Re:
Enrico Gimondi said:
Watch the documentary "Blood Sweat & Gears: Racing Clean to the Tour de France". It follows the Garmin team around in the 2008 season as they want to get invited to the Tour. VDV talks about that experience in it........... or a very similar one He says he has the best performance of anyone on the team in a particular test, but was told he was second. He was happy that he was second, behind only Lance. Later he found out that he actually had the best performance but the team didn't want Lance to not be first. VDV said he understood and wouldn't want the team leader not to be first.
D-Queued and others, I believe the original "story" came out of JV's mouth (Jonathan Vaughters) and it was a pre-season camp with Bruyneel and the team in America, so it would be sometime around 1999 or 2000 January, it would have to be after the first year of Lance at USPS, so after that Vuelta 3rd on general classification in 1998, or was it fourth overall? I think it was third, and I think the Vuelta was already in September on the calendar. Would it be a training camp before the TTT disaster in 2000 or 2001 when they took the fall and Vande Velde was one of those to crash (I could be wrong on this memory). Cos no doubt Armstrong and Bruyneel would have held it against them. I am thinking it was probably before, it was probably in 1999 or 2000, before Armstrong was Armstrong. But, my attempt at triangulating when this story was from, if perhaps futile, since the story may well be confected...
so it is after cancer, post Cofidis.
The story is about a "
lactic test". Simple blood *** measurement test of the lactic acid in the blood. This was JV's words around 2007/8 when JV was attempting to build the mythology around Slipstream and Christian VdV,
I cannot for once believe there is this dovetailing of two similar stories regarding Bruyneel falsifying test results.
what would not be surprising, is if Bruyneel falsified one result. And indeed, there is a dependent variable, notably, Bruyneel's propensity to lying and his fealty to truth (lack of). it would be nothing for Bruyneel to lie. Howver, these two "stories" are too similar, to believe they have not been confected. Now this is a quandary, is it possible to smear Bruyneel, when Bruyneel is an utterly incredulous individual to begin?
So, even if D-Q read it in a book from critical journalists like Wheelmen authers Albergotti and OConnell, and their stringent and rigorous fact-checking, JV, Vaughters has already managed to poison the well on this story for me.
It will go down under the file of one of these cycling myths. It could well be true, as I said, both elements could be true. It is probably zero question, the Vande Velde had a prodigious talent. Most in the pro ranks do.
But these are the reasons, why I cannot give my unstinting belief to this tale.
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