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Operacion Puerto / drugs in sport

Sigmund Fraud

Sigmund Fraud

893 all the way.
If you didn't know what it is, there a ton of info here:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operaci%C3%B3n_Puerto_doping_case

Essentially the biggest doping case in professional sport ever uncovered, Puerto is the Spanish polices investigation of the infamous Doctor Fuentes and his numerous treatments, all of which relate to blood doping and the use of erythropoietin (EPO). Plainly put the good doctor had a almost completely undetectable racket going on and was charging a high price for his services.

Cycling has kopped the lions share of the flak. 56 pro cyclists were implicated, some coughed for it, some flatly denied involvement. Puerto meant the two favourites for last years tour de france (Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso) were withdrawn from last years race; both were subsequently sacked from their teams. Ullrich retired earlier this year while Basso moved to fill Lance Armstrongs boots at Discovery Channel...only to resign last week when Puerto flared up again, admitting Fuentes had some of his blood in his lab.

The case clearly has legs yet and will rumble on and on, taking with it no doubt the credibility (if there was any left) of cycling and its biggest race, the tour de france. In the eyes of many, especially those with a casual interest in the sport, cycling is finished - not just because of Puerto but as the last nail in a rotten coffin.

There were initially reports of 200 athletes linked to Puerto but so far only cyclists have been implicated - there were rumours of tennis players, runners, F1 drivers and La Liga footballers also using Fuentes' 'services'...

So my question is this: do you think its just cycling and athletics that have a doping problem? These two sports crop up again and again whenever theres a discussion about drugs in sport; or do you think (as I do) that theres just too much money in professional sport for more sports not to be tempted to cheat and use drugs. How would you feel about your team/favourite sportsperson if you found out they were doping all along?
 
I think that cycling and athletics will always be the sports with the biggest problem because they are the sports which arguably require the greatest concentration of athletic power .... be it a burst (as in sprinting or jumping, or short-distance track cycling), strength (as in most field events) or endurance (as in long-distance running or road-race cycling).

But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it's more widespread in football and rugby than has hitherto been admitted.
 
I concur. Whilst there is skill involved in both cycling and athletics, they are probably the two sports with the greatest concentration of raw fitness and athletic prowess in the popular spectrum. With football (and perhaps rugby, I'm not sure), you can get away with being a fat, unfit fuck who does little work if you have the skills and know the nuances of the sport. There also isn't the concentration of monetary capital invested in cycling that there is in football (certainly in Britain, although I appreciate it's massive audience on the continent).
 
Whilst I agree with the comments about certain sports relying more on raw fitness and athletic prowess than others its easy to overlook the reason athletes dope. Performance enhancement ie on the field of play is only one side of the coin; drugs like EPO not only massively increase your performance, they also increase your ability to recover from that performance and do it again and again.

The issue becomes more complex with cases like that of Chelsea's blood spinning programme in 2005 (see here), where artificially boosting players haematocrit levels to speed up recovery from injury was used. I was quite surprised to hear about it when it broke, cos its pretty much the same technique that got Tyler Hamilton a 2 year ban in cycling. Chelsea stopped doing it under advice that it fell foul of FIFA edicts on doping.
 
I know :( , I got sick of posting up links to the unfolding car crash thats rolling on.

Yesterday was an interesting day, as well as Riis's fess up (surely the worst kept secret in cycling, the man's nickname was 'mr 60%' ffs) there was the admission by the Italian Olympic Committee that Ivan Basso faces a 21 month ban for amitting to being part of operacion puerto then saying he only 'attempted' to dope but changed his mind:rolleyes: , ...yeah right.

They'd backed him up till now but now he'll be hung out to dry - and rightly so. He'll be 31 years old when his ban ends, still room for a couple of tour de france wins at least eh?:rolleyes: :mad:

I'll keep posting up the grim details as they happen, let this thread be a monument to the terrible state of my favourite sport.

:(
 
That means that virtually every TdF winner I can remember has marks against their name, however justified; Riis, Ullrich, Pantani, Armstrong (however much it might be the European press) and Landis. Only Indurain as far as I know was spotless.
 
Indurains 5 victories in the Tdf were at the height of the EPO madness...personally I think Lemond was the last clean Tdf winner...in 1990:(
 
It is very sad, because discounting the drugs issue, there are few greater sporting spectacles in the world than the Tour de France.
 
Yes, but we have to ask ourselves some difficult questions there, because we the audience are complicit in the war of attrition that i the tdf - and therefore also complicit in our wonderment at athletes performing the superhuman for three weeks straight. Are we not also part of the doping problem?

There was a great quote by Chris Boardman from one of the mid 90s tours: he was beaten in an individual TT into 5th place by Riis, Zulle, Virenque and Ullrich to which he apologised to a journo and said 'sorry, I can only train to do whats humanly possible'. I doesn't make sense until now, but those four names have all been busted for doping. Lol, the idea of Virenque beating Boardman in a 60km TT, thats almost as crazy as Danilo di Luca leading the giro d'italia and blitzing Simoni, Garzelli and Cunego up the mountains...oh hang on...:mad:
 
The more that comes out the worse it gets. Yep, Lemond may well have been the last clean Tour winner, but even then...who knows?

Indurain...innocent until proven guilty but some of those climbs....hmmmm....:(

I'm not convinced by the Armstrong arguments - I mean there might be evidence out there but L'Equipe's constant badgering, which goes well beyond the issue and into xenophobia makes me hope it's all bollocks.
 
Armstrong..hmm lets see. Three of his closest lieutenants have tested positive - Hamilton, Landis and Heras - and we're supposed to believe that he was able to ride on the tails of these 3 until the base of a col and then drop them for dead whilst being clean? This is a man whose average speeds over 7 tdfs went up every year but one, despite getting older. He was also able to come within a whisker of Pantani's Alpe d'Huez absolute record time in the 2004 tdf ITT - a rider who though awesomely talented was also on the dope.

In fact if you look at the alpe d'huez times its a real insight into how times have changed, take a look here:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpe_d'Huez

In the late 80s it was taking Lemond and Delgado over 40mins to get up there - bikes have got better but not that much better, now sub 39 mins is the norm and sub 38 minutes for a select few.

Anything that looks impossible usually is.
 
I'm not denying that it looks fishy at all and there have been plenty of rumours around various tests, Balco involvement etc.

But there's still a total lack of concrete evidence. That's what annoyed me about L'Equipe's vitriolic attacks on Lance, speaking as if a case has been proven. Not whether there's a case to answer, which I think there is.

It's all very depressing either way...the idea that Bugno, Super Mario, Mayo etc...the people I cheered for years may have been cheating. When the Virenque news first appeared it was bad enough because he'd always been a favourite.
 
Indurain...innocent until proven guilty but some of those climbs....hmmmm....
Click to expand...
He used to look quite pained I remember as he tried to keep pace with Rominger, before blitzing everyone in the TTs. That's how I remember him winning.
 
stavros said:
He used to look quite pained I remember as he tried to keep pace with Rominger, before blitzing everyone in the TTs. That's how I remember him winning.
Click to expand...

Pretty much how I remembered it aswell. Plus '96 when he fell to pieces in the mountains and blew the whole tour.
 
Only Olano (another big Spaniad) came near him in the long TTs, but he didn't have the staying power to haul that weight up the cols.
 
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