There was a lot of talk about this but it seems to have died down over the last week.
One of the things that really bothers me about this situation is that the EPO test has returned a number of false positives recently, but no one seems to mention this in the same context as the retrospective testing of Armstrong’s samples. Perhaps I’m getting out of my depth here. The science lab at school was definitely not a place I liked to spend time. But when you look at it you have:
- A test that has returned false positives.
- 6 year old B samples.
- No A samples.
- Extremely questionable handling of the samples and associated (supposedly private) test data.
The thought of all these allegations being true saddens me, and I suppose there is a chance that there is some truth to them. But given the doubt surrounding the test and samples it seems impossible to conclude with any certainty that Lance was in fact using EPO in 1999. While the UCI and WADA are busy pointing the finger at each other, L’Equipe continues to drag cycling through the dirt with it’s shoddy reporting.
Just real good going guys. Great stuff.