Oier Lazkano Suspended

75 thoughts on “Oier Lazkano Suspended”

1. IR points out that the UCI will only take action in clear cut cases. That means all in the grey area – including very dark grey – will avoid censure. That must surely include some guilty riders. One must also assume that well-organised teams and riders pushing the boundaries escape sanction too. That’s frustrating but, as IR suggests, the UCI can do little more.

   Question: are discreet warnings ever given without formal action?

   • Grey areas will attract more scrutiny, hopefully leading to prosecution or exoneration.

   • Not that we’d hear of any warnings but this would be hard as the testing is outsourced to the ITU and the experts reading the data don’t see names on the sheets.

     If anything the contrary now, where I wrote “Far from alerting the rider in question, they are tested more”, this comes from a case of rider who complained along the lines of “if you suspected, why didn’t you come after me earlier?” but no early warning alert, but instead they built up a bigger collection of numbers.

     • I have a sneaky suspicion that either Lazkano did something incredibly stupid or there’s been an insider’s tip to the ITA. Therefore the grabbing his phone and computer quick by the authorities.

     • Also note that UCI as the governing body can do as it pleases in the internal process of preparing a claim against a rider/team. Sometimes they are able to act quickly given the facts, other times they require further support for their claim and it takes more time, as IR said. But once the claim is lodged, then all these rule procedures are activated and the rider is notified. I am unsure, however, if UCI has a legal privilege to its internal claim development, sounds like not as all that is discoverable in court/CAS.

       Good point IR that darn near every claim is ultimately upheld.
       Ironic that a sporting body has far better results than a criminal prosecutor.

       • Disturbing, I’d even say. But I’m personally fine with it, for now.
         Unless this is the beginning of a drop by drop series of cases about 2022-2024…
         -___-

2. Could this have an effect on the worldtour selection? I quickly found plenty of new points for Cofidis.

   • I did have a quick look but getting the 400 points wasn’t obvious at all, but if I was Cofidis work out every result and if it got the magic amount, write to the UCI to put them on notice.

     The verdict would have to fall quickly. Results stand to be redone but it’s not obvious, if a rider is done for the passport and results disqualified it can and has been from the first date of the anomaly but it could also be on and off during this period too.

3. Has any rider other than Sergio Henao been publicly named (I assume by the UCI?) for having biological passport irregularities, and then got off with it? I don’t remember any.
   And was the reason Henao was found to be not guilty ever made public, with the science backing this?

   You say, ‘the UCI has yet to lose a passport case in hearings or appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport’, I’m wondering how many cases they don’t go forward with so that they don’t lose.

   • I don’t think Henao was publicly named by the UCI, it didn’t get to the final step with them but instead the stage before where they ask him to account for things in private and at this stage he was pulled from racing.

     • Roman Kreuziger was cleared by the Czech governing body. The UCI and WADA appealed that decision but dropped their appeal a few months later, so he plainly produced enough new evidence that they felt they would have lost.

       • WADA/UCI may have felt that taking the case to CAS was expensive, and that there was a risk of losing the case. One of the problems with the system is that prosecuting is very expensive, bureaucratic and time-consuming. This is especially true when the defendant is determined and well-resourced.

         This is why often what seem absurd explanations are accepted in return for a minor punishment and “no fault” finding. And the courts seem to be asking for “proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt”, which is the level of certainty required for criminal cases. These are and should be a civil case which rests on “preponderance of evidence”.

         • Sport courts ask for proof beyond doubt *to the defendant*, who gets that legally absurd burden. Of course, that happens if there’s at least a fact to be proven or disproven, which isn’t the case with the biopassport which is fully probability-driven and which is accepted from the very beginning precisely because sport courts work with modest level of certainty, which is normally assumed as legally viable as the social consequences of their action are anachronistically considered as modest and limited, as if sport still was a private hobby of sort. Several times when brought to normal civil courts, cases simply don’t hold (not to speak of criminal courts). The barrier to appealing to civil courts nowadays is that your carrier is lost anyway, and – even worst – any further role in the sport, in case you put up that sort of fight. And money, of course.

