Re:
wendybnt said:
I'm not sure you've grasped what the point of the article is. It's neither an attack on nor a defence of Froome. It's about the overlooked problematic nature of 'transparency'.
This sort of argument (on both sides of it) I think leads naturally to the position I have been personally considering for a while now. Transparency is a very tricky thing to achieve. In actual fact, I think it is never truly achieved. Even if people actually are clean, you can't 100% know they are clean regardless of what evidence is presented. Any numbers can be manipulated before they are given to the public. Any output of passports and testing is fraught with problems that mean they aren't 100% believable.
There is absolutely nothing anyone can do to unequivocally convince someone on the other side of an argument like this. If UCI produces a test result tomorrow showing Froome is on <insert drug of choice>, some people will believe the test to be wrong/lying/rigged. If UCI produces a test tomorrow that they say can detect every last thing Froome has ever taken into his body and it's clean, some people will believe the test to be wrong/lying/rigged.
The main problem is that the skeptics in both camps have some reasonable chance of being right and can point to historical situations where their skepticism would have been correct.
So, we are left with the question of what to do...and here is the heretical position I have been contemplating and I think may be the only real way forward for sport.
Allow doping. Officially, as opposed to the current stance of "we don't allow doping" that actually means "well, mostly we don't allow doping, but you can use this chemical all the time, this other one some of the time, this other one never but we can't test for it, etc." Basically, limited doping is allowed right now...everyone dopes at least a little...but nobody knows what exactly is allowed. It's sort of like speed limits in the US...you can break the speed limit as long as you don't do it by too much, everyone speeds at least a little sometimes, but you never are quite sure how much you can get away with.
So. Get rid of all this drama about doping. Make it officially legal. Provide some basic limits like max hematocrit etc. Put in a rule that if your riders die or have serious health problems your whole team and everyone associated with them is banned for 10 years. We allow these guys to take risks descending at 100 km/h...why not allow them to take these other risks as well, as long as they have a helmet on...
That would remove all this froth. It would likely make the playing field more even as everyone then can dope to the best of their ability rather than trying to dope to the levels they think they can get away with. It would remove the politics involved with enforcement (if Froome had a failed test, can we be sure it would see the light of day? Amrstrong's positives would have stayed mostly buried if he weren't such a raging a-hole). The Clinic would turn into discussions of what things are likely being done without the overhead of the idea that people are morally corrupt. Winners would be winning "fair." The drama would move back to the racing and the training.
Heresy? Certainly. Worth considering? I think so.