screaming fist said:
Quite funny: people anonymously calling Kittel a coward for him callking someone a doper - using his real name.
I don't think it's necessarily cowardice, and of course internet posters under assumed names making the point may be in themselves hypocritical, there can be no denying he's picked a soft target. He won't have to answer to Sayar or his teammates as he won't face them again in 2013, and the guy's on a small team that isn't really in a position to put its weight around either.
That is not to say that Kittel is not right to call them out, however. Remember this gem of a clued-up comment from the Giro a few years ago?
At the Giro, there are only four teams with a tight control system – Slipstream, High Road, CSC and Astana... [Davide] Rebellin and [Riccardo] Riccò, I don't know how often they have controls like me. I don't want to talk about the team of Priamo.
The accuser on that occasion was that well known anti-doping crusader Andreas Klöden. Within that Giro, CSF Group-Navigare (the team of Priamo, as Klöden calls them) were the minnows. They were the little guys, who had no weight to put around and had the dodgy history (Richeze was excluded from the Giro for a positive shortly before the start). And who were riding around in ridiculous fashion throughout that Giro, punching way, way, way above their weight. Klöden, who caught quite a bit of flak from fans at that point for picking on the little guys even though he did also hint at a couple of other ProTour teams (Gerolsteiner and Saunier Duval, with the riders Rebellin and Riccò in particular), called them "the team of Priamo" due to his stage win, but could easily have called them "the team of Sella" (then leading the mountains classification) or "the team of Baliani" (who had been in several breaks with seemingly boundless energy, won the intermediate sprint primes and wound up finishing 12th despite all this). Matteo Priamo and Andreas Klöden had never met nor even bumped shoulders in the péloton, according to Matteo. So why the team of Priamo? Well, it turned out he was the one providing them with CERA.