I hate being a total copycat, but I can’t think of a better title of this post than the exact same title that an article at Velonews today.
According the article, Vincenzo sent his own personal letter to the UCI to voice his opinion, and support, of his team.
In the letter, he says, “The team must continue to participate in all competitions. It is in the best interests of cycling, of sport and of justice.”
Of sport and of justice? Well then, by all means, let’s welcome them with open arms and forget the past. Bygones should be bygones.
Maybe Vincenzo should have sent them his earlier opinion. In December, 2014, he said, “The problems in this team are also in many others. I don’t think our team is the worst because in other teams there are worse people than there are here, I won’t name names.”
I guess things changed in the last 3 months. Problems of last December have cleared, and now, “Astana is a symbol of clean and honest sport”.
Maybe Vincenzo should have testified to CIRC and named names. Seems he thinks he knows names. At least he implied that in December.
Nibali also wrote about the Padua investigation dossier that states that Astana was working with Dr. Ferrari for two years. Not the whole team, just the team director, Alexandre Vinokourov, plus 17 of their riders.
About this, he says, “The dossier can’t be used. The documents still have not been presented in the court, and so can’t be considered credible.”
I’m sure that the prosecutors that did this investigation probably just made up the 550 pages they gathered and that they really did no work and are just picking on Astana because they are Kazakh team, messin‘ around in their sport, bicycle racing. Bicycle racing is an Italian sport, not an Eastern European sport. They stole our rising star, so we’ll get back at them and make up a bunch of shit so they can’t race. Makes total sense to me. Completely not credible.
Vincenzo is sitting in Tenerife now, a very credible place to train, according to CIRC and Chris Froome. It is the same place that Alexandre Vinokourov and Maxim Iglinskiy used to train for their respective wins at Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Too bad Maxim and his brother both tested positive for EPO last season, while racing for Astana.
I don’t really appreciate, Vincenzo Nibali, supposedly a model rider and spokesman for “clean sport“, to spew silliness for his own benefit. If Vincenzo is truly interested in competing in a clean and fair sport, he needs to acknowledge and confirm what he knows to be truth and then behave accordingly. If he decided to race for a team, such as Astana, then he needs to understand the potential pitfalls that decision had.
And one, which seems imminent, is that his team won’t be racing as a PRO Tour team. Only seems right.
This is probably the UCI dope control that is sitting at the summit of the 3,718 meter volcano on Tennerife. I’m sure Vincenzo is being tested on a daily basis, even though it has been shown to be a “drug testing free” area.
What about the post you were going to do when jv invited you to hang out with Danielson and vandevelde while they got tested before the TDF a year or 2 ago.
Steve,
Couldn’t agree more. Every time Nibali opens his mouth, he only digs the hole deeper. And to think people (used to) consider him a clean rider. It seems now he garnered that reputation by simply speaking out against doping. However, everything he has said in the months since his TdF victory suggest the opposite.
Astana needs to go. Vino and co. also.
I don’t know what the Kazakhs did to the UCI, but whatever it was, it must have been bad.
Sure, Astana World Tour squad is clean. Clean like a few other squads with grand tour winners in them. Just like that last American grand tour winner. What happen to him?
Tejay’s clean too. Yup. That’s why he had lower-ranked results like a LeMond, or Hinault. Right? Because we know USA Cycling’s owner, Thom Wiesel, runs squeaky clean teams back before even Subaru-Montgomery.
We know for sure the UCI has hidden positives and the only thing the UCI has done since is to make anti-doping MORE secretive than ever. Call it the WWE at the WT level and abandon any pretense it’s a sport.
This would have made a better headline on April 1st.
Get over it Mr. Channel Zero….throwing van Garderen under you paranoid bus is getting old. Yes, Tejay is not Lemond….but who is? He at least won numerous National Championships….2nd at Tour de Avenir as a Junior. I have been tolerating you stupidity long enough…NOT EVERYONE is DOPING! VG has had some really bad days in the TDF….which have kept him off the podium….meanwhile Nibali looks like he is breathing through his nose on the climbs…WTF! Did Tejay kick your ass as a Junior or what? If you are always going after him..what about Talansky? Him too? He beats Tejay as much as Tejay finishes ahead of him? I raced hard in the ’80’s….Lined up a few times with the guy who runs this blog…I was never elite, but I was close….I can tell when someone is ”juiced”…TVG is not. Get a friggin’ life.
