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Armstrong Under Criminal Investigation

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Mar 18, 2009
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Given the extreme brutality of NFL football, the endemic head injuries, the ease with which a career can end with just one tackle, the steady battering by 300+ lbs monsters which is a given in the sport, the lining up and pi$$ing blood after games (a friend of my father's who was a doc for Green Bay at one point described this to me), I think most NFL fans just assume that PEDs are a necessary part of every players' lives and really don't care at all about the issue. I mean, if NFL fans and coaches really cared about the players' health, they'd try to make the helmets actually protect the head--or really, if they cared about their health, they'd tell them to stop playing football.
 
Feb 13, 2013
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NFL has notorious bad behavior - Ray Lewis, Vick, etc. The NFL audience enjoy cheering on a gangster!!
QUOTE=DirtyWorks;1138462]I think because the NFL has a *much* bigger audience, any bit of doping controversy in the NFL is seen by many more people. Are many in that gigantic audience outraged? I don't think so. I think if they were, the anti-doping enforcement process would exist outside the sports league.

The NFL behaves in a stimulus-response manner just like the UCI. If an athlete health story gets out of control, they make a little change.[/QUOTE]
 
Jun 16, 2012
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gjdavis60 said:
Just my opinion, and sorry to go so OT ... the NFL understands its mission, its business, and its market, and its actions are consistent with that understanding. It protects its brand and the interests of its stakeholders. It provides a product of high quality that perennially satisfies its customers and attracts sponsors consistent with the image it wants to cultivate around the sport.

The UCI is managed incompetently at almost all levels and would not even be in business were it not for the cozy little monopoly it's managed to carve out in pro cycling. It holds the entire sport - riders, sponsors, organizers, and fans - hostage to its intransigence, corruption, greed, and astonishingly poor judgement. There could be no Lance Armstrong without the complicity of the UCI.

Correct - There really is no comparison. One could credibly try to start an entirely new break away pro cycling league for less than the contract value of most starting NFL quarterbacks. Talented managers and marketers flow to the money.
 
DirtyWorks said:
The way I read the story at Velonation, they confused the APMU and testing and mixed the term software into the confusion. I think the UCI likes the story that confusing though.

According to WADA documentation, the UCI tells the lab which samples to test. Those tests generate a bunch of documentation. That documentation is passed to the APMU. The APMU has some software to track all of this stuff. The APMU passes suspicious values and lab documentation off to experts.

The UCI's claim is the APMU was not managed by the UCI, so it would be the lab providing the APMU service on top of their testing service. This changed in 2012. Now the sports federation is the APMU. That's a wonderful opportunity to suppress positives.



As I understand the WADA documentation, the non-suspicious test results means the APMU does not pass on the results to an expert. Why would they? Passing results to an expert generates meaningful costs. The anti-doping experts are not working for free.


No. Statistics is pretty good at establishing good-enough sample sizes such that one can be confident testing a small population as representative of the whole.




Here's where things get murky and IMHO that is intentional.
-If you are a smart doper, you higher a doctor who has figured out dosage and timing such that the athlete never tests positive. Floyd Landis states plainly that he and presumably other riders were examining their own blood to stay within some non-positive parameters.
-The UCI dicates who to test and what tests and they know which athlete codes match the athlete. Plenty of opportunities to lose some tests, not test for certain drugs as was done in the Giro, and probably many more clever ways to divert tests.

I posted some other boring details here:
http://forum.cyclingnews.com/showpost.php?p=1137882&postcount=295

Thanks for the reply, appreciated. It doesn't sound like that thorough a system to be honest!
 
Jun 16, 2012
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Race Radio said:
Trapped between a rock and a hard place

Sorry USADA, can't talk unless DOJ says it won't use anything I say against me. Now go talk to DOJ on my behalf and get me a get out of jail free card. Otherwise cycling crumbles, big fish go free - and that's on both your hands. Oh, and hurry, you only have two more days.
 
Aug 13, 2009
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reginagold said:
Sorry USADA, can't talk unless DOJ says it won't use anything I say against me. Now go talk to DOJ on my behalf and get me a get out of jail free card. Otherwise cycling crumbles, big fish go free - and that's on both your hands. Oh, and hurry, you only have two more days.

Yup.....oh, and he also now has to be nice to Travis, the guy who beat him. Lance is not a good loser
 
reginagold said:
Sorry USADA, can't talk unless DOJ says it won't use anything I say against me. Now go talk to DOJ on my behalf and get me a get out of jail free card. Otherwise cycling crumbles, big fish go free - and that's on both your hands. Oh, and hurry, you only have two more days.

USADA isn't a government agency. It's employees are not state actors. If they hear statements from people, they are witnesses and the public has a right to every man's evidence.

Any arrangement between Lance and USADA providing for confidentiality would not survive a grand jury subpoena.

Otherwise, criminals could enter into nondisclosure agreements, and other bad things.
 
Aug 13, 2009
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MarkvW said:
USADA isn't a government agency. It's employees are not state actors. If they hear statements from people, they are witnesses and the public has a right to every man's evidence.

Any arrangement between Lance and USADA providing for confidentiality would not survive a grand jury subpoena.

Otherwise, criminals could enter into nondisclosure agreements, and other bad things.

USADA is not a State Actor but their word goes a long way. Ask Joe Papp and Marion Jones. Travis and USADA were a key part of their deals.
 
