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Vancansoleil in the Pro Tour or dead meat ?

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Mar 26, 2010
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Mambo95 said:
3. Why do people think that the ASO/RCS would be any better than the UCI? They are profit making companies and as such are unelected and unaccountable to the sport. Their only obligation is to the shareholders. This isn't a recipe for a corruption free sport.
A) They can't be worse. B) the currently elected clowns are unaccountable.
 
Oct 25, 2010
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Mambo95 said:
Three points on this:

1. First of all, no-one's been stripped of their licence. The UCI have just said they'll consider it, as they should. I doubt anyone will be stripped of anything. This seems like a warning shot to me -'hire returning dopers at your own peril'.

I like the message, but I find it strange that the UCI is considering something that they will not do and if they would, it'd be unfair, I think. Besides: "at your own peril" seems too much for me. If riders are back from suspension, they either are back or they aren't. In that respect I don't see any fundamental difference between Riccò and Millar (who both claimed to stop the doping). Does not mean that Vacansoleil should be signing Riccò por even believing him. But still, THAT is not a crime, I think.

Mambo95 said:
2. There's a fundamental difference between the Ricco and Contador cases. Namely that Contador wasn't a Saxo rider when he tested positive. Nor did Saxo know about it when they signed him. Saxo can't be blamed.
On the other hand Ricco was a Vacansoleil rider when he had his recent troubles, plus had a previous sanction against him.

I'm not sure if you're referring to my remarks on that, but if you are, I was specifically referring to the Mosquera case, not the Riccò case. The Riccò case does put Vacansoleil in some bad situation (whatever that may be called in English), but the Mosquera case is not a Vacansoleil-problem. I think it would be a VERY bad thing, ethically, to kick Mosquera out right now or to hold Vacansoleil responsible for the Mosquera case, like it would be wrong to hold Saxo responsible for the Contador thing.

(your other remark was not about my post. I don't actually have an opinion about this politics thing. I want to watch guys ride bikes as fast as possible, nothing much else)
 
Feb 1, 2010
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Angliru said:
...and what was Mosquera's background prior to joining Vaconsoleil that makes it questionable? I must be missing something.

Suddenly on the podium in a GT in his thirties. Never racing outside Spain (that notoriously anti-doping paradise). Do you think HTC or Garmin would have signed him? I'm not suggesting this is evidence for a ban, just that sometimes you know signing a certain person will bring trouble. If like Vacansoleil you sign two people with very suspect records, you're asking for trouble.

Take Di Luca, the riules are such that it's fine to sign him, I have a problem with that, but hey that's the rules. But given he's now served two bans for doping would you put your trust in him being clean?

I'm not trying to have a big anti-doping rant here, just pointing out that some riders come with a lot more baggage than others, and if you sign them you can't be surprised when it all goes belly up.
 
dougzz99 said:
Suddenly on the podium in a GT in his thirties. Never racing outside Spain (that notoriously anti-doping paradise). Do you think HTC or Garmin would have signed him? I'm not suggesting this is evidence for a ban, just that sometimes you know signing a certain person will bring trouble. If like Vacansoleil you sign two people with very suspect records, you're asking for trouble.

Take Di Luca, the riules are such that it's fine to sign him, I have a problem with that, but hey that's the rules. But given he's now served two bans for doping would you put your trust in him being clean?

I'm not trying to have a big anti-doping rant here, just pointing out that some riders come with a lot more baggage than others, and if you sign them you can't be surprised when it all goes belly up.

Well, it wasn't so much that he got a podium. He had raced well in the Vuelta in the past finishing 5th, 4th and 5th the three years before. The strange thing was that eventhough he had those very good results in the Vuelta he was still riding for a small spanish team rather than having been picked up by one of the bigger teams. That is what suggests that the teams knew something that we don't since they stayed away from him for all those years inspite of his results.
 
May 28, 2010
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O.K. I saw this in a CN article, and the innaccuracy was so blatant and ridiculous I needed to point it out...

Regarding the continuing doping case of Ezequiel Mosquera and the ProTeam license of Vacansoleil:
The Dutch outfit secured its ProTeam licence thanks largely to the points accrued by Mosquera's results last season - before he was signed by the team.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/mosquera-doping-case-still-undecided

Vacansoleil expressely asked that Mosquera's points not count towards their ranking as soon as it came out that he had tested positive. Therfore, they ranked high enough to gain ProTeam status without his points. This statement in the article is just completely false.

Back to the general topic, I think aside from signing these two riders (Mosquera and Ricco) who were obviously a little questionable, Vacansoleil has had a very strong anti-doping stance, as evidenced by their firing of Ricco. I don't think they've done anything to merit the loss of their license.
 
Oct 29, 2009
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hector5950 said:
Why don't the teams, riders, ASO and RSC get together and form a cycling program outside of the UCI? They would control all the riders, the top teams and the overwhelming majority of the top races. Set up their own deal and tell the UCI to pound sand.

For a (brief) while it looked like the ASO was kinda heading in that direction if the UCI would continue play hard ball over doping control and race status, when the power play between the UCI and ASO came to a crescendo.

Then teams faced with the stark choice between the FDU and the ToC, or the TdF, Paris-Nice, Giro, etc, they "inexplicitly" declared loyalty to ASO, and the UCI backed down.

When mr A died, mrs A took over, the ASO director who was confronting the UCI head on was replaced. Instead another A was installed at the helm, and we have the new ASO, who doesn't want to confront the UCI too forceful, and instead seems rather content to split the future of cycling up between the two of them, so it benefits both the UCI and ASO, and mostly them, at the cost of other prominent race organisers.

I sometimes wonder what the doping situation would be like today, if Baal and Leblanc had been put in charge of cleaning up the sport in 2005.
 

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