Fighting Against Doping

"To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time."
– Katharine Hepburn

"People tell us you have to work within the system to survive, but we won't compromise our ethics. Its about a new sense of freedom, a different kind of dream, a dream where your hero isn't doped up on drugs! An opportunity to own the truth, eventually it all boils down to: The Truth and fulfilling the promise you made to yourself. It reminds others that you're about the road. AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH BRING IT ON!"

The ever increasing commercialization of professional sport has led to an increase in the temptation to take drugs to enhance one's performance.

But the problem of doping does not only exist in the professional sports field.

Studies led by the European Commission revealed that amateur athletes also make use of performance-enhancing drugs, leading doping to become an issue that affects the whole society.

What it means

What does doping really mean? One way of finding out is to look in the dictionary, where it tells you that it comes from a Dutch word "doop" meaning a thick liquid or sauce, a reminder that it originally referred to a South African drink. In days gone by, "dope" was something you drank to help you work hard, if only for a short space of time. So, in English, "to dope" means to administer a drug, specifically as a stimulant.An official definition of "doping" was adopted in Uriarge in 1963. Since then, it has meant the use of substances and any other available methods of artificially enhancing performance in a sporting event, or when preparing for it, in a way which violates sporting ethics and damages the physical and psychological health of the athlete or player.So doping is an operation which sets out quite deliberately and knowingly to do two things: combat fatigue and enhance performance.This definition needs some refining. To start with, there are the medical aspects.What doping involves is misusing medicinal products or techniques. Where products are concerned, it can mean every drug in the pharmacopoeia. Some of them are exogenous, which means coming from outside the body and therefore easy to identify. Others are endogenous, stimulating the body to secrete particular molecules itself. Identifying these means doing medical tests.

When it comes to techniques, it boils down to using medical practices for the wrong purposes, e.g. the practice of putting sportsmen and women on drips.We also have to find a definition of doping in terms of the law. It flies in the face of sporting ethics, and tarnishes the image of sport as a means of keeping society in balance. Doping is also bad for the health. It is a criminal offense, and both users and suppliers of "dope" can be punished.And then, of course, there is the definition of the term as understood by sports people themselves. More and more they seem to be split between two camps. For some, there is no "doping" unless a person's life is in danger. They can accept a situation where drugs are administered by a doctor or under medical supervision. Others use the term to mean engaging in practices or taking substances which are against the rules. The problem here arises from the lack of uniform standards. The criteria for regarding products as forbidden drugs vary from one sport to another, as the list drawn up by the International Olympic Committee is not yet universally accepted.

Some history

Higher, faster, stronger – that was the Olympic motto dreamed up by Baron Pierre de Coubertin at the end of the 19th century. Yet men and women have always striven to excel themselves and sport, or physical exercise in the broader sense, has given them the opportunity to do so. And there have always been techniques for sports people to apply or substances to take to increase their strength, raise their standard or improve their performance artificially. The poppy was already being used in the Neolithic era, and opium was highly prized by the Egyptians, the Romans and, of course, the Greeks, who were also especially fond of beef when the Games were on, believing that it gave them the strength of ten. Both then and subsequently, in other parts of the world, ginseng root, coca leaves, hemp, maté and kava (an extract of the pepper plant) were also highly valued.Doping, however, in the sense used today, really came onto the scene in the 19th century. In a way it was brought into being by medical advances and by the emergence of sport as we see it today.

The first drugs to be used were heroine and morphine. Heroine was mainly found in horse-racing circles, while morphine was very much in fashion in boxing and so-called endurance sports. At any rate it was suspected of having caused the death of Arthur Lindon, a Welsh racing cyclist who died a few months after the Bordeaux-Paris race of 1896, thereby becoming the first ever recorded victim of doping.Things really got out of hand at the beginning of the 20th century, with strychnine and ephedrine making their appearance, not to mention steroids. The team behind Thomas Hicks, a runner who won the marathon at the 1904 London Olympics, were clearly giving him the first of these, laced with alcohol and cocaine, to push him to victory.The second (ephedrine) was actually the forerunner of amphetamines. Developed at the beginning of the 1930s, amphetamines first came into use in sport at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

They were widely used in battle in the Second World War and became extremely popular in the years that followed. What made them especially common was that most of the time they could be bought freely. Some time later, however, they were clearly implicated in at least three deaths. The victims were two cyclists, Knut Enemark Jensen from Denmark, during the 100 kilometre race against the clock at the Rome Olympics in 1960, and Tom Simpson of England in the Tour de France in 1967, as well as a French footballer, Jean-Louis Quadri, who died in 1968.Hormone doping arose out of the work done as long ago as 1889 by a French physiologist, Edouard Brown-Séquard, and then in 1935 by Ernest Laqueur, who isolated the male hormone, testosterone. Four years later the Wolverhampton football team tried it out in England. It was not until the 1950s, though, that anabolic steroids really made their entry onto the sporting stage, starting with weight-lifting and athletics. But they spread fast. The Spanish tennis player Andres Gimeno admitted taking them in 1959, a long time before it was discovered what lay behind East Germany’s sporting successes in the 1970s or before the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was disqualified from the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988.

