posted by Patrick Herron at 10:06 PM
I'm a former (very) amateur cyclist with debilitating arthritis in my left knee. I live my dreams of cycling glory vicariously through people like Lance and Floyd.
My bias in Floyd's favor is offset by the familiarity I developed with performance-enhancing drugs while in high school; I *know* the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs is far more prevalent than is being reported. Later in life I had a good friend who was advised by his college head coach that if he wanted to make the NFL he should take steroids. He did take steroids, and he did make the NFL. That coach is now a division I coacn at a big sports program. If Floyd used, it wouldn't be shocking. Cycling has been dirty for over two decades.
Having said that, I have serious and well-founded doubts that organization ssuch as the WADA or UCI can be effective at making determinations about drug use, at least not without checks and balances and good independent oversight.
My understanding of the underlying issues goes beyond the mere anecdotal. I've worked professionally as a researcher in gene toxicology at the NIEHS and later helped start two organizations in the US federal government that evaluate governmental test method standards both in the US and internationally. Let's just say I'm accustomed the the bureaucratic influences involved in setting standards like the ones used for detecting drug use in pro athletes. I have been first-hand witness to a phenomenon worse than groupthink: political machinations, dictated by greed, deliberately undermining the quality of well-researched test standards.
In December 2006 I completed graduate school. I studied the adoption of innovations by pharmaceutical companies for my master's thesis. My academic study focused on biomedical informatics: consumer health, evidence-based medicine, clinical and biotech data mining, and biomedical text mining. I took the Summer of 2006 off from school, working as an enterprise architect responsible for the reorganization of the SAS corporate support site, optimizing findability for the 4 million or so SAS users. I performed a great deal of language use analysis geared towards making sense out of large collections of expert domain documents, the domain of expertise in this case being statistical analysis.
I am currently seeking employment and have recently enjoyed some good interviews. I haven't found the right match yet. I want to get it right.
In my spare time I write poetry. I've written five books to date but have stopped writing for the moment. The second book of mine to be published will be released this fall by Effing Press. The forthcoming book, written by my puppet Lester, has enjoyed a cult status among poets for years.
2 Comments:
Very interesting thought. I thhink this help go back to the suggestion Landis has raised of a possible Agenda and it should come as no surprise that Dick Pound has finally provided that agenda:
'The Montreal-based organization urged governments to ratify the UNESCO convention which makes the terms of the World Anti-Doping Code enforceable by law.
So far, only 15 countries have signed the convention. The treaty will only come into effect when 30 countries have signed. The next opportunity to ratify the convention will come at a meeting of European sports ministers in Moscow in October.' (Exerpt from TSN.ca)
Doesn't this 'new' allegation also conveniently serve WADA purposes? They can finally move away from Armstrong and use this new scandal to call Landis a cheat and not accept any hint whatsoever of process problems.
I can think of someone else who used a similar tactic when they couldn't get the guy they wanted, George Bush. Landis is WADA's IRAQ! Feel free to expand on all the wonderful comparison opportunities here!
The limiting factor in Landis' case is the UCI not the WADA. That is to say, the UCI has the WADA run testing for the UCI. If the WADA had any credible basis for a lawsuit against the UCI, then it would be in the UCI's interest to strike a deal and back off of the WADA. You know, keep things friendly. the agreement might be to give the WADA more latitiude in the margins of the testing guidance. Or Pound may have been blowing hot air. But Pound is a talented and experienced attorney and certainly no one should take a suit threat from him lightly. It is a potential factor here that to my knowledge has received no scrutiny in the press.
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