ClassicomanoLuigi said:
Can't see how he would be deterred from going to CAS even if it is a long-shot proposition to get the ban reduced. Other cyclists with much less money went from ADT to CAS (although all failed)
I don’t think it’s a certainty that Froome would appeal any ban. People say, what does he have to lose, except money? But CAS doesn’t have to choose between upholding or reversing the ban. They start over, and if Froome appeals the ban, he could get a longer ban. That’s a significant risk he would take, and if the ban were lengthened, it might be backdated, so he lost any results he had hypothetically retained following the Tribunal’s ban.
OTOH, what does Froome have to gain by appealing a ban? Suppose it’s announced after the Giro, is proactive, and a year or less. If that were reversed, he would get the Vuelta back, but that’s pretty much it. Any reversal would come too late for him to race the 2018 Tour, and he would be able to race the 2019 Tour ban or no ban. So he would have to weigh the benefit of getting back the Vuelta vs. the risk of either losing a hypothetical Giro win, or being out for, say, two years, after which his time as a contender might well have passed.
ferryman said:
I worked in corporate Legal for 30 plus years and lost some and won some. The minituae in some of the cases went back and forth for months and months and months. Again IMHO, Froome's team are on top of this. He will walk..
An anti-doping case is not like your usual corporate legal cases. Science matters, a lot. Morgan couldn’t help Contador much, and the meat contamination hypothesis was a real opening. As I've pointed out before, most of the AAFs that do not result in a sanction, and don't involve TUEs or NCA, are clenbuterol cases. I'd say if you test positive for CB, the odds of getting off are better than if you exceed the DL for salbutamol, though of course establishing the source of the meat matters. But there's a real precedent there which, AFAIK, does not exist for salbutamol.
Wiggo's Package said:
It's difficult for a prosecution to hold firm in the face of such an onslaught all Morgan has to find is one beloved patriot in the armour
Morgan has to find more than some hypothetical beloved patriot. He has to explain one of the highest salbutamol concentrations ever recorded in an athlete. If there were some obvious explanation, it would have been found and exploited in the past six months. The fact that a judge has been appointed means that LADS already found Froome’s case unconvincing, and proposed a ban. That means the odds of Froome’s winning are significantly less than they were when he was notified of the positive. Morgan has to convince the judge that LADS was wrong.
And the inevitable delays play right into Froome's hands as the terrible otpics of him continuing to race loads more pressure on to the UCI
I'd say Froome is the one who's getting more damaged by the optics. Every day that this drags out, his image looks worse. Even if he's exonerated, he'll be forever tainted. So much has been said about how rare his level is, that unless he's not only exonerated, but publishes the results of the hearing (unlikely), and there's some slam-dunk obvious explanation (which hasn't emerged in the past six months), it will be widely assumed he got off on some technicality.
samhocking said:
Certainly Lappartient has switched from resolution asap before Giro to it's very complicated and won't be before Giro now.
IMO, this was the most interesting thing to come out of his interview. It isn’t just that he has become resigned to the case’s taking a long time to be resolved. In this latest interview, he implied that he knew more than he could talk about, that he had been following the case closely. That clearly wasn’t the situation a few weeks ago, because if he had been that close to the case then, he wouldn’t have made a public pronouncement about needing to speed up, he just would have told both parties. So not only has Lappartient’s opinion about how fast the case is moving changed, but his role in it has, too.
Maybe after he made that public statement a few weeks ago, the judge called him in, explained to him why the case was taking as long as it was, and told him to STFU.
Could be either side, but I would suggest when delays occur it is minutia coming out of both legal teams holding things up now.
To some extent, yes, Lappartient said as much. But other cases have experienced fairly long periods between the appointment of a judge and the hearing. Five of the cases that have gone before the Tribunal have held a hearing, and in those cases, the average time between appointment of the judge and the hearing was about three months.
The other thing is that if Froome’s team is seriously pursuing some unusual theory, they will request a lot of time not just to get all the supporting evidence together, but to call experts to testify, and scientists like these are not exactly on call 24/7. UCI, of course, will have to have its own experts.
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