay for living in a “free world” where legal insurance can be as important as Life.
And I am well aware about the fact that cyclists have to make a (sometimes difficult) living riding their bikes.
I have a hard time understanding why they are not protecting their interest better by taking influence on their governing body.
Filing lawsuits will do nothing in that regard. UCI, IOC are well “fleeced”, and riders would have to pay that out of their own pocket.
I stand by my statement:
Filing suit would be a losing proposition for the athletes. Even if it might provide instant relieve…
“During last weeks AIGCP meeting, representatives voted unanimously that any of the teams who have not respected the Code of Ethics would not be allowed to race in the Tour de France.”
“They’ll sign. And then they’ll dope, because cyclists have been doping at the Tour de France since the earliest days of the race, when it was common to carry a separate valise loaded with one’s personal narcotics. It was even permissible to discuss drug use with the press, until someone figured out that it wasn’t such a good idea.”
I’m starting to think that the tour should be two different competitions. One would be a bike race, and the other would be between WADA and the cyclists doctors and trainers. Here is how it would work. The Bike race would be 21 stages over 23 days. The other competition would be that WADA sets parameters for the amounts of foreign substances in blood and urine, and the cyclists do whatever they can to be fast as possible while staying within those parameters. If a cyclist is found to have a test which shows amounts of substances outside of those parameters, they get a suspension of… oh… lets say 2 years. Here is where it gets fun. WADA will develop ever more stringent and effective tests, while the doctors and trainers will develop ever more sophisticated ways to get faster. If an athlete fails a test he is a doper. If he doesn’t, he is clean (and he would be clean based on the parameters set forth by WADA).
Sometimes it seems that trying to clean up cycling has become moralistic and somewhat arbitrary. Let me explain. They are somewhat interrelated, but first the arbitrary part. Optygen is the official supplement of the Discovery team. It even has their logo and endorsement on the cap. On their website they advertise it like this “Optygen is a revolutionary endurance formula that’s designed to help you optimize performance, maximize oxygen utilization and achieve greatness. The patent-pending, legal, safe and stimulant-free Optygen formula is based on human clinical trials and the latest scientific research on increasing endurance”. Basically, they advertise it as legal dope. They used science to create a (legal) substance to make you faster. So what, right? Still, there is an arbitrary quality as to what is legal or illegal. Obviously, drugs that are clearly harmful, like the amphetamines that contributed to Tommy Simpsons death, should be illegal. Other than that it seems a bit arbitrary to decide that one substance is legal and the other not, or that one substance you can use with a note from your doctor while another is never OK (which is why half the peleton is athsmatic). Now about the moralistic part. There seems to be an idea that we need to stamp out doping to keep the sport “pure”, and some will accuse an athlete of violating “the spirit” of the rules or spread unsubstantiated rumor about an athlete, even if there has been no positive test. I listen to someone like Dick Pound, and I think he is on a witch hunt. Why the moralistic fever? What exactly makes for purity in sport. We have a group of people who use every bit of science and technology in the realms of nutrition, training, equipment, supplementation and psychology. They use this knowledge, and an army of experts and support staff, with the sole aim of making themselves faster. Somewhere in there is a line. Is that line clear? (this is a serious question) Can someone tell me where the line is between supplement and PED (aside from an arbitrary decision by WADA), or between purity in sport and cheating when no test was failed? I honestly think cycling would benefit from taking the attitude that a rider is clean unless he fails a test, otherwise there will NEVER be an end to the whispered innuendo which has become so commonplace.
“During last weeks AIGCP meeting, representatives voted unanimously that any of the teams who have not respected the Code of Ethics would not be allowed to race in the Tour de France.”