         • No, the standard applied by CAS is “comfortable satisfaction”; they define this as being *between* ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and ‘on the balance of probabilities’. So it’s between the civil and criminal standards.

         • There’s another aspect to it – they backed out of pursuing the Kreuziger case because the bio passport is primarily of value as an intelligence tool to inform targeted testing (including re-testing of stored samples) and as a deterrent. Any ADRV findings secured directly from the passport are effectively a bonus.

           No single case is important enough that it is worth risking a CAS judgement which might rule parts or even the whole of the bio passport system to be illegal.

         • @Nick, I am speaking of sport courts, not specifically TAS (whose relative independence from EU laws is currently being challenged, by the way). You can find several examples of ordinary (civil justice) courts overthrowing sport veredicts because the criteria to be met for finding a person guilty are actually stricter. Celestino Fernández’ case is recent, some time back you have Heras I already named, further back one of Di Luca’s many issues saw him acquitted by ordinary justice, I believe.
           Schwazer’s most recent case, altough debated in a criminal court, is also interesting because of what the judge wrote in the sentence.

           Anyway, as in this latter case, personally I think it that the shades of gray between grades of often-not-really-measurable probabilities are such that at the end of the day other factors have actually the more relevant impact in the long term, namely money and politics.

           Guardiola’s nandro case was also a good example…or Sun Yang’s ^____^

           The CAS/TAS, uffff…

   • Henao was pulled by Sky in 2014 and 2016. In 2014 it was down to internal testing. In 2016 the CADF had got to the stage of asking Henao for explanations of his values as per the process, so still private at that stage. Sky decided to go public on Henao’s receipt of the letter from CADF and the UCI only commented publicly after that. The case did not proceed to a provisional UCI suspension.

     • Team Sky pledged that a research paper would be published in connection to Sergio Henao’s blood values, specifically that high altitude natives had different biological passport responses than other riders. That never happened. And why then have other high altitude natives not produced similar results. Similarly, Froome wasn’t banned for salbutamol while other riders were banned for the same results when they were tested. There are always different rules for the wealthy.

       • Henao may or may not be a bullshit story.

         But on your three assertions: Sky could not and did not pledge a research paper. They are not academic publishers; they don’t control peer review, etc. Brailsford stated an intention to publish. He may be guilty, and not for the first or the last time, of no more than opting for a short-term PR gain over a possible lasting, long-term detriment. There may well have been no intention ever to publish anything. Equally, the findings may not have been sufficiently robust to justify any publication of the results as academic research.

         How do you or anybody else know that other high altitude natives have not produced similar results? You don’t. We don’t. It is to the advantage of due process and the making of as watertight as possible any conviction under the procedure that biopassport cases are not public knowledge until provisional suspension. But that is to the disadvantage of public discussion of the who and the why and the how many cases were opened and dropped before reaching such a stage.

         Froome was not banned for salbutamol because the test was discredited and disowned by its creator. In similar circumstances, the collapse of cases due to discredited professional evidence can lead to the re-opening of past convictions on possible, and likely, grounds of a miscarriage of justice. Different rules for the wealthy or Petacchi and Ulissi potentially wrongly penalised?

         • Not quite the precise reconstruction it may look like at first sight, esp. the last paragraph.

4. Excellent explanation, thanks.

5. Nice explanation thanks, the e bike example was good I thought. I guess the concern is this is based on probabilities, ie there is an observation so improbable that it could not be through chance. But there are probabilities and probabilities. In my research I always like to see highly significant findings, that is where the probability of seeing results through chance are less than one in a thousand say. The more borderline this is, the less certain you can be. I’m sure there are very clever people analysing these data but I still just have this concern in the back of my head. But overall having said this the longitudinal nature of the data and the ability to see trends is a good improvement.

   • Yes, it is probability based. You can see cases where the conviction is achieved in part of because of assertions from the prosecution like the chance of a clean athlete returning off score values “is somewhere between one in a thousand and one in ten thousand”. With a World Tour/Pro Conti peloton of a thousand riders it’s not so improbable, although other factors are cited too.

