Are the police the most effective anti-doping organization out there?

[Mrs John Murphy]

Other people have said Ballan. I don't know. I thought it might have been DDL as he is much more exciting and a 'real' champion.

Needless to say, it took the police 2 hours to break this rider.

Millar turned from a hard man with a big mouth to crying like a baby when he spent the night in the cells.

Didn't Virenque also burst into tears as well.

Guys who are brazen dopers when it is just the UCI threatening them. Put them in a cell and all that bravado soon wears off.

 

[Merckx index]

I don’t think there’s much question that law enforcement agencies can catch more dopers. But I worry a little about the appropriateness of bringing them in. Let’s remember that PEDs are frequently substances that are legal, or at least not criminal, when taken out of the context of professional sports. They are a problem in sports because of specific rules banning them, but they aren’t necessarily a problem when taken by non-athletes. Should the police be called in to enforce the rules of some organization that governs only a few hundred or a few thousand individuals? Is that an appropriate demand on their time and resources?

I can understand when it involves drugs that society has made illegal or at least restricted, and these are imported from other countries. But what about, for example, blood transfusions, which remain the most serious form of doping in pro cycling? Should the police be spending their time trying to find stored blood bags? What about EPO, which is legal when taken with a prescription? One might argue that use of a drug without a prescription is a serious offense, and law enforcement should be pursuing trade in such drugs. But then what about Viagra, for example, which has serious side effects in some men, and should not be taken by certain individuals? It’s supposed to be a prescription drug, but anyone can obtain it on the internet. Do we want the police cracking down on that?

At the least, if the police are called in, I think it should be because society has very legitimate concerns that a particular drug is being used by large numbers of non-athletes, and that it may have detrimental effects—resulting in costs that ultimately will have to be born by society. I don’t think law enforcement should be called in just because sporting bodies have proven unable or unwilling to police themselves.

 

[Mrs John Murphy]

While that maybe true - that PEDS are small-fry, the networks that supply the athletes are often criminal. I think it's time to move beyond the idea that doping is just a rider and his DS shooting up some EPO, or t-patches and look at it more deeply and in a broader context.

There is also the health issue - if someone were selling 'expired meat' etc this would be treated as a criminal act because someone is profiting from doing something which risks others health.

There is also the tax issue as well. Just as we don't like bankers etc not paying tax, so the same goes for doctors like Ferrari.

My point is that without involving the police, the only things that will happen is for a few stupid users will get caught ie Ricco, and not the suppliers, not the enablers and the networks will go untouched.

 

[L'arriviste]

Other people have said Ballan. I don't know. I thought it might have been DDL as he is much more exciting and a 'real' champion.

Needless to say, it took the police 2 hours to break this rider.

Millar turned from a hard man with a big mouth to crying like a baby when he spent the night in the cells.

Didn't Virenque also burst into tears as well.

Guys who are brazen dopers when it is just the UCI threatening them. Put them in a cell and all that bravado soon wears off.

Ah right, I think that was when we were indulging in conjecture on another thread. I myself went for Cunego

It's true anyway that individuals do end up folding quickly before the police. I'm assuming that the police explain that the evidence against them is incontrovertible - videos and transcripts, for example (though Millar thought "they had nothing on me") - or else that the riders have inadequate legal advice (seems unlikely).

If you spend your time in the bridewell weighing up your prospects, the worst you're going to get if you sing is two years off the bike. Might as well 'fess up to the police because if you've got the right connections you can just sit it out.

My research (which is all just based on press accounts and sometimes judgments if I'm lucky enough to find them) into who the police tend to bring in has acquainted me with a new trend I'd never noticed before and that I haven't yet had time to fully substantiate. It's a sort of zombie rider. A 'lowly domestique' who might not otherwise have got a pro contract but for the fact that he seems to have facilitated team activities in other ways, acting for example as a courier by making frequent "home visits". I wondered if anyone else had noted this kind of thing?

 

[Cloxxki]

I passed through the main Moldovan-Transnistrian border crossing twice last year. Although surely one could smuggle stuff through there, is was still the most stringent customs operation I've witnessed, apart from x-ray machines at airports. And there are so many more crossings before you reach Russia or Western Europe...

I wonder, there are so many meth labs. Why couldn't those folks make some good hardcore designer drugs? How hard can it be, if you have dollar signs in your eyes, and a good biochemistry study under the belt?
Just hypothetically, how hard would it be for a small team of driven scientists/athletes, to make their own HemAssist, or anything else hard to obtain, but proven to work? All protecting the world from such operations, is the patent office. As long as your chimney doesn't exhaust pot fumes, who's going to care?

 

[Mrs John Murphy]

Yes, it's improved a lot, but you can still cross the border fairly easily, the same with the Ukrainian border.

And you will surely recognise with the recent scandal involving Romanian customs officials that bribery is very very common. So it is still very easy to get things across the border if necessary.

 

[Oldman]

So generally it's recognized that borders are porous and old, hard line Soviet era operatives probably have control over smuggling franchises. That doesn't make me sleep any better about the E I get at the club.

 

[Mrs John Murphy]

Yes. The problem is that a lot of the networks pre-date the fall of communism. For example pre-1989 there was a lot of smuggling into Romania, especially from Serbia. After 1989, and during the blockade of Serbia the pattern was reversed.

Former Romanian President Iliescu was implicated in petrol smuggling to Serbia and he certainly turned a blind eye to it. A lot of the Romanian economic elite made their money via smuggling. ie Becali's infamous line about 'don't ask me where I got my first million from'.

The point is that again we have local networks of people smuggling any and everything across the borders, which feed up into larger criminal-economic-political networks.

It wasn't for no reason that Romania and Bulgaria were described as 'feral states' by the EU.