More PR driven guff from UCI

iainf72

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/uci-sup ... uspensions

PR 1 : Desire to actually do something about doping 0

Good old UCI.

RichN95.

So you oppose four year bans then? Personally I'm all for them. As old Pat says, it makes it harder for dopers to come back.

Not everything Uncle Pat says is wrong.

london-red

Life ban with room for appeal. Bosh.

LJAR

I think they also need to be retrospective. With lesser penalties for those who admit rather than get caught.

We need to be stripping people who have doped of all their past palmares I think. (even then I still think people would do it)

symo

UCI needs to invest in a decent blood scrrening system and get rid of the 50% haemocrit which is allowing microdosing to continue. They need to buy a proper storage facility for samples to allow proper full spectrum retrospective testing. Also talking to manufacturers of rEPO and CERA to allow proper analysis looking for tell tale markers.

By making it known that your samples can be tested in the future long after you leave the sport and will be stripped of rewards and results would be a far more positive commitment to the sport.

Of course that might affect donations from texas but still....................

Kléber

I actually don't support a four year ban for first time offences. Two years is a long time.

Bear with me a minute but there are studies from the US looking at the death penalty. Forget a four year ban, the electric chair is surely the ultimate deterrent? Only murder rates are high in the US. Some analysis of this shows the death penalty works only when detection rates are high, ie the culprit is caught, and only when the time spent on death row is relatively short. To summarise, the mere threat of execution doesn't deter many criminals, but the threat of being caught, tried and killed does.

Back to cycling and the main problem isn't riders thinking "hey, I'll only cop two years", it's riders thinking "I won't get caught". But by bringing in four year bans the risk is that the few riders who are caught by the ban start epic legal battles and cost the UCI loads.

The UCI right now needs to think about the following:
- treat the Landis affair more seriously. If - big if - it does take down some of the big names then the UCI can't be seen on the wrong side of the argument.
- what's going on with Pellezotti? We had a fanfare, now the Italian and his lawyers are picking away at the bio passport.
- holding the Spanish federation to account
- whether the UCI should be the sport's showman and its sheriff at the same time
- applying its rules evenly, there's talk some riders can come back after a ban but others are blacklisted. An unofficial life ban, whilst satisfying some, is not the way to go.

iainf72

Kléber wrote:

- what's going on with Pellezotti? We had a fanfare, now the Italian and his lawyers are picking away at the bio passport.

I agree with your other points. On Franco, I believe he claims to have asked for some data from the UCI which they have no provided and was threatening to take them to court over it.

Franco is using FUD tactics though so who knows. But it's the UCI so I'd not be surprised.

flattythehurdler

symo wrote:

UCI needs to invest in a decent blood scrrening system and get rid of the 50% haemocrit which is allowing microdosing to continue. They need to buy a proper storage facility for samples to allow proper full spectrum retrospective testing. Also talking to manufacturers of rEPO and CERA to allow proper analysis looking for tell tale markers.

By making it known that your samples can be tested in the future long after you leave the sport and will be stripped of rewards and results would be a far more positive commitment to the sport.

Of course that might affect donations from texas but still....................

And why would the manufacturers kibosh the greater part of the market?

Kléber

One more point to add: the UCI needs to make a PDF of the Sysmex receipt available. Nobody's seen it yet...

andyp

I thought Pierre had a copy?

RichN95.

flattythehurdler wrote:

symo wrote:

UCI needs to invest in a decent blood scrrening system and get rid of the 50% haemocrit which is allowing microdosing to continue. They need to buy a proper storage facility for samples to allow proper full spectrum retrospective testing. Also talking to manufacturers of rEPO and CERA to allow proper analysis looking for tell tale markers.

By making it known that your samples can be tested in the future long after you leave the sport and will be stripped of rewards and results would be a far more positive commitment to the sport.

Of course that might affect donations from texas but still....................

And why would the manufacturers kibosh the greater part of the market?

Annual sales of EPO and the like is over $10 billion dollars a year, with sales direct to the medical industry. Sportsmen aren't really a factor in their sales figures.

Kléber

I've mentioned it before but in the mid-90s a staggering proportion of Johnson & Johnson's EPO sales were in Italy, the consumption levels were massively out of line with every other country. At the same time, clinics and hospitals were being raided by gangsters, not for the morphine or expensive medical equipment but for recombinant EPO.

Whilst doping use is probably not the big driver of sales, it was for a time a big component part. Now a lot of the produce seems to be made in copycat labs in less developed countries.

LangerDan

Kléber wrote:

I've mentioned it before but in the mid-90s a staggering proportion of Johnson & Johnson's EPO sales were in Italy, the consumption levels were massively out of line with every other country. At the same time, clinics and hospitals were being raided by gangsters, not for the morphine or expensive medical equipment but for recombinant EPO.

Whilst doping use is probably not the big driver of sales, it was for a time a big component part. Now a lot of the produce seems to be made in copycat labs in less developed countries.

Not really true - a few years ago, we were looking at the current and anticipated market demands for EPO for one of the manufacturers. For comparison, I looked at the supposed regime for doping and calcualted that even if there were 300,000 athletes worldwide using the stuff for 3 cycles per year, it still only amounted to little over 1% of the market. Large enough to make it worth stealing, but not significant enough to warrant it as a business developement basis for J&J or Amgen.

Bear in mind that in the larger manufacturing facilities, the high-speed filling lines will produce anything up to 500 or 600 vials or syringes per minute. For 8 or 10 hours per day. And most facilities will have at least two lines. Thats a lot of EPO.