webvan said:
Good write-up, as we suspected there is more to the story, here comes Tuft!
Really JV ?!
Are these the same clerical errors that led to key staff members 'overlooking" the name of the practice and physician attending to one of their riders?
I can see a one-time mistake. Sure. Those things happen. Noticing them and addressing them right away in a forthright manner stems the negative fall-out. Precisely what did not happen here.
But now we see there were two oversights, with nothing done for nearly a year and a half, and further rattlings about JV/Prentice communicating vague references to a Doctor in Valencia amongst themselves...
Funny, in light of this all, now reading the Landis/Kimmage piece and Landis (written in late 2010) referring to Landis hiring Del Moral for his Phonak transfusion program:
"How did you manage your doping in ’05? The Wall St Journal piece said: Mister Landis said he hired a Spanish doctor in Valencia to take transfusions and paid one person $10,000 to make two separate deliveries of half-litre bags of blood during the 2005 Tour de France.
In 2004, the Postal Service got rid of Luis Garcia Del Moral, who was the team doctor, and I knew that he was often in charge of the logistics of doing transfusions and things like that, so I just contacted him and asked if he would do it for me. So I paid him to do it.
Del Moral?
Yeah.
You paid Del Moral?
Yeah.
Did that ‘work’?
Did it work? Yeah, the reason that I was not as good in 2005 as I was in 2004 or 2006 was because I had surgery that winter and wasn’t walking for weeks and it took a while to get back in shape. So drugs or no drugs weren’t going to change that. I did the same thing in 2004 and 2005 and 2006; the one variable was that I had my hip issues to deal with and therapy and things like that. I mean, in all of the Tours I did exactly the same amount of blood (transfusing) except the first one (2002); the first one I did one transfusion which is 500 millilitres and the next four I did 1000 militaries each, three separate times in 2006, because it was easier to maintain the continuous blood parameters that were being checked. But it ended up being the same total volume that I added so…yeah, Del Moral, in spite of denying that he ever saw any doping, like everybody does, that was all he really did."
I wonder what it would take for a journalist to press Slipstream to reveal the money trail associated with Lowe's visits to Del Moral? I wonder if that money trail would further support a contention that JV/Steffen had full knowledge and lent, at minimum, tacit support or acknowledgement of working with the tainted good Doctor?
For Slipstream, it will be these details they must explain if they expect the community of fans and supporters to continue to offer them the benefit of the doubt going forward. So far we see articles with enticing headlines like "Vaughters Baffled By Lowe Situation"... seriously? Simply put, all headlines moving forward should simply state "Vaughters Baffled", until further notice.
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