Over the last few years, doping has taken a new and dangerous turn. Growth hormones have appeared, as well as intravenous doping involving transfusions of the athlete’s own blood, and then erythropoietin, perfluorcarbons and reticulate haemoglobin. In none of these cases has respect for human life necessarily been the primary consideration.All this has changed the whole course of doping. Drugs used to be taken just for a one-off effect which activated various standard bodily functions, but now they may bring about the biological reprogramming of the body. To put it plainly, the time is not far off when it will be scientifically possible to make artificial but lasting changes in the way an organ functions and when the technicians of sport will be able to tailor each drug to meet the specifications for a particular level of performance.

The Festina Affair The skies over Dublin were changeable. Everything was ready for the Tour de France to set off from Ireland, and France had not yet won the World Cup. A few hours before the cyclists were to leave the starting line for the most prestigious cycle race of the season, a strange rumor began to spread. In the middle of the week a trainer for the Festina team - the pick of the bunch, the team featuring such riders as Richard Virenque, the darling of the French public, world champion Laurent Brochard and Alex Zulle, twice winner of the Tour of Spain - was checked by customs at Neuville-en-Ferrain on the French-Belgian border. And according to the rumor, the officers had found a great many unusual things in his vehicle, which was officially accredited to the Tour de France. Shortly afterwards the world was to learn that he had been carrying EPO (erythropoietin), growth hormones, testosterone, corticoids, amphetamines and vaccines.At the Tour, they started to shake in their shoes. For the first time in the history of the Tour and for the first time, indeed, in the history of cycle-racing and sport, the participants realized that the authorities were aware of how little winning the race had to do with sporting prowess alone and had decided to do something about the doping.But it was a bitter struggle. When the Tour got started in Dublin, the Festina affair had still got no further than merely questioning the Festina team's trainer, Willy Voet. Not until he confessed on 14 July and Bruno Rossel and Eric Ryckaert, the team's manager and doctor, were detained for questioning did people at last realize that in this particular case the doping operation had been run by a very well-oiled and experienced machine.The Festina affair began to have wider ramifications. On 17 July, Festina’s cyclists were disqualified from the Tour. Another case came to light when investigations were started into the Dutch TVM team in Rheims, and the Tour only made it to Paris a fortnight later by the skin of its teeth. Twice, on 24 and 29 July, the participants threatened to go on strike. Some teams had their vehicles and hotel rooms searched. On police orders riders were made to take medical tests. One of them, Rodolfo Massi, was placed under investigation, as was Nicolas Terrados, the doctor for the Once team, a Spanish line-up which withdrew from the Tour along with five others.At the end of the day, when Marco Pantani, the first Italian to wear the winner's yellow jersey since Felice Gimondi in 1965, crossed the finishing line in Paris at the head of the pack, everyone was left with a strange taste in the mouth. For once it had become abundantly clear how widespread doping was in sport.And then the fight began. It was a hard battle. Some called for all sport to be completely above board, while others argued that there was a place for doping provided it was done under medical supervision and did not jeopardize the health of the competitor concerned. Some saw sport as a school for human behavior, while others, themselves active sportsmen and women, were not at all keen to break with old habits.It was a very real conflict, fought out on the sports field, with the organizers of the Tour de France putting the ethics of cycling at the top of their list of concerns. And there it stayed when the International Olympic Committee, at the beginning of February, held an anti-doping conference and set up an Agency whose primary task was to make sure that the Sydney Olympics were clean.Governments were also involved. On the initiative of Marie-George Buffet, the Minister for Youth and Sport, France passed a new law on action to combat doping. This made safeguarding the health of sportsmen and women the main priority, stressed the need for prevention and laid down stiffer penalties for suppliers. Things began moving in other European countries as well. When, in May, the French courts again looked into the habits and practices of the cycling fraternity, the Italian courts (especially those in Bologna and Turin), not wanting to be left behind, began investigating cases in a variety of sports, including football and cycling. The Italian Minister for Sport, Giovanna Melandrini, said she was determined to move in the same direction as Marie-George Buffet. And lastly, as the German courts looked into what had happened in the world of East German sport, the European Union's Ministers for Sport said they were anxious to be involved in the Anti-Doping Agency set up by the IOC.

