Monday, February 11, 2008

Monday Roundup

News
The CyclingNews says that all doping controls from the controversial late night testing done on Team Lampre have been determined to be negative.

Law.com carries a detailed report on a ruling denying immunity for non-governmental entities that may resonate for USADA and HRO.

ESPN reports some funniness in Tennis, where an investigation has been going on into potential match-fixing. Bill Hue comments below:

Here is an intersting quote from the head of the ATP. Perhaps he hasn't gotten the memo that anyone accused of throwing matches or providing "inside" information about their health to professional gamblers must be guilty if 3 people file affidavits attesting to that fact and/or circumstantial evidence exists to establish it:


"For its part, the ATP has had to strike the delicate balance of investigating a highly unusual betting pattern without unfairly indicting one of the sport's premier players.

"We never at any point mentioned Davydenko and went to great lengths, in fact, to stress that nobody should mention any player because their reputations were at stake," ATP executive chairman Etienne de Villiers says.

"[Davydenko] is a player, whether he is guilty or not, who deserves due process," de Villiers adds. "He deserves to live by something we all live by, which is, 'We are innocent until we are proven guilty.'"

Are we, then?

Someone get this over to Floyd Landis ASAP.


Blogs
Peloton Jim writes about the fight between good and evil, this time in the guises of Rock Racing and Slipstream. You can guess which team wears the white hats and which one wears the black. BTW argyle is now cool again.

Chris at Podium Cafe thinks the games the UCI and ASO are playing is an altered version of "Spy vs Spy", and he wonders why anyone would pick sides. And where is a PR firm when you need one:

Another reason not to pick sides: why bother? Neither spy gave readers a reason to even think of liking them. Sound familiar? Seriously, the "organization" of Cycling seems to suffer from the same disease that afflicted the Red Sox management for my entire childhood: a belief that I was lucky to have them. Has Cycling ever hired a communications team? A PR firm? Has anyone ever been tasked with telling people in a calm and reasoned way what the hell is going on with the sport? Ah, nope. Instead, we're supposed to be satisfied by dueling, unintelligible hot air blasts. And if that's not good enough for us, well, I mean, why would a sport need a fan base?

8 comments:

Dave said...

Is there some reason we can't get full text feeds of the posts? The RSS feed truncates the post so that we only get an "above the fold" type presentation. I subscribe to the comment feeds...how about full text for the postings?

DBrower said...

Yes, there is a reason. When the full text goes out the RSS feed, you have no idea how many people are reading something.

TBV

Dave said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dave said...

Sorry, the url didn't paste right.

This problem has been solved, and in fact switching to feedburner provides even more detailed stats:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/09/19/
redirect-blogger-rss-feed-to-feedburner-for
-detailed-statistics-and-monetize-ads/

That should be all one line.

You can, of course, choose not to turn on full text. I'm just a reader who would like it.

DBrower said...

OK, now the reason is inertia, and taking the 45 minutes or so it'd take to figure it out.

thanks for the tip; no promises.

TBV

Laura Challoner, DVM said...

There is an interesting article over on ESPN.com about professional tennis players and the concept that certain matches may have involved cheating, beneficial to professional gamblers:

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/news/story?id=3235411&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos2

Here is an intersting quote from the head of the ATP. Perhaps he hasn't gotten the memo that anyone accused of throwing matches or providing "inside" information about their health to professional gamblers must be guilty if 3 people file affidavits attesting to that fact and/or circumstantial evidence exists to establish it:


"For its part, the ATP has had to strike the delicate balance of investigating a highly unusual betting pattern without unfairly indicting one of the sport's premier players.



"We never at any point mentioned Davydenko and went to great lengths, in fact, to stress that nobody should mention any player because their reputations were at stake," ATP executive chairman Etienne de Villiers says.



"[Davydenko] is a player, whether he is guilty or not, who deserves due process," de Villiers adds. "He deserves to live by something we all live by, which is, 'We are innocent until we are proven guilty.'"

Are we, then?

Someone get this over to Floyd Landis ASAP.

strbuk said...

Hey Bill, that story has been floating around for quite awhile and is really interesting to me. As for sending along the "due process" quote to Floyd, don't you know it's different and doesn't apply if you're a cyclist and have been accused of doping?

str

Laura Challoner, DVM said...

I'm sure he'd be gratified to know that we are all presumed innocent, that nondisclosure of identity prior to adjudication is not only appropriate but mandatory, because once your reputation is gone, there is no bringing it back and that whether a person is guilty or not, they are entitled to due process.

All that would come as news to Floyd and to every accused cyclist. Travis Tygart, Bill Bock, Dick Young, Matt Barnett and Dick Pound might profoundly disagree.