Ninety5rpm said:
In a sport in which the title sponsor for the biggest event in the U.S. is the manufacturer of the dominant PED in the sport, is it reasonable to presume the riders are not using PEDs? Yes, I know the TOC did not exist during the time of Postal, but this is meant to be an example, not the salient fact.
Did the USPS really not know? How stupid are these guys to sponsor a team in a sport they know so little about? I mean, if they didn't know, then they arguably knew too little about the sport to be reasonably informed about what they were sponsoring, and that's on them.
I think it is reasonable to think that the USPS did not "know" that the riders were on a doping programme, because of two things:
1. Their contract surely has provisions prohibiting illegal behavior, as well as behavior against the rules of the sport in which they were competing.
2. The star rider, the cancer survivor, has publicly and consistently denied using PED's.
Given those two facts, there is little more USPS has to do in order to prove a breech of that contract, should the investigation uncover a systematic doping programme.
The fraud is in the withholding pertinent facts, misrepresentation of the operation of the team, the compliance with the laws and sporting rules, and the money at stake.
If a man walks down a street late at night, is mugged, and the police catch the mugger, they don't let the mugger go because "everybody knows" muggers assault folks late at night, ie, the citizen should have known better.
The act is still a crime.
Perhaps there are a few USPS employees quaking in their boots because they knew of the doping and they did not alert the proper authority? Maybe one or two of them work now for CSE, Public Strategies, or Trek?
That would be quite the twist.