- Mar 13, 2009
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we luv hombre/bobke/hombre de subaru.MacRoadie said:
oncearunner had a sockpuppet on some forum, might have called the puppet hombredesubaru too, another forum from the original. And he got a personal message from a patsy of hombre, who thought the puppet was the original, then oncearunner found out who hombre was, and it turned out, that he might have had a hand in the original iteration of the lance armstrong foundation. he was involved with founding it.
so funnies, such funnies. I always liked how hombre talked of his son's exploits on the bike, and about ivy league doctors, and how many watts his son was putting out. such wildean hilarity and drollery. he was good value.
- Mar 13, 2009
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Franklin said:To the boldened part, Excuse me???? Where do I deny he tested positve? How insane is that? Of course he tested positive, otherwise this thread would not exist.
Perhaps you intend to say I deny the possibility he willingly took it: Where do I say it's certainly contamination? Why yet another strawman???
What I do say is that I find it unlikely that people like AC and MR who weathered more serious scandals as these and who are veterans in this shady game all of a sudden decide to use a drug which is easily detected. Even stranger, they are the only high-profile cyclistsever found with it, which seems that it's a high detection drug of which the competition finds it's not worth it.
So again: It's plausible that MR (who I am convinced is a long time doper) in this case is indeed innocent of said charges. I do not know, but this is one of those cases where I wait and see instead of pronouncing guilt of the athlete.
Sorry, but that's clearly nonsense. Contaminated meat as has been shown in other cases certainly can get you off.
Do not claim that there are rules that are not there. Stick with the facts.
Thanks for setting me straight. I don't know what got into me.
frenchfry said:
And I'm sorry for being so annoyed. I find that missadressing a position to me (strawmen) really get me going.
Somehow if you have some consideration in certain cases and question the burden of proof chain all of a sudden you are a wide eyed Naive guy who thinks riders are clean.
As I wrote to Merckx:
Now I certainly understand why the burden of proof is with the athlete, but it's a big flaw. And when there is a plausible explanation we should be very careful not to dismiss such a thing out of hand. We already have a perverted justice system where the burden of proof is at the accused, not the prosecution. No need to put even more arbitrary constraints on the accused.
We need a fair system.
- Mar 13, 2009
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Franklin said:
Apology accepted.
The debate on strict liability is an interesting one, and as I have posted previously in a case like Rogers we are likely to never know the truth so it will be impossible for anyone to gloat about being right.
The risk of not having strict liability is that dopers will use it to essentially undermine any legitimate anti-doping efforts.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the burden of proof is indeed on the prosecution, who must prove that the banned substance is present in the body of the athlete. How it got there, strictly speaking, is irrelevant. Of course there have been some cases where the origin has resulted in lighter or no sanctions but these are subject to interpretation and do not strictly follow the anti-doping rules.
As you are probably aware your apple example is irrelevant to this discussion, as possession of an apple is in no way prohibited. Presence of clenbuterol in an athletes system, on the other hand, is.
I am not saying Rogers is guilty of anything other than having clenbuterol in his system, there is no way for me to know how it got there (other than speculation, which I haven't entered into, and as I said above we will probably never know how it got there unless there is a police investigation that uncovers something), unfortunately for him this is against the rules.
- Jul 27, 2010
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Franklin said:
I have replied to Franklin in some PMs. For the sake of others here who might be interested, i note again he never explains what he means by significant vs. plausible. He does deny he ever said the risk was significant, which was my point all along. If it isn't significant, nothing to worry about. Significant has a reasonably precise meaning in science, whereas plausible can mean just about anything anyone wants it to mean.
Again, none of the links you posted refers to CB, they refer mostly to another drug, and in mostly very minute quantities. This is irrelevant to the issue of testing positive for CB. In your PM to me, you implied that what you mean by this statement is that there is a threshold for CB, so there can be CB up that limit. To which I replied, yes, but the threshold amount does not result in positive tests. This was established in the Contador case.
The most likely source was from blood transfusion, which would result in a relatively small amount. I discussed this in detail back then, including specific numbers.