     • Lies, damned lies and statistics!

6. WADA also has a passport system. Quite a few Kenyan runner’s plus others i am sure have been suspended in the past few years.
   So does the UCI use the wada programme or do cycling and other sports pay for and use there own system. Perhaps with the same rules or different. I would imagine some sports don’t really have the funding to run their own system. Even the UCI would struggle to run the system and pay for lawyers if the courts get involved too often.

   • It’s the same system, just administered now the the ITU which is an outside agency set up to do this. The UCI pays it, and funding from teams, organisers and riders (eg the prize money levy). The rules are the same and if ever the UCI struggled with it WADA would probably support them as a joint party in litigation to uphold the passport (unless the UCI did something obviously stupid etc, then WADA might take the opposite side again to uphold the system).

     • That would be the ITA (International Testing Agency) which was formed by the IOC and included the UCI buying in by merging CADF (Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation) into it.

       ITU is the triathlon federation and I certainly hope they don’t have anything to do with cycling governance.

7. I’m wondering whether we might see an increase in bio passport anomalies in the next year or so. More & more riders seem to be spending increased time at altitude and with the advent of extreme heat training perhaps blood profiles may become more ‘variable’. If these variations take a couple of years to be analysed, perhaps there are already riders who are effectively being watched.

   • Doesn’t that make it less likely? One of the reasons adduced for the explosion in altitude training camps for the vast majority of WT teams and riders is that they provide two major ways to game the biopassport should you feel the need to do so. Firstly by providing some explanation for variation in values and secondly by evading testing. It’s a few years ago now since it was stated that the testers had never been see on Teide, for example, and one hopes that has changed now. But do we know that it has? UCI and WADA provide numbers for how many tests they do every year but do they do it by location?

8. Kreuziger?

   • Gabriele has returned with a one-word comment???

     • 😉
       Witty observation!
       Reading from time to time, but not yet many options for writing. I was surprised that the Kreuziger case hadn’t been cited and just grabbed my occasion to point it out, as it didn’t need much delving into (by the way, meanwhile I’ve discovered that this latter verb I often used is now considered a hint of AI redaction O__o).

       • I believe one of the differences is that in the past, the local federation adjudicated the case; I think maybe Kreuziger’s case was dismissed by the local Czech federation. The UCI has changed that, where the UCI and the ITU adjudicate the case; it’s no longer left to the local federation.

         • Absolution by your national federation hadn’t previoysly prevented International authorities to go on looking for a sanction they often obtained in Switzerland even under circumstances of reasonable doubt (which makes perfect sense in this sort of court, of course, only it’s an even more… arbitrary and money-driven form of “justice” – which is how Heras got the Vuelta back through ordinary justice).

     • (And I rushed to read the Lazkano news as I had long been worried that his disappearing might have been a case of mental health issues, as suggested by many in Spain)

9. The statement that the UCI has never lost a biopassport case is not true.
   Kreuziger was provisionally suspended in August 2014 under the biopassport.
   He was cleared by the Czechs the following month and returned to racing.
   The UCI and WADA declared their intention to appeal the lifting of the suspension to CAS but withdrew the week before the scheduled hearing in June 2015.
   The case rested primarily on the effect of thyroid medication on the blood values measured by the biopassport and, if I remember correctly, also partly on whether or not the UCI/WADA thought Kreuziger was faking a thyroid condition in order to take that medication as a masking operation.

   • I saw that as more of a “draw” to use a sporting term than a loss with the UCI and WADA later walking away and changing the procedures so that an athlete’s home Olympic committee doesn’t get to have the final say. But perhaps it was a loss too, the UCI seemed wary of taking on Kreuziger, a millionaire, who had the support of Oleg Tinkov, a billionaire.

     • Well, a curious kind of draw when one side gets what he wants and the other retires however strategically? A draw should have been something like no sanction for Roman but he quietly leaves the sport, or for example a modest sanction with no practical effect like Sinner’s etc.

