Contador loses Tour de France title as court overturns drug acquittal
http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/06/sport/cycling-contador-cas-ban/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
I don’t normally report on doping here, though I have an interest in it and follow the cycling doping blog Rant Your Head Off (even have a post there), but the article above prompted me to write something here. I have not been a fan of Contador, he always seemed a bit too sure of himself (though I have been a fan of Armstrong who is at least as full of himself as Contador is) and really didn’t like him taking off after Andy Schleck’s chain came off during the Tour in question (as I recall, the final margin on that Tour was almost exactly the same as the margin for that stage, meaning they might have tied if it hasn’t been for that issue), but that is besides the point. He is a great competitor and even if he dopes, I strongly suspect that all that does is bring him on par with his competitors. (BTW, if you read the post I allude to above, you will see that I am convinced the vast majority of the enhancement of so-called performance enhancing drugs is due to the placebo effect.) My objection is the laughably inconsistent attempt to look for dopers, then draconian punishment for people testing positive. So, Contador loses his previous win at the Tour (and his subsequent win at the Giro (if these names don’t ring any bells, then you clearly aren’t into professional cycling and should have already moved on to something else ;-)), but isn’t banned from competing in the future. Meaning, his punishment is ‘retroactive’, yet as I recall he was competing (and winning on occasion) while he was now retroactively banned, which seems rather nonsensical. It is well established that competitors need to compete in order to maintain their edge, so while Contador is indeed suffering (financially as well as personally, losing a Tour after you won it can effect people deeply (see Michael Rasmussen, though he didn’t actually win it, he likely would have)), he has had the benefit of being in competition at the highest level, unlike most people who are banned and must somehow try to motivate themselves for two years to train at the highest level. So, at the end of all this stupid crap, Contador isn’t actually being banned at all. 100% failure from all angles on this one!
Of course, the supposed positive drug test is also nonsensical on the surface, the amount detected was so low as to be irrelevant, but the whole drug testing regime is nonsensical (to be polite; I already use too many blue words here) anyway. What makes the whole thing stick in my craw is how ridiculously erratic the whole process is. I didn’t watch the Tour after Landis was called out (yes, he admitted doping, but I read the science very closely and he certainly wasn’t guilty of what he was charged with, making mockery of the process) and it took me a while to get joy from watching again, now this crap. I wanted to see how Schleck would stack up to a focused Contador (in the last Tour, Contador was trying to win too many grand tours in one year and thus wasn’t peaking for the Tour) and see if Evans could hold them both off, now that won’t happen. Maybe by the time the Tour rolls around I will be past this, but if it were on now I doubt I would tune in.
Much like the TSA, the anti-doping efforts are all about window dressing!
