cfforum

From Velonews:

http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/13619.0.html

Seems like Kashechkin's attorney is taking the human rights approach in defending his client.

To quote the article:

"Kashechkin's lawyer is Luc Misson, who co-defended Jean-Marc Bosman after the Belgian footballer took his team to the European Court of Justice and won over "restraint of trade" in 1995.

Misson will argue in a Belgian court on Tuesday that sports bodies such as the UCI and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) have no legal right to submit athletes to doping tests.

In essence, he believes that sports organizations, because they are run privately and are not public bodies, have no legal right to interfere in the lives of individuals. "

I belive someone said this same stuff on the forum when the whole Landis topic was first posted. We'll see how it comes out.

If they win, this will turn WADA and the IOC upside down on its head.

That is what I'm hoping happens here.

The system in place pits the athletes against some amorphous set of "authorities" that have taken the bizarre and in my mind overly punitive approach with very little energy spent on prevention or education. The system assumes that there are cheaters and "cuts corners" scientifically to find them. Benefit of the doubt is given to the Labs and WADA/UCI vs. the athletes and they have the attitude "better to wrongly convict one rider and catch 10 cheaters....."

Once an athlete has served his "sentence," unless he prostrates himself for perpetuity as David Millar has, he is not likely to get a team to put him in a big event ever again (See Tyler Hamilton comments, and now Danilo DeLuca)

Guilt by association rules the day - if I went to a suspected doctor for amoxycillin I can get banned for 3 months. Evidence is not needed nor paid attention to. When someone blows the lab procedures to bits and shows how they are not following their own procedures, it is disregarded.

I think that goes against everything we think of as civilized in our society.

Until the Athletes and groups like WADA come together and jointly agree on the rules of the road, this won't improve. It has to be a partnership. The sport needs athletes and the athletes need the sport.

Today - the assumption seems to be that the athletes are expendable. But if all the riders failed to show up at the starting line for the 2008 TDF, the sport would wake up in a hurry. You would end up with "replacement riders" and "replacement teams" in the TDF and millions of dollars would be lost instantly.

You can criticize MLB or the NFL, but they seem to be slowly rooting out cheaters and sanctioning them without imploding or creating the witch hunt that typifies Cycling today.

I always ask people "what if Floyd is truly innocent?" Dethrone a champion and appear silly on the world stage and are you really "cleaning up" the sport? There will always be cheaters. Cycling will NEVER be 100% clean, unless you want to put a bunch of 6 year olds on the starting line.

If you start with that premise and assume that you need partnership with the riders, then you have a basis to build on.

My two euros....