Re: Re:
winkybiker said:
Tienus said:
On the next sentences, well the first Stade 2 program was a farce
They made Brian aware of their specific suspiscions and he did nothing.
Does your tinfoil hat get hot? Why on earth would the UCI want to condone or cover-up motorised-cheat cycling? What's in it for Cookson? Catching motorised bike-cheats is trivially easy. There's nowhere to hide. The motors (even wheel mounted ones) are dead easy to detect (even without Lemond's "large arches"). They're going well above what is required in my view. The number of tests is more than adequate. I have no idea how you can still be convinced that the fix is in; that there is some huge conspiracy. There just isn't. Not everyone is lying to you.....
Of course they don't want to condone it, but at the same time, there was a lot of coverage for Femke and her motorized bike in places that sure as hell wouldn't normally cover your average doping story (only if it was somebody of the Lance/Alberto kind of status). And as you point out, it's immediately obvious. If Femke had done things the "traditional" way and mainlined EPO, the test result would have come out a month after the Worlds, Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico would be going on, and a women's U23 cyclocross rider testing positive would be forgotten about in the time it takes the average non-Dutch-speaker to pronounce her surname, whereas this blew up into news stories way bigger than any result she ever achieved at Zolder could have done. What's more, for years (long preceding Cookson) we'd seen deflection of talk of motorized doping as something nobody would do or would get away with, and now all of a sudden those performances that had seemed suspect in the past would fall back under the microscope because it was proven once and for all that motorized bikes were not a fanciful conspiracy theory but something that was legitimately happening, to the extent that it had trickled down to U23 cyclocross riders making a pittance. Although the counter-argument could then come, well, actually it wasn't all that subtle in her case, so maybe doing something like that and making it hard to detect would be difficult.
With the knowledge that the UCI announced their new testing for motorized bikes would be debuted at Zolder and that riders from both within the Belgian team and other competitors had raised red flags about Femke's performance, it isn't
that much of a stretch to believe that the UCI would want to be rid of her, or at least 'that' bike, without having to bust her publicly, similar to the multitude of "tap on the shoulder" theories about various riders' performance drops.
If there
was an era of motor-doping you could argue that potentially Femke was the start of bringing that to an end; moto fraud is not something that you can delay the finding on for months and pick the time to bury the bad news, nor is it something you can fight and fight on technicalities.