“You might want to ask Floyd about his old boss. See if that leads to your doorstep?” Jonathan Vaughters
I’ve written this before, but I’ll try again. If all of you believe everyone at the top of the sport is a) doped and b) a liar, why do you bother with it? Harping on and on on forums like this, watching via pirate internet feed or pay broadcasts, going to the websites for the latest news, etc. Why? It’s like a woman who keeps going back to a husband who beats her! Why? Some folks just like to bitch and moan and if it wasn’t pro cycling you’d be whining about something else instead? But of course YOUR favorite rider is CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN though you don’t know anymore about what he is actually doing than you know what Nibali is (or is not) doing. Please note that this letter was written by Nibali’s lawyer which was plainly stated in La Gazzetta dello Sport today online. A dumb idea? Sure, but lawyers are like that, just think of BigTex’ army of crap-slingers. I don’t know if Nibali is or was doped and neither do ANY of you. We all know Astana came out of the ashes of a dope scandal and has done little to make anyone think things have been cleaned up where the Kazaks and Russians are concerned. Some of the Italian management was around during some famous doping scandals as well. Guilty or not, I think Astana needs to be busted down to the Continental status since they have continued to appear to not-much-care about the appearance of scandal. This could show the world that cycling has truly changed from scandal management under the previous UCI regime to one where they truly want to make it very possible for clean riders to win.
I imagine Vino telling all the Italians when they were hired that there would be ZERO problems in the future despite the team’s dodgy past. We now know that was a lot of baloney, Nibali might end up being an innocent victim here, but there’s no doubt he knew of this team’s dodgy past when he signed up to get the fat paychecks they offered. He (and Aru, etc.) may suffer the consequences. But then, if Astana’s not at the big races, who will you choose to vilify and whine about next?
There is no clean sport. Never has and never will be. Even chess is dirty. Unfortunately. Maybe I’m just depressed, what do I know… but I feel it’s a proven fact by now. Beyond all doubt.
Jesus H people are stupid! TJ and Talansky are clean? What are you guys smoking? Give up on cleaning up the sport and watch bowling or worse, soccer? What the heck- is it wrong to expect athletes, especially cyclists, to at least try to be clean, try to race with ethics, try to be role models for the youngsters- youngsters who are staying away from the sport by the millions? You can spot who is clean? Good one, I can spot who is dirty far easier- do they have a number on? Ok, maybe not everyone who has a number on- but certainly any Classics or Grand Tour winner. Watch THE ARMSTRONG LIES and hear it from the horse’s mouth. Good movie by the way, even if you don’t care about the doping one way or the other- the race footage alone is awesome! And I came away agreeing with Lance- he won those Tours because everyone- EVERYONE- was doing it.
“To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
You don’t need to read the entire book, just read Chapter 6.
Is Trudi still working for BMC? Or did she finally have enough of the team that is as dirty as all the rest? Greg VanAvermaet getting popped for taking (illegal) baby medicine is just the tip of the iceberg. Look out, TeJay. You’re next!
another post on drugs… lol… your posts are either about you braging and bumming a free room and food, are they’re about drugs..
They should run the same Audit on team sky they they ran on Astana – even better yet every pro cycling team should have the same audit. Sky definitely have some team policies around doping – unfortunately most of it probably falls within the rules, but little of it would be safe for the riders, and be within the “spirit” for fair competition. Their team Dr wasn’t selected for his ability to treat medical conditions, in fact he seems to have great difficultly in treating basic illness’s, which is very apparent with both Froome and Porte, both becoming seriously ill while enjoying very frequent contact to a Dr. I suspect the cocktail of drugs they are taking masked the symptoms of whatever basic illness they had, until it became a serious infection. So if hes not there to treat illness what is he there for?
They WILL run the audits on the others. Astana just got to go first since they seemed to be flouting the rules so flagrantly. Keep in mind the “But Mommy, the others did it too!” excuse has been pretty much used up by now, mostly by BigTex.