       • Kreuziger did serve a provisional suspension which was then lifted (provisional or otherwise, he didn’t get that time back) and the UCI/CADF got to walk away with the biological passport program’s undefeated record intact and no CAS decision calling into question and of its practices.

         I’d say that’s more like a 2-2 draw with a penalty shootout victory going to UCI/CADF.

         • That’s if you assume he was actually innocent, which is indeed the factual truth we’re left with, but hence I’d say it was rather a case of draw in the sense of everybody losing.

         • How is the biopassport regarded as undefeated when a national fed overturns a provisional suspension by the international governing body; an appeal against that decision is filed by said international governing body jointly with the top-of-the-tree international anti-doping authority at CAS and then withdrawn at the very last minute; and it becomes public knowledge that the increasingly commonly prescribed L-thyroxine drives a coach and horses through its algorithms?

         • It remains undefeated because they successfully took action to avoid getting a loss. It is still an objective fact that there are no anti-doping tribunal decisions or CAS decisions against CADF/ITA for bio passport cases.

           Not losing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a 100% winning record, as it also includes cases like Kreuziger’s which were a draw with neither side winning and neither side losing.

           What matters for the UCI and ITA in bio passport cases is preserving the operation of the biological passport program so it can continue to serve as a deterrent and an intelligence tool to inform targeted testing. The ability to directly secure sanctions is a secondary matter.There’s a very strong chance that any tribunal or CAS decision against the bio passport will include strong precedents limiting parts or even the whole of the program.

         • Thyroid medicine was closely monitored in the wake of this and users are required to inform testers if they’re taking related medicine (and if asked show the diagnosis, history etc) so Kreuziger’s case helped shut off or at least shrink the scope for grey area abuse here.

         • It’s an objective fact that the Czech Olympic Committee overturned the provisional suspension by the UCI saying that Kreuziger did not violate anti-doping rules. That’s an anti-doping tribunal decision, the UCI did not appeal that decision or avoid that loss.

           It does not have to be true that a loss to any anti-doping procedure in any individual case necessarily involves the non-preservation of the procedure.

           Kreuziger got a provisional suspension from the UCI which he appealed successfully with a statement that he did not violate anti-doping rules. You can say that’s not a win for him if you like; that the provisional suspenders got a draw out of it when they had every intention of going to CAS to overturn that successful appeal and withdrew at the last minute, if you like. But I think that’s a Humpty Dumpty use of language.

         • Two points. Calling out an athlete as a probable doper is always a liability for sport institutions, never an asset. So every single case starts as a necessary self-damage, then of course it can be turned into a benefit, but you start down by one serious point.
           Secondly, the biopassport lost under national Czech due process and institutions decided not to appeal making their defeat firm. It’s not like they stopped at an earlier phase.

10. It maybe worth stating that doping can not really be completely eliminated from professional sport. The aim of testing, in my view, is twofold. (i) ensure doping is confined to small proportion of the peloton, and is minor in its effect on performance. (ii) ensure that riders who do not dope can compete for, and win, the major prizes. Even if the bio-passport can not completely eliminate doping, I think it largely achieves the two outcomes highlighted here.

    • We have absolutely no idea how much or how little doping there is in cycling (or in any other sport). In the past, the dopers have always been ahead of the testers, in terms of knowledge, products, etc. Who knows if that is still the case – if the dopers were ahead, we would have no way of knowing, obviously.
      Also, in many sports – including cycling – there has, in the past, been collusion between the authorities running the sport and the dopers. This was done to protect the reputation – and thus profitability of the sport. This may still be going on: we have no idea.
      Those who think they know the extent of doping in sport – whichever side they fall on – are only deluding themselves.