It's not in line with contamination in Spanish meat.
Yeah, and it only takes me one winning lottery ticket to get rich.
Which proves what?
No, the main reason they didn't like the transfusion scenario is because it seemed to require two separate transfusions, to account for the fact that DEHP and CB got into his system at different times. But this could have been accounted for in other ways, as again, I discussed in great detail back then.
Merckx index said:
I'm sorry. The chance of being struck by lightning is insignificant. But it sure sucks when you loved one is fried.
The chance of being sentenced on contaminated meat in europe is insignificant, but it sure sicks when it happens.
Again, your semantics to avoid admitting you have no good answer on the problematic burden of proof comes through clearly. Your best answer remains: well, to make an omelette you have to scrambe some eggs.
Guess you need to read the links as several are explicitly about CB. This is rather bizarre.
And I and other disagree by the same numbers. Even CAS disagreed, so I would say it's hardly as slam dunk as you make it out.
Spanish meat is hardly beyond suspicion. In fact even Northern European meat with certainy less economic problems and supposedly high standards are plagued by scandals.
But the problem is of course that with lottery:
1. You voluntarily participated.
2. It's a reward, not a sanction.
So there is absolutely no comparison.
1. That the statement: Meat contamination is impossible in europe as the EU has bullet-proof controls is bogus (not you, but a very vehement statement by at least one other poster).
2. That the possibility of CB contamination is real even in Europe (see lijks, read hem again at your own leisure).
Yes, you know best. Can't be contamination. Impossible. Of course the prosecuation could not proof their case, but it's an athlete, so the burden of proof lies with him. Clearly it's not a human with normal judicial rights.
How about that apple you stole. I assume you will be okay by being banned from groceries for two years?
I await your answer for quite awhile now.
- Jul 27, 2010
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Franklin said:
Let me summarize what I think is your view. Any possibility of contamination, no matter how remote, has to be addressed. The only way to do this is to stop drug testing completely, since every test has a non-zero probability of a false positive, or, in cases like CB, a positive resulting from contamination.
Even not accepting my arguments that there may be no correlation between CB level and origin, a threshold for CB isn’t enough, because there is always that one in many millions chance that an athlete will eat meat from a cow so heavily dosed with CB that he takes in microgram quantities—there are known incidents of contamination this high.
So we should stop testing for CB. We should also stop testing for EPO, because there is easily better than a one in a million chance that a positive is false. We also have to throw out the bio-passport, because there is better than a one in a million chance of a false positive for that, too.
In fact, we have to stop all bike racing, because quantum physics tells us that there is a non-zero probability that all the molecules at the finish line of some race will spontaneously assemble into a bike and rider, before the rest of the pack gets there. Of course, that possibility is extremely remote, but I have asked you, again and again and again, to put some limit on probability of a false positive or contamination, and so far you have refused to. So I have to assume you think there should be no limit.
Then post them again. There is nothing in that Wiki on horsemeat. And while you're at it, explain why you aren't worried about EPO contamination, since all meat contains traces of EPO, and there is certainly a non-zero possibility that it isn't all degraded during digestion, and a non-zero probability that it will run like synthetic EPO on a gel.
And I and other disagree by the same numbers. Even CAS disagreed, so I would say it's hardly as slam dunk as you make it out.
Funny, I don't recall your posting anything here at that time disputing my numbers. Contador's lawyers did present an argument based on the unlikelihood of his taking a lot of CB right before a blood withdrawal, but by that logic, all positives should be overturned, because no athlete would be dumb enough to take a substance he might test positive for.
The numbers are fine, and again, I challenge you to show why they aren't. The arguments were basically psychological, not statistical.
So do the riders voluntarily participate in testing. If they don't like it, they can find another job.
Every sanction in modern society has this basis.
Now i know you never followed this forum back then, because I never said it was impossible. I said the evidence against it was strong enough to make it less likely than other alternatives.
I assume you are against all criminal laws, since it's well known that occasionally someone goes to jail, or worse, for a crime he didn't commit.
