Re: Re:
kwikki said:
sniper said:
IndianCyclist said:
Why is she deleting tweets. Thought she said she didn't care about tests over family. So why is she worried over a couple of harmless tweets.
no time to update whereabouts form. But plenty of time to tweet about wedding bands and then delete those tweets.
This is turning into a no-brainer.
Everything she did in between the third strike and the CAS decision suggests she knew this was going to be taken care of.
You don't go promoting your book if there's a chance that you're getting banned from the Games. And the way she raced in that period, too.
This was not an athlete with a potential ban hanging over her head.
This was an athlete who knew for sure she'd be cleared.
Yeah....turns out she was right to think that. She obviously knew she was in the right.
"In the right" is a bit excessive, don't you think? It's not that she's in the right - she still missed the test. It's just that she wasn't the only one in the wrong, the tester was partially at fault too, which gave justifiable cause in CAS' eyes to strike the test. Of course, it doesn't stop the fact that giving bogus reasons for not being at races and taking on marketing commitments riles up opponents, who now realise that if a journalist hadn't blown the lid off it, they'd never have known anything about it, and it would just be another time that Lizzie got sick that prevented her riding races (which seems to happen often, though whether that's simply that Lizzie is prone to illness or that it gives Lizzie an excuse to only show up at those races where her form is good enough to win, because she's that type of competitor; she doesn't like half-assing it and with the exception of the Giro Rosa she will seldom do a race where she's not the team's #1 option - this is one of the biggest reasons why her form for the Olympic RR is guesswork even without the temporary suspension drama).
This is a question that I simply don't know the answer to, but Armitstead explained that her phone was on silent because she didn't want to interrupt her roommate, but who was her roommate at Vårgårda? Surely athletes within the ADAMS system who are teammates rooming together, traveling and training together could homologate their testing times so that you wouldn't have a situation where an athlete needs extra hours of sleep when the other has their testing availability marked? At the very least, could Lizzie not have said to her roommate, "I've got the hotel from 6am to 7am down as my availability for testing tomorrow, so be aware you might get woken up early"?
The Boels team at Vårgårda was:
- Lizzie Armitstead (herself)
- Chantal Blaak (in her 8th pro season)
- Megan Guarnier (in her 6th pro season)
- Christine Majerus (in her 8th pro season)
- Katarzyna Pawlowska (in her 4th pro season)
- Evelyn Stevens (in her 6th pro season)
None of these women are inexperienced, and so it seems odd to me, but maybe that's naïveté. After all, different riders have different training needs and maybe somebody crashed in the Vårgårda TTT or out training and needed to rest up before the road race. Then again, running the risk of missing a dope test to encourage a teammate's recuperation requires a bit of noble selflessness that would be completely out of character for Armitstead too.
As I've said, the fact that I don't like Armitstead and have never tried to disguise that does colour my viewpoint. But as Bridie O'Donnell pointed out, you'd have to be very poorly organized, or very desperate, to miss three tests; given the way she manages her racing form etc. I have trouble believing that her self-discipline off the road is that much worse, and of course now with the knowledge of these missed tests, I find it difficult not to view her periods of invincible form alternating with sickness-related absences and withdrawals with a more cynical eye. And she's tearfully bewailing that people will think she's a cheat because of this, and protesting that she's a fundamentally honest person, right off the back of a three week period where she and everyone around her was in fact being fundamentally
dishonest. Certainly her fiancée has absolutely not helped matters (asking people to respect her privacy regarding personal matters is absolutely fair, but Deignan disrespecting others' personal matters is playing with fire) and has thrown another spanner into the works for her in her attempts to alleviate the damage to her personal PR, but also at the same time, the fact that others' responsibility has been invoked has been picked up on, which many who have followed women's cycling for several years have seen time and time again from Lizzie, meaning it's not as tacitly accepted as it might otherwise have been. And the fact that everything was covered up - and seemingly was intended to remain that way - is of course a huge PR blow for her, because it's, shall we say, quite fundamentally dishonest?
However, although we understandably should greet Lizzie's performance and success with a deal more cynicism than previously, and of course knowing about the various missed tests of Froome and Farah and the suspension of Ohuruogu makes dots very easy to join, we do need to keep some perspective. The péloton's harsh reaction may well be about perceiving her as a cheat (and is certainly about a feeling of resentment about preferential treatment in respect of the covering up of the suspension), but it is also coloured in part by her being seen as a selfish and arrogant champion who blames others when she doesn't get her way. The suspension she has avoided is for missed tests, not for positive tests. Of course, there is always the possibility that the former were in order to prevent the latter (was it Hamilton who testified about hiding behind his sofa for an hour when the tester showed up when he was glowing so the tester would think he'd gone out and mark it a miss?), but that is nothing more than conjecture at this point.
Lizzie missing tests and being cleared is not the evidence of a nation-wide doping conspiracy some want to paint it as, at least not in and of itself and in isolation. However, her behaviour in and around the situation has shown that she is still reluctant to take responsibility for those errors that persist, and that she has no qualms about claiming honesty and integrity whilst simultaneously lying or bending the truth to fit the story she wants to present, which will always make it difficult for fans to show the trust in her she has lost and is begging to have back.
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