      • Unless you believe the whole testing process is a shame, and there is a gigantic conspiracy led by the UCI which involves the whole peloton, then we know that the peloton can not dope in the same way and to the same extent they did in the “”doping era” between c.1990 and 2007. In that era it was more-or-less impossible to win the major races without doping. Even if there is doping in cycling now, it remains true that the benefits of doping are now much smaller and riders can compete for wins clean, which they could not do in the “doping era”. This view is overwhelmingly held by the riders and teams, and even someone like Bruyneel has publically stated it is his view (and he, at least, has no motivation for lying about the situation). This, I think, is a great achievement, and what the anti-doping controls have delivered.

        Of course, nobody can “know” there is zero doping in any sport, but this is a ridiculously high bar to set. And not one which can ever be achieved since there will always be some people who are tempted to dope. The aim of testing, instead, is to achieve the two objectives highlighted above.

        • John, I think your point is spot-on. When Major League Baseball was in its doping era, it was incredibly difficult for players to compete at the highest level without doping, so as we later learned most of the stars were doping in one form or another. Now, it is likely that some players are still doping, but it is not a widespread issue that distorts the sport. And every once in a while, people still get caught. If cycling (and other endurance sports) can have that level of impact on the expectations of the athletes and the public, then the system is working. But I would never expect to catch 100% of the cheats.

        • All that you state is opinions, whether by others (who happened to express them exactly in the same way at the time of generalised doping) or by yourself. Nothing wrong with that, but you didn’t get the point by J Evan, who, I believe, wasn’t defending that you can’t be sure about “zero doping”… rather that you can’t be realistically sure about *any current* “doping level” you decide to conjecture about, whether you feel it’s mild or ramping.
          I don’t share that view 100% but it’s a very solid point.
          (I agree with him you can’t have a global picture of how much people are doping in absolute terms, but we definitely have hints of some teams and athletes “enjoying” some differential plus towards the rest – all very subject to personal impression and normally not worth much mullin’ about unless donkeys start to fly or the same people sit on the same top pharmapolitical spot for more than 3-4 years in a row with no proper turnover, which might very soon be the case, but still isn’t and hasn’t been for some 4-5 seasons now).

          • I am afraid I disagree with the point. My statement is that either you believe the testing process is a sham and the peloton are all part of the conspiracy; or you believe the testing process is not a sham, and it has ensured the kind of widespread doping we saw in the past can not longer occur (and cycling has a very extensive testing programme unlike many other sports). People are free, of course, to believe in the conspiracy.

            And the key statement remains: the aim is not to eliminate all doping, but to ensure it doesn’t seriously distort the sporting contest (as stated by Craig).

          • John, there are possibilities other than the two you suggest.
            For example, one can believe that it is possible – only possible – that some riders/doctors/etc. have knowledge/products that are beyond the capabilities of the testers. That does not mean that one believes that ‘the testing process is a sham and the peloton are all part of the conspiracy’.
            Also, “blood doping”, for instance, is very hard to detect, especially if done when not racing and in small amounts.

11. I guess the good news for him is that it’s ‘improbable natural causes’ and not ‘suffering from a serious illness’.

    “Sir, your results have returned an anomaly.”
    “Oh God, how long do I have?”
    “Our results are indicative of doping.”
    “Oh, thank God for that!”

12. Wouldn’t Bora have been informed of this at the same time as Lazkano, or is the rider put on notice first without their team being informed? It’s odd that Lazkano could “self-suspend” while under contract, and not injured. There were any number of races throughout the year where he would have been a valuable team member or even in contention to win. The fact that he didn’t race at all would seem to suggest a decision coming from Red Bull management rather than the rider himself.

    • The rider is told but not the team. El Pais’s Carlos Arribas has pieced together some more with Lazkano attending Red Bull’s training camp for the Dauphiné/Tour but that was his last time with the team, as well as other details like having his phone and computer seized (see here).

      • Thanks for the clarification. It does seem like there is still a lot we don’t know about what was happening behind the scenes, especially from Red Bull’s perspective (which is understandable). I see today that Lazkano has finally made a public statement professing his innocence (much as you’d expect him to, so no surprise there). If there is a silver lining to all of this, it is that yet again we’re seeing what appears to be an individual rider acting alone who has tried to use some performance enhancing techniques. If the biological passport has succeeded in eliminating the team sponsored doping that was rife in the peloton, and what we’re left with is a few individuals doping, I would say that the system has been a success. No sport will ever be totally clean, but I have a lot more confidence in what I’m watching now than I did back in the 90s.