- Jul 1, 2011
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Merckx index said:
Any chance you can summarize your own view? I'm trying to follow this conversation as there's some interesting stuff in it, but I think you've got lost in trying to 'win' something.
There seems a fair level of agreement between you and Franklin that:
- Eating contaminated CB meat in Europe is highly unlikely
- But there is clearly nothing infallible about the European meat supply chain
- And eating contaminated CB in Europe is possible ('one in a million/lottery winner' - 730 million people in Europe. . .)
Neither of these statements seems particularly controversial, right?
So Franklin's view seems to be that despite the former, the latter point (and hence the possibility of false positives) means putting the burden of proof on the athlete is fundamentally unjust.
Frankly you seem to be intent on arguing about some of the semantics he's used to make his case; I'm interested in your view on the underlying point about justice - given the problems you yourself have pointed out with interpreting the source of a Clen positive from the test itself, is a positive test for this particular drug in and of itself still a useful tool in isolation? Should there be a burden of proof on the prosecutor to at least demonstrate a plausible scenario for how the positive might be the result of doping? Should Clen be treated as a drug like Caffeine (which as I understand it definitely has a pharmacological effect, but is so common in our culture as to make any kind of testing threshold absurd, so de facto it is a permitted PED?) Should we just ignore the possibility of false positives as 'collateral damage' in the fight against PEDS (if so, why?)
Whatever, these are just questions for discussion; because at the moment this discussion currently is becoming increasingly sterile, and could be so much more interesting!
- Jul 27, 2010
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RownhamHill said:
My view should be clear in earlier posts, I'm not going to summarize it yet again.
That's my view, but I'm not sure it's Franklin's.
This gets back to the distinction between significant and plausible. My view is that there is not a significant chance of testing positive from eating contaminated meat in Europe. Significant being defined as greater than 0.01 for any particular rider.
Again, if this is one's view, then one should be worried about being wrongly targeted in the bio-passport. No doping test can guarantee there will be no false positives.
They are controversial if one first acknowledges that the possibility of testing positive from contaminated meat is below the standard used on other doping tests, then continues to argue that the CB test is unfair.
And my view is that to be consistent he should argue the same with other doping tests, and also the criminal justice system, which occasionally puts an innocent person in jail. All he has to do to refute that criticism is present some specific numbers showing that the odds of testing positive for CB are much higher than that. So far, he hasn't done this.
Because his argument hinges on semantics. He's trying to blur the distinction between significant, which again, has a fairly precise meaning to scientists, and plausible, which does not. I will stop arguing semantics just as soon as Franklin starts presenting some specific numbers. Same thing with the Contador case. i posted in great detail back then, with specific numbers. Now he wants to argue against those conclusions, without addressing those numbers at all. When this is the tack someone takes, one is reduced to arguing semantics.
To repeat yet again what I've already posted here, I agree with WADA that a threshold is not very useful. Currently, the best way to argue contamination is to provide--surprise!--evidence of contamination. As I further noted, a test for racemates might provide a better way to distinguish contamination from intentional use.
Are you serious? Any time someone tests positive for CB, there is almost always a plausible scenario for doping. I say almost, because the Contador case was exceptional, in that he tested negative for it not long before he tested positive. That put a limit on how long it could have been in his system, which in turn put a limit on how low his level could have been. This is why everyone on both sides acknowledged that he didn't intentionally take CB during the TDF--hence the transfusion scenario.
But this situation rarely occurs. Far more often, as with Rodgers AFAIK, there is one test in isolation. If that is the case, then of course there is a plausible (whatever that means) scenario for doping. Why wouldn't there be?
If everyone could be tested for CB every week, then if a positive occurred, one could estimate a maximum--based on testing negative a week earlier--that could have been ingested. If this maximum were well below the level one would need to take for PE, this would be strong evidence of contamination. But testing weekly would be hard to implement, I imagine.
Again, this doesn't sound serious. CB has performance enhancing effects to a degree that caffeine does not. However, in any case where reasonable doubt exists about the source, I'd advocate reducing the penalty, just as often is done with contaminated supplements.
