Fallout VIII

News
The Cleveland Plain Dealer opines that in the wake of the Landis scandal, among others, people are skeptical of Dara Torres' recent swimming accomplishments. While understandable, it's still sad.

The Vallejo Times Herald dumps on Landis, while being inspired by the Olympic Trials.

The Loop provides "prime snark" for Floyd Landis.

VeloNews correspondent Andrew Hood speaks with Greg LeMond who can "believe" in the Tour again, and doesn't place all of the blame for cycling's near downfall on Floyd Landis:

I can believe in cycling that is going to change in a very positive way. The sport needed what’s happened to it. It didn’t change after Festina, and it didn’t change after [Operación] Puerto, or [Floyd] Landis. It needed (what happened) last year, because all of a sudden, there was a crisis. The pressure of sponsors pulling out – then it had to change. I’ve been pushing for an independent anti-doping agency, not associated with the Tour, not the UCI. The anti-doping control people need to be completely independent. They shouldn’t care if cycling is destroyed by a positive.

We have to make sure that the tests are fair. We have to go forward. The biological passport looks at the chemistry of the body, but we also need to be doing testing on wattage and VO2 max, but it all comes down to genetics. When you dope, you can change your oxygen intake by 15 to 25 percent, so by the end of the Tour, you can see a 35 to 40 percent increase in power output. Even if you’re the hardest-working person, you cannot do it. We have to get back to a point where talent alone can win the Tour de France. Someone is going to win this Tour, but it might go 5km slower, it would probably be more dramatic.

Blogs
WADAwatch continues with part II of the "Post-Landis Stress Syndrome" with a piece that notes the award in the case pretty well dismembered the Quigley Rule that had seemed to govern doping adjudication.

The Quigley case had been a guiding light for the duration of these last thirteen years: a beacon giving authority from the Court for Arbitration in Sport towards the legal creation of a fair system.

The fight against doping is arduous and it may require strict rules. But the rule-makers and rule-appliers must begin by being strict themselves. Regulations that may affect the careers of dedicated athletes must be predictable. They must emanate from duly authorised bodies. They must be adopted in constitutionally proper ways. They should not be the product of an obscure process of accretion. Athletes and officials should not be confronted with a thicket of mutually qualifying or even contradictory rules that can be understood only on the basis of the de facto practice over the course of many years by a small group of insiders.

[Ww:italics added]
[CAS: USA Shooting & Quigley v. UIT, 1995 (CAS 94/129)]

Noting the WADA code has been drifting away from this:

[D]uring its original drafting process and the recent redrafting exercises that have produced the WADA Codes (first the 2003 version, and as redrafted (through 2007), taking effect before 2009), WADA institutionalized an attitude that it had to act tough against tough actors, and that it could do so by creating tough rules. Whether the WADA Code represents 'Tough Love', it also has, in retrospect, revealed a disdain approaching arrogance for fairness and equality ('Tough LUCK'?) between its various Signatories toward the Athletes whose lives are affected by accusations and convictions for doping.

The problem is that rules are squishy, allowing and encouraging "judicial interpretation" favorable to those inside the system (i.e., Richard Young):

The Quigley–defined aim to create a fair system, for all concerned, echoed the IOC, and the CoE. WADA was conceived to help this happen (and long long before WADAwatch), and yet through this Landis Decision from CAS, it really has to be stated that it now appears that the 'small group of insiders' has won again, who prefer judicial interpretation to clear, concise Quigley–based rules.

And many of the complaints about Landis' strategy have missed something for reasons one can guess:

Sadly, WADA didn't discern the fine and honorable nuance between:

“an aggressive campaign against the anti–doping movement”

and

“an aggressive campaign against the implementation and
administration of the anti–doping movement
by a small group of insiders”

Later,

CAS disassociates itself with its own words it had first argued, and wished to erase all thoughts of the 'sloppiness' – 'untrustworthy' dialectic from the AAA Decision, with a phrase in its final section on costs. There, CAS stated

“all that the Appellant has established after a
wide–ranging attack on LNDD is that there were some
minor procedural imperfections.”

How are we...

– and future 'victims' of the legal perfection (?) of -
- WADA and its Labs –

... to balance the CAS ruling in Section VIII C (from which we received para. 259) on “administrative deficiencies, bad laboratory practice, procedural error...” which it lumped together inclusively with “... other honest inadequacies”, against this latter “minor procedural imperfections”?


Quigley is quickly sinking in interpretive quicksand...


Remember, though: 'departures' cannot exist under Art. 6.4.

Go read.


Re:Cycling watched the "disingenuous" Versus interview with "inarticulate" clean cycling "spokesman" Greg LeMond and has some thoughts to share on it.

Kalidurga says

Dick Pound and WADA made such asses out of themselves so many times over the last two years that they've shredded their integrity and left me rooting for the riders.

Violence Worker is ready to move on:

Well, it's back to the back of the peleton for the bicyclists. We have an all star game to get ready for.