        • Movistar, the team he was on for the three years in question, aren’t getting much of a mention here, are they?

          • If Jorgenson is to be believed Movistar take a pretty hands off approach to the coaching and preparation of their riders. So in this instance their claim to know nothing about it might be believable.

          • There’s not much to mention if we stick to the case and what we know.

            Lazkano was trained by Leonardo Piepoli who is not noted for his contribution to sports science. Carlos Arribas is asking questions about the entourage from Caja Rural so something to keep an eye on (given Roson was another passport case) but now we’re getting ahead of things.

        • RV, you say, ‘yet again we’re seeing what appears to be an individual rider acting alone’, but there is very likely to be a medical professional involved, providing him with knowledge (at the very least), as well as someone to provide the actual products.
          Yet again, we’re being told that this is an individual rider acting alone. But we have no idea who is involved.

        • Team sponsored doping, the last case of which lasted years, under the bio-passport of course. And in whose case no broader sport investigation has been seriously open, despite the findings and sanctions from institutions external to the sport itself.
          On a wholly separate level, operation Aderlass anyone?
          As Arribas writes, first things a new rider is asked in order to sign a new contract is his personal password to his training logs with full disclosed data… and to the Adams system. If a rider is being targeted across some seasons, hard to defend that a team isn’t really aware, whether he gets finally called out or not. Apparently, not much worrying about or not so many special tests.
          On this, does anybody remember some athletes wondering about a reduced number of tests? Just don’t test too much (not every test is a blood test), so the database on an athlete is generally weak. Easy to see how the biopassport might easily become a biased tool.

          By the way, any opinion here on the Bahrein situation, and individual misdeeds, and the biopassport?

          But, whatever, I prefer this system, only it’s a long shot to say that it grants a cleanish sport. I’d wish so, but can’t believe it again the mere story of the last decade or so. I hope it keeps things a little tighter, but I don’t believe that too strongly, either. Yet, I hope so, indeed.

          • *believe it AGAINST

13. There was a Spanish newspaper column in September this year that claimed from anti-doping sources that the well known Dr Ferrari was back in pro-cycling. Plus ça change!

    • Ferrari is 72, surely his methods are old hat and outdated now? It would be like going to your grandad for advice about chatting up girls.

      • LOL got the point but still worthwhile to get granddads’ take…

      • Doping with autologous blood transfusions goes back to at least the early 80s. Did that make the technique “outdated” when Ferrari used it decades later on his athletes – Armstrong notably – in the mid 00’s?

        Some things we keep using for a long time cause they just work well.

    • It’s a bit like the economist who has predicted seven of the last four recessions though.

14. The ABP is, IMO, the modern version of the 50% “haematocrit” rule: it stops egregious and naive doping, but its “rails” are easy to stay within with a little bit of medical support.

    I write this as someone who took part in a WADA funded blood doping and spent time with the post-doc researchers conducting the study (PI was a fairly prominent sports physiology professor). That study was for EPO micro-dosing, and trying to find a way /other/ than blood values to detect such doping. The need for such studies basically implied that ABP was not much of a barrier. Which was backed up from my reading between the lines of my conversations with the researchers. Blood values can vary massively from day to day, week to week. As I could see in my own values (which I got at the end of the study). Just drinking or peeing has significant and hard to control for effects. The noise in these values is significant.

    • Oh, worth noting that one of the methods to control for that ‘noise’ in blood values is to use the carbon-monoxide (CO) rebreathing protocol. It’s likely infeasible to conduct that in or soon before competition though, as it has a multi-day negative effect on aerobic capacity immediately after.

      Also, I’m fairly sure there are far fewer authorised “Blood Collection Officers” than there are ordinary “Doping Control Officers” who travel to get the OOC urine samples. Do we know how often WT riders get blood samples taken? Any indications anywhere?

