Re: Official Lance Armstrong Thread: Part 3 (Post-Confession
"High Octane"?aphronesis said:Weird how years later people can't sort their vitriol and morals. Let's call it responsible doping?thehog said:The reason riders like Ferrari so much is that he is so precise. You can dope to the exact level of not being caught. That is key. Conservative doesn't come into as well as full on doping.StyrbjornSterki said:I don't think I ever before have heard anyone refer to Ferrari's doping regimen as "conservative." For starters, this was the man who often remarked that a rider must produce a minimum of 6.7 Watts per kilo to win the TdF. Show me the man who can produce 6.7 W/kg doping "conservatively" and I'll shake his hand and buy him a Daniel Webster seegar.
Ferrari also remained intimately aware of what all the Posties' Hct levels were. In The Secret Race, Hamilton cites a number of times when Ferrari chided him for his Hct being too low, implying that he needed to be LESS conservative and take MORE EPO. And he exhorted the team in general to take ever more (without risking a 'positive') by preaching that it was no more dangerous than orange juice. If he ever tried to rein in riders EPO use when their Hct was yet sub-50, I've never heard tell of it. Although Hamilton did write that Ferrari once gave him up to Pharmstrong for an Hct of 49.7, not because it was too extreme but because on some level it posed a threat to Pharmstrong's superiority.
Ferrari already had done all the requisite "experimentation" under conditions that didn't put his paying clients (or their careers) at risk. What he and Pharmstrong were about was exploiting data Ferrari already had gathered to systemically and incrementally creep up to (but never exceed) the brink of illegality and/or detectability. That involved empirical goals and I doubt non-deterministic words like "conservative" or "extreme" ever entered into their deliberations. There are rules, which they knew by rote. And (for the most part) they had the same medical lab equipment as did WADA, so they could self-test and determine -- empirically -- whether there were any further gains could be made before potentially running afoul of detectability and/or the legal threshold.
That was Ferrari's stock in trade. His riders doped better than anyone else's. Had that not been the case, if he had begun to fall behind because other riders doped better than he, Pharmstrong would not have kept Ferrari around.
Culturally, FLandis had a lot to learn very quickly when he left the farm. And the learning curve got steeper still when the news of his positive doping control broke post the 2006 TdF. He obviously was overwhelmed on all fronts when the story first broke, ergo the aimless "wiki" defense. But in later interviews he clearly had gathered his wits about him and in fact learned to be quite circumspect. In a 2012 interview linked to in another thread in this forum, several times he backs away from questions that would have required speculation on his part, apparently preferring to stick to matters he had certain knowledge of. Quite a different tack on his part.
Plus he also displays a certain droll resignation to the fact that life isn't fair, and pro cycling certainly wasn't fair to him. Now older and wiser, I think he realizes that speculating to the cause of his false positive will only see him labeled a vindictive whinger. So lacking so much as the first scrap of evidence, he keeps his suspicions about any role Pharmstrong might have played in his downfall under his hat.
But it's a classic case of lack of evidence not equaling evidence of lack.