All science can do is try to reduce false positives to a minimum.
I thought it was sterile and redundant quite a long time ago. I reply to Franklin occasionally not because I have any illusion the discussion is going anywhere, but just as a way of refreshing myself on CB issues.
Franklin said:
For 2012:
285,000 samples
98 positives for Clenbuterol
If meat was contaminated worldwide you would have 9,800 positives.......
- Jul 27, 2010
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Kicker661 said:
This is an example of useful information. So about 0.035% of tests for CB were positive. I assume many, perhaps most, of the athletes involved were tested multiple times. Let’s assume on average, an athlete was tested three times during the year, some more, some less. So perhaps 0.1% of athletes tested positive, or one in a thousand. Maybe the exact numbers are available, I don’t know.
The next question I have is, do those figures include athletes who got off because they successfully argued for contamination? If so, then the number we have to worry about is less than one in a thousand. But not knowing that, one in a thousand seems to be a rough estimate of the maximum number of athletes facing sanction for CB.
So in the worst case scenario, in which one assumes that all the CB positives resulted from contamination, we have one in a thousand innocent athletes wrongly sanctioned in a year. Over an entire career, an innocent athlete might face roughly a one in a hundred chance.
I’m sure Franklin, and many others here, regard this as an unacceptably high number. But one out of a hundred is around what most people consider beyond reasonable doubt. That is, if the odds that you didn’t do something you are accused of doing are one in a hundred--and remember, this is not in any one instance, but over multiple instances over an entire career--most people would say you are guilty.
So the short answer is, if you take the worst possible case scenario—that all those positives were due to contamination, which I would say is extremely unlikely—you are still very unlikely to be wrongly sanctioned. Probably no more likely than for any other doping test, none of which do I hear Franklin complaining about. The odds of testing positive wrongly in other tests are likely in the same range.
Nevertheless, Franklin, and many others, will insist that one person wrongly accused is too many, to which I can only reply, again, that no system of justice in the entire history of the human race has been able to achieve perfection. Some innocents get caught up.
I don’t have any problem with people making this point, but to be consistent, they also have to acknowledge that there is always a tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. Saving one athlete from a false positive means letting off maybe dozens as false negatives. People who take the one is too many attitude never talk about all the careers destroyed—not lost for two years, but out and out destroyed—for clean athletes who are the effective victims of dopers. It's very easy to feel sorry for the busted athlete who might be innocent--his sanction is very obvious. It's not so easy to feel sorry for the athlete no one ever heard of because he could never compete--his effective sanction is not so obvious.
let's say Contador really ate contaminated meat. I don't believe it, but let's say he did. He still kept four GT titles, won another after his sanction, and is still racing today, albeit in poorer form than before (and I wonder why that is?). Contrast this with Bassons, whose career never got off the ground. Who do you think lost more, the alleged victim of a false positive or the victim of false negatives?
- Jun 16, 2010
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Merckx index said:
As a former defence lawyer who loves cycling, but is cynical about the sport because of 30 years of serial doping and cheating, I am somewhat concerned about your comments regarding a cycling legal system (i.e. Olympic sport legal system) that is acceptable, because only one in a thousand innocent person may get caught. You seem to suggest this is acceptable and because no system is perfect we should be satisfied with this.
While no system of justice is perfect it should aim to be perfect. Where it is found to be imperfect, the imperfect result should be corrected. The legal system must be set up in such a way it is very ,very highly unlikely an innocent cyclist will be proven a doper. This means a system where the onus is on the anti-doping authorities to prove to a level of reasonable certainty on the facts, that
a. The drug in question in fact had a performance enhancing effect or
b. The drug was taken with the intent of it having a performance enhancing effect, whether it did or not or
c. Where appropriate it exceeded some threshold level where everyone accepts it would not have had a performance enhancing effect.
Now this is not a "pure" proof beyond a reasonable doubt system. This would be a system where the dominant principle would be fairness. A system where the onus is on the prosecution and not the cyclist, unless and until a cogent prima facie case can be made against the cyclist and then and only then, the onus shifts to the cyclist to raise a reasonable doubt.
