How to prove a negative?

[Benotti69]

Do we?

I don't think we do, yet.

Armstrong tested positive for Cortisone at 99 TdF. Did he get busted or was it covered up by UCI accepting a back dated TUE?

 

[DirtyDennis]

So if he has the power you say he had how come we all know about the cortisone TUE?

Not exactly covered up, was it.

 

[thehog]

So if he has the power you say he had how come we all know about the cortisone TUE?

Not exactly covered up, was it.

Because the positive was released in LeMonde.

They had to come up with a public way of dealing with it. Hence the TUE.

If LeMonde didn't print the story you'd never would have heard about the TUE.

Rather simple really.

 

[Benotti69]

So if he has the power you say he had how come we all know about the cortisone TUE?

Not exactly covered up, was it.

Because the positive was released in LeMonde.

They had to come up with a public way of dealing with it. Hence the TUE.

If LeMonde didn't print the story you'd never would have heard about the TUE.

Rather simple really.

Rather simple really.

 

[DirtyDennis]

Because the positive was released in LeMonde.

They had to come up with a public way of dealing with it. Hence the TUE.

If LeMonde didn't print the story you'd never would have heard about the TUE.

Rather simple really.

Your memory of this may well be clearer than mine, and I'm willing to be corrected on this.

When was the Le Monde story published?

Did it create the TUE, or did it merely bring he existence of the TUE into the public domain?

 

[thehog]

Your memory of this may well be clearer than mine, and I'm willing to be corrected on this.

When was the Le Monde story published?

Did it create the TUE, or did it merely bring he existence of the TUE into the public domain?

http://www.google.com.

It reported the positive.

The paper called Armstrong and the UCI telling them they're about to print the story requesting comment.

Within 24 hours they had the TUE story although at the time people weren't aware of the "backdated part".

IF Le Monde never printed the story then we never would have heard about the positive.

 

[Mrs John Murphy]

Emma O'Reilly is the main source and has talked about the issue

1999 Corticosteroids (Continued)



"In 1999, while Armstrong was on his way to his first Tour victory after beating cancer, a French newspaper received a tip that Armstrong had tested positive for a corticosteroid and had no therapeutic use exemption (TUE) on his medical form. Armstrong, who was riding for the Postal team, had just said in a press conference that he did not have any prescriptions for banned products. When the team discovered that the newspaper had received the tip, panic hit Armstrong and his inner-circle, according to Emma O'Reilly, a soigneur from Ireland who worked with the team and specifically with Armstrong. She (Emma O'Reilly) was in the hotel room after the 15th Tour stage when, she says, Armstrong and team officials devised a plan.

"They agreed to backdate a medical prescription," O'Reilly tells SI. "They'd gotten a heads up that [Armstrong's] steroid count was high and decided they would actually do a backdated prescription and pretend it was something for saddle sores."

In violation of its own protocol requiring a TUE for use of such a drug, officials from the UCI announced that Armstrong had used a corticosteroid for his skin and his positive result was excused. O'Reilly also told SI that, just before the start of the '99 Tour, Armstrong asked her to use some of her cosmetics to cover up injection marks on his arm, though O'Reilly does not know what substance Armstrong had injected. O'Reilly made these same allegations in a 2004 book about Armstrong, published only in French, called L.A. Confidentiel. Armstrong subsequently filed a libel suit against O'Reilly, the book's authors and its publisher. He also sued The Sunday Times of London for reprinting the allegations in a review of the book. (Armstrong settled The Times case for an apology and recovery of his legal costs, and dropped the others.)"

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/magazine/05/23/lance.armstrong/index.html

 

[DirtyDennis]

OK, I've had a little Google but the chronology is still not clear to me.

I've found this report of the 1999 Le Monde article which appears to say that the test was not declared a positive because it was a 0.2 reading and below the threshold of a 0.6.

So, it appears that Le Monde uncovered a suspicious result rather than a 'covered up positive', or am I being a bit thick here?

Now, we all know the TUE was bull****, what I am interested in is whether the UCI covered up a positive.

Google also spat up this:

http://inrng.com/2013/01/armstrong-1999-positive/

....which is revealing.

Many apologies if I'm behaving like a senile old fart, and discussing things have been concluded here before

 

[thehog]

Just prior to the Landis positive, Hein Verdruggem, Armstrong, and a few investors were in talks with the Amaury organization to buy the Tour de France. Problem was, the price was too high. What they needed was a way to lower the price - and the lower the better, no doubt. The possibility that Hein and Armstrong sabotaged Landis for this purpose was first brought to light here in the Clinic. Landis, for his part, eventually confessed all, but has always insisted he wasn't guilty of that particular infraction.

When you couple the financial angle with the fact that no one, to my knowledge, ever left USPS to lead a competing team without subsequently testing positive; and then add in that such a scheme would be in keeping with armstrong's personality -- you have a scenario where all the pieces fit. Highly likely, even. I wouldn't be surprised if Landis agrees.



(And you know, had they bought it, we'd have heard it called "Tour de Lance" forevermore.)

Edit: But to bring it back on topic, clean cycling is for me is as pornography famously was for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. I don't need to know that the riders are "clean" down to the Nth degree. I don't think such a standard is practical. I just need to know that they are racing as human beings, not extraterrestrials, that they are suffering and giving their all, that none has an undue advantage. They prove they are clean simply by being clean. People with eyes usually can see the difference, and if you can't then it doesn't matter as much.

(And by the way, it's all well and good to say the peloton today is cleaner than ever, but if that simply means that only a few riders are permitted to go overboard while everyone else is held back, as it is today with Sky, well, then racing as a whole is dirtier than ever.)

Let’s be honest. The sport does thrive on the scandal.

Some people are attracted that you have to transfuse your own blood just to compete.

Does anyone really believe it when the athletes say they're all clean?

Vaughters tries to make it sound a lot more complex than it actually is. But it really isn’t difficult to ‘prove a negative’.

If really clean releasing blood profiles, power readings behind the athletes is not going to cause misinterpretation from an unsuspecting public.

Fans actually like to lean. American football can appear complex to the non-American. But once you learn tactics, and the plays it becomes a lot more of an enjoyable sport to watch. Cycling is similar. Really understanding how teams work and place themselves on the road to the uneducated is difficult but once you spend time watching is makes it more enthralling. It’s the same with releasing blood profiles. Soon the public would understand them.

The reason they’re not being released is that the athletes know dam well what they’re up to. Whether illegally or by TUE. They’re doping in some way or another.

 

[DirtyDennis]

I disagree with pretty much all of that.

Cycling is a dirty word in many countries, UK and Germany being two of them. In Germany, national TV broadcasters pulled the plug on televised cycling because of the scandal, does that equate to thriving?

I can see from reading some of the stuff on this forum that some people here get off on the doping stuff. To be honest, I'm not convinced they are fans of cycling, but they are fans of the intrigue and drama of doping.

That's OK. It takes all sorts. Some people watch F1 just hoping for a crash.

 

[the sceptic]

Welcome back Joachim

 

[thehog]

Welcome back Joachim

I was just going to say the same thing...

 

[ebandit]

thought

I was just going to say the same thing...

and i had just been thinking................what gives with the 'clinic crowd'

looking for conspiracies under every rock

maybe? i should smile more

Mark L