Jun 16, 2012
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MarkvW said:
USADA isn't a government agency. It's employees are not state actors. If they hear statements from people, they are witnesses and the public has a right to every man's evidence.

Any arrangement between Lance and USADA providing for confidentiality would not survive a grand jury subpoena.

Otherwise, criminals could enter into nondisclosure agreements, and other bad things.

Right, that's why the deal would have to be between DOJ and USADA.
Now that's not likely either for all kinds of reasons, but surely Wonderboy's team of highly paid advisers will have recognized a chance to gum up the works more by trying to force the enforcers to negotiate amongst themselves, even if the only result is to burn up some time so that Wonderboy can ask for those seconds to be added back to the clock.
 
RownhamHill said:
Thanks for the reply, appreciated. It doesn't sound like that thorough a system to be honest!

I wasn't super-clear at the time of that post what the APMU did. I've since learned one of the functions of the APMU is to run statistical tests on the collections of results submitted by the Lab. Another function of the APMU from the lab's side is to post all of the documentation and test results.

As mentioned elsewhere and to discredit the UCI's lies about the APMU, they claimed the APMU didn't have a test for results that are too close together. Pelozotti and other positives debunk that lie.

The UCI suppressed at least Wonderboy's irregular blood values. The federation was part of the sports fraud. Period. I'm not sure why that isn't a story in mainstream media. The facts are clear.
 
Jun 19, 2009
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DirtyWorks said:
I wasn't super-clear at the time of that post what the APMU did. I've since learned one of the functions of the APMU is to run statistical tests on the collections of results submitted by the Lab. Another function of the APMU from the lab's side is to post all of the documentation and test results.

As mentioned elsewhere and to discredit the UCI's lies about the APMU, they claimed the APMU didn't have a test for results that are too close together. Pelozotti and other positives debunk that lie.

The UCI suppressed at least Wonderboy's irregular blood values. The federation was part of the sports fraud. Period. I'm not sure why that isn't a story in mainstream media. The facts are clear.

CBS has had Tygart mention it several times and I thought there was a reference on Oprah. Much of the press blowback in the US does refer to it although the "confession" is the big story. Almost noone in the press believes Armstrong was clean, ever. That the UCI was heavily implicated hasn't been detailed, particularly the last week's exchange with Ashendon.
 
reginagold said:
Right, that's why the deal would have to be between DOJ and USADA.
Now that's not likely either for all kinds of reasons, but surely Wonderboy's team of highly paid advisers will have recognized a chance to gum up the works more by trying to force the enforcers to negotiate amongst themselves, even if the only result is to burn up some time so that Wonderboy can ask for those seconds to be added back to the clock.

That opinion presupposes that the DOJ would be willing to enter into negotiations with USADA that would result in compromising their criminal investigation against Lance so that USADA would get information that would help USADA and the sport of cycling and the DOJ would get nothing that would help them in their criminal investigation.

That appears unlikely to me.
 
Jun 16, 2012
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Race Radio said:
USADA is not a State Actor but their word goes a long way. Ask Joe Papp and Marion Jones. Travis and USADA were a key part of their deals.

Your cooperation with _____ will be included in the factors we consider for the terms of any plea agreement. Now move along.

Something like this, stated, not written, perhaps?
 
Jun 16, 2012
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MarkvW said:
That opinion presupposes that the DOJ would be willing to enter into negotiations with USADA that would result in compromising their criminal investigation against Lance so that USADA would get information that would help USADA and the sport of cycling and the DOJ would get nothing that would help them in their criminal investigation.

That appears unlikely to me.

No, it just presupposes that the subject of the investigation will try to get USADA to talk to DOJ if USADA "wants information on evil at the highest levels of the sport". USADA will relay something about that to DOJ, DOJ will, likely, say "stand down", and everything will go onto extended hold while DOJ proceeds with its investigation. I did suggest some posts ago the announcement of the obstruction of justice investigation meant USADA was stopped, as they had been during the entirety of the Birotte investigation.
But it's fun to guess at what the dance is during the extra two weeks requested from USADA. Presumably requested before the new DOJ investigation was known to the target.
 
MarkvW said:
That opinion presupposes that the DOJ would be willing to enter into negotiations with USADA that would result in compromising their criminal investigation against Lance so that USADA would get information that would help USADA and the sport of cycling and the DOJ would get nothing that would help them in their criminal investigation.

That appears unlikely to me.

Keep us posted Mark. If anything changes call 911.

The Feds were sitting in on the USADA witness statements. But they're not working together?
 
Nov 8, 2012
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reginagold said:
Sorry USADA, can't talk unless DOJ says it won't use anything I say against me. Now go talk to DOJ on my behalf and get me a get out of jail free card. Otherwise cycling crumbles, big fish go free - and that's on both your hands. Oh, and hurry, you only have two more days.

I think LA realized (or should have) that his lifetime bann is in fact , lifetime. I think he toyed with the idea of naming names under oath with USADA... but the moment Birotte was publicly embarrassed he knew he would not be able to cooperate with USADA without exposing himself to real jail-time.

Rock and a hard place indeed.
 
Scott SoCal said:
I think LA realized (or should have) that his lifetime bann is in fact , lifetime. I think he toyed with the idea of naming names under oath with USADA... but the moment Birotte was publicly embarrassed he knew he would not be able to cooperate with USADA without exposing himself to real jail-time.

Rock and a hard place indeed.

No problems, hogger.
 

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