Such a system must rely on fundamental principles of proof, and should be designed so that some "innocent" does not get swept up in a wrongful conviction as though he is a mere statistical casualty and that is okay. The concept of reasonable doubt (or in this case, reasonable certainty) has never been nor is it accepted in any democratic country as a statistical concept where one in a hundred/thousand innocent cyclist might get convicted and if so, so what.
Reasonable doubt has to be applied separately to each and every individual case based on the peculiar facts of that case. If a cyclist can raise a doubt, a reasonable doubt, that the evidence is not proof to a reasonable certainty that he ingested the drug, say clenbuterol, with no intent to gain a performance advantage, or innocently due to tainted meat or whatever, then the cyclist ought to be given the benefit of that doubt. The process does not involve reasonable doubt based on some simplistic statistical analysis of one case in a hundred.
Reasonable doubt is a concept that has evolved over several hundreds of years of justice. It mean what is says. It is a doubt based on reason. A person (cyclist) must be able to a logical and rational reason based on either lack of evidence in which case the case falls short or evidence that raises the reasonable doubt. It does not mean the cyclist must prove his innocence but simply show based on cogent evidence (or lack of evidence on the part of the prosecution) that there is a good reason to doubt the prosecution case. Each case must turn on the particular facts of each case. It is not a statistical enquiry.
- Jul 27, 2010
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RobbieCanuck said:
First, keep in mind I was talking about a worst case scenario, in which a) none of the recorded positives involved cases where athletes successfully argued contamination (I doubt this is the case, but I don't know); b) none of the positives occurred in Europe, which is what the discussion with Franklin has always been about (and I'm very sure many of them did); and c) they all in fact did involve contamination (we will never know, but this is very unlikely, to say the least). If you take these factors into account, the actual probability is far less than one in thousand.
The first two are already part of the system. The threshold argument ignores the fact that if a doper is tested some time after doping, it's quite possible the level of substance will be far below that necessary for a performance effect.
I hope as you say all this you are aware that all doping tests are already OVERWHElMINGlY in favor of the athlete, to the point where it's well known going in then most dopers will go free. EVERYTHING is slanted in favor of the athlete in these tests. Maybe one has to be a scientist to see this.
Of course it has. What you mean is that if the problem of imperfection is stated in that manner, everyone is against it. But the fact of the matter is that innocents getting caught up are inevitable. It doesn't matter what your standard of doubt is, there is always a loophole, so to speak. The only way to ensure this doesn't happen, 100%, is to allow anything.
I agree with this, which is why, like WADA, I'm against a threshold, and think each case must be determined on its own merits. But that still involves statistics. look at the Contador CAS case, the landis CAS case. They are all about statistics. In fact, the rules clearly define guilty as somewhere between preponderance, 50%, and reasonable doubt, which I would say is 99%. The standard for guilt in a doping case is not as high as that in a murder case.
In the age of science, every educated person understands that reason is based on statistics. If you come to the conclusion that someone is innocent, you do it on the basis of statistics, whether you recognize that you are doing this or not. Just because you don't present cold, hard numbers doesn't mean that this isn't what the human brain is doing. You are weighing various factors, which is a statistical process. You are asking yourself how likely something is, which is probability, which leads to statistics.
Of course, there is a great deal of irrationality in human decision making, but the point of the legal system is to abolish this as much as possible. It's irrational, for example, to argue that an athlete may falsely be sanctioned just because there is evidence of contaminated meat in the system. A rational approach asks how much meat, how contaminated, with what, and so on. This was what CAS did with Contador, e.g.
No offense meant, MI, and I truly love your scientific input in the discussion but we had this discussion about law before in the AC-case and from your posts now it shows again that although you might be a good scientific thinker, you seem to have no clue when legal (or connected ethical or moral) issues are involved. No problem, to each his own,but to argue that law and the rules of evidence is all about statistics is actually complete and utter BS. It might be sometimes and the cases I have seen in my country where it was all about statistics the system got it wrong, very wrong, every time.