      • Using the CO rebreathing protocol as a method “to control for that ‘noise’ in blood values” sounds intriguing, but how exactly?

        If it doesn´t require an impossibly long explanation, I´m sure others, too, would appreciate if you could explain it in plain English.

        • It’s can just be a more reliable measure of haemaglobin. If you do a blood test where the sample is taken from a patient who is standing/sitting/lying down the result can often vary, likewise with dehydration.

15. This is of course the tip of the iceberg. The media and authorities have kept silent over the last few years and did not question one single performance despite the fact, that the level absolutely sky-rocketed since at least 2020. They want us to believe that it is all down to nutrition and equipment as if we had no idea about science 5 years ago and the riders were riding on 10 kg bikes. Furthermore Movistar added to their setup at the end of 2021 PIepoli and Ibargurem, both notorious figures in the sport, implicated in several doping cases and investigations. Both were part of the Saunier Duval team in the 2000s, together with Matxin and Gianetti. Now these two are the masterminds behind the UAE success and everybody wants us to believe, that this team is as clean as a whistle. Sorry, but anyone who believes that, is either naive or a complete moron. The sport hasn’t cleaned up one iota, the same notorious figures are involved behind the scenes and the authorities have zero interest to clean it up. You just have to watch the document of German doping investigator Hajo Seppelt from this year (where he uncovered the connection od David Rozman (Team Sky/Ineos), former accomplice of Mark Schmidt, to Operation Aderlass) Once a while a rider from the third or second page is caught, but the big fish never will, because that would be a complete disaster for the whole industry. Unless an insider like Landis, who has nothing more to lose, starts to speak, nothing will change.

    • I suppose its an interesting comparison between Armstrong and our current crop. Armstrong appeared post cancer with spectacular performances and was known to be coached by Ferrari. That was sufficient for him to be suspected of doping and for certain journalists to make it effectively their life’s work to out him. That Armstrong went around delighting in making enemies might have contributed to the determination people had to out him. It could be argued that certain riders are putting in performances substantially more spectacular than anything Armstrong achieved, certainly across a season. And those riders are associated with individuals who are just as notorious in their own way as Ferrari was, if not necessarily as openly brazen about it. Nobody that we are aware of seems particularly concerned about it though to the extent that they want to investigate it. Maybe there are reasons for this that are all above board, but its still an interesting comparison.

      • Armstrong would have never been caught had he not returned in 2009 and pissed Landis off when turning him down. It caused a spirale of events that ultimately ended in his downfall. It was in nobody’s interest, not in UCI’s, the sponsors or the industry. The sport was on the verge of collaps and nobody wants this to happen again. As you said nobody seems to be concerned because at the end of the day, nobody wants to endanger his own career or job. By speaking up only by raising concerns you risk ostracism or in the worst case a lawsuit, hence everybody just goes along, and that includes journalists or podcasters (even Lance himself). What astonished me though is that 10 years ago Froome faced scrutiny although by comparison his performances were nothing to what happens nowadays. Now Pogacar has a peak from February to October, wins across all terrains by absolutely smashing the competition, UAE wins 100 races a year, has people on board with a rotten past and bar a few mostly anonymous accounts on the internet there are no questions asked whatsoever. We are being told that this a result of improvement in equipment and nutrition although even Ferrari once wrote on his blog that Savoldelli won the Giro thanks to consuming 100 g of carbs per hour. And that was back in 2005!

        • Classic conspiracy thinking: lots of people in on the act, only a handful of anonymous people will speak out while everyone else is fooled. Same with the moon landings, alien abductions etc.

          During Armstrong’s time many people spoke out, there were books published, newspaper front pages and much more, long before he was taken down by USADA. There were others who made a good living out of telling plenty of people what they wanted to believe too.

          As we’ve got to the “trial of Pogačar by blog comments” I’ll turn the comments off again because, as ever, it’s the same arguments rather than anything original.

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