- Sep 29, 2012
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RobbieCanuck said:
And as a defence lawyer you should know that jail is filled with 100% innocent people.
So you are saying 98 positives out of 250,000 samples clearly demonstrates world wide tainted meat causing a mammoth amount of positives. Glad you made that clear.
Kicker661 said:
He is not saying that at all. He is saying that any judicial system be it in "normal" life or in sports life should go out of it's way to make sure that people don't get punished innocently. I happen to agree with that even if it means some guilty people get off.
Dear Wiggo said:
He didn't? Would like to revisit his post?
Now my reading skills may be off today, but I can;t read that any other way. As a lawyer I am pretty sure that in many cases innocence or guilt is not decided based on statistics, knowingly or unknowingly.
- Sep 29, 2012
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GJB123 said:
Sure. Let'd do it for S&G...
MI said:
which you equated to:
Which is entirely different. You are now equating it with this:
GJB123 said:
In a court or tribunal, yes, true, but MI is arguing you as a person, and not a court. It is entirely different to you (a person) deciding innocence or guilt.
If you lived in the Netherlands, you would typically greet a stranger in Dutch, correct?
If you were holidaying in France, you'd probably offer a stranger a greeting in French.
If you came to Australia, you'd say G'day.
Not everyone in the Netherlands speaks Dutch, nor does everyone in Australia speak English.
But in your mind, there's a probability calculation you take for granted that says - in this country, these people speak this language 99.9% of the time. Sometimes, you get it wrong, and the person will look at you with a blank expression: a tourist, or someone not yet assimilated into the culture / language of the country in question.
In the same way, yes there is due process and evidence and laws and all that stuff. But despite all that, people on the jury still go in to the deliberation with different ideas as to guilt or innocence - it's not always a slam dunk. Hung juries are a reality. The people on the jury / panel / whatever are filtering all that stuff through their life experience, learning, etc, and judging whether the person is guilty or innocent, subjectively. And that process essentially boils down to: what's the likelihood (ie probability) that this person did this thing. Statistics.
- Jul 1, 2011
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Thanks for the reply, MI - some interesting stuff at the end, and subsequently some more interesting discussion on the thread. . .
- Jul 1, 2011
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Dear Wiggo said:
I'm not sure that's entirely right, as especially with trial by jury, there are other factors the jury will take into account - not least will justice be served by prosecuting. The one time I served on a jury (in a criminal trial) I thought the defendant probably was guilty. But given the nature of the offence, the consequence of a guilty verdict for the defendant, and the shoddy, complacent job the prosecution did of prosecuting (their attempt to dismantle the defence was essentially just to assert it wasn't true), I thought a not guilty verdict was the most 'just' outcome - as did the rest of the jury and we acquitted. That had everything to do with subjectivity, but nothing to do with probability statistics (as I've no real doubt that he probably was 'guilty' of the offence as the law proscribes).
GJB123 said:
But the system already does that.
We have seen top riders with bags of money pay for hefty defence lawyers and......lose.
You can argue here all you want but your colleges have tried your arguments with all evidence at hand and continue to have loss after loss after loss after loss...... then the riders admit afterwards.
I'd suggest the reality of testing is there is 0 casualties.
- Sep 29, 2012
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RownhamHill said:
No offence ibn my complete disagreement with you, but all those judgements you made:
probably guilty (not definitely)
complacent job
consequence of guilty verdict (you're not omniscient ;-))
etc
are based on statistical analysis that happens in your head, unknowingly, given you are estimating the effect of all those things, and then weighing them up against each other before making your decision.
It could not be more mathematical / statistical if you tried.
Then consider the chance that you were on that jury for that trial. Another statistical variable in and of itself.
- Feb 10, 2010
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GJB123 said:
Not a specific reply to your post, if anyone bothered to read WADA's standards would realize the system has an *enormous* bias for controlling false positives.
Particular to Rogers, clenbuterol does not occur naturally in the body, so any amount is sufficient for a positive.
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