The Issues at Stake

The Challenge to Sport

With sport operating as an organized system for producing performances, there is a built-in tendency to stray from the straight and narrow. The task for sportsmen or women, especially in the top rank, is to beat the others and get a result. This twofold imperative creates a third one: they have to equip themselves to achieve their aims. So, to their way of thinking, doping does not seem like cheating; to put it bluntly, it is just something that has to be done.The system makes increasingly grueling demands on its practitioners and they have to keep up. Sporting calendars are getting fuller and fuller.Sportsmen also have to keep up with a system which is making top-flight athletes and players more and more frail and tired. They now have to cope with ever tighter constraints imposed by the media and with economic necessities which are more and more pressing every day. In these circumstances the decision to take drugs is often taken passively. Sportsmen and women are, in a sense, acting under pressure from an environment which practically makes doping essential.In the broader context, however, we need to stress that this need to resort to artificial ways of carrying off a performance is at odds with the basic values of sport as a social, cultural and educational activity. On the principle that all athletes and players contain within themselves the resources they need to bring out their personal best, doping diverts sport away from its true purpose. It prevents it from being a school for human behavior.

The Challenge to the Media

The media influence sport in two ways. Firstly, they turn ordinary happenings into "events" and even set about making sure there are more of them, for essentially economic motives. Secondly, in some cases the media are well on the way to making organizers follow their rules. Sport no longer just means physical exercise. Since the end of the 1970s, and especially since the media began to call the tune, it has been turning into show-business, and the financial stakes involved are high. By their very essence, because they involve such huge sums of money and because of the thinking which motivates the people who organize them, these show-business events are more than likely to influence the use of drugs for doping.

The Challenge to Politicians

Doping is a genuine public-health problem, since it affects everyone involved in sport, including amateurs and young people. All of them want to be recognized, and all of them want to identify with an elite.What makes doping a really burning question is that the products and methods used are getting more and more dangerous and the ways they are used can easily lead to real dependence, which in the end is tantamount to drug addiction.But prevention is no easy task. To begin with, as there are no reliable health indicators it is impossible to work out exactly how many people are affected. And it is not at all easy even today to pinpoint what the actual pathological consequences of doping are.This means that the battle has to be waged on two fronts. First, we need to do something about prevention, in other words a public-information campaign should be directed at users and a public-education campaign at non-users. Then we need to run a public-health alertness exercise. At all times we should remember that there is a price to be paid for stamping out doping.

The Challenge to Medicine

Athletes and players have to be kept under medical supervision. This was true before and it is still true today, for the function of medicine is to cure. Why it was overlooked before, and what makes it even more important today, is that doctors have to be concerned for the bodily and/or psychological wellbeing of the sportsmen or women under their care.Sports medicine can almost be regarded nowadays as a kind of occupational medicine, for it, too, helps individuals adapt to a particular environment. To put it simply, with the passage of time doctors have steadily become more and more involved in bringing athletes to the top of their form. This is obviously different from using drugs to enhance performance. And that is where the borderline lies between what is known as "medical preparation" and doping.We need a code of practice for doctors to follow, and the resources to put it into effect. For there are now real dilemmas facing the medical profession. Refusing to take part in doping means, as far as doctors are concerned, not just objecting to the prescribing of banned products, but also rejecting the use of authorized substances which are administered in ways or prescribed in doses incompatible with medical ethics or sporting ethics.But to push this line of reasoning to its limits, and looking at the way things are developing today, might a doctor who refuses to take part in doping eventually be suspected of refusing to give help to a person at risk?

The Challenge to Society

Obviously, sport is not the only sphere of human activity where drugs are used. There are other fields where rivalry and competition sometimes push people to use artificial, i.e. chemical, means of achieving their ends.It cannot be right, though, to treat doping as respectable just because it is common practice in the society we live in. Sport is, first and foremost, an activity unlike any other, one which relies on rules which are not supposed to be open to dispute and must be respected. Drug use for purposes other than sport as such may be dictated by the need for high performance but that does not mean the law is blind to it. There are rules governing the taking of drugs, and most cases of drug dependence arise from attempts to cure an underlying condition.

Floyd's Fall - Scandal Dismays County Cyclists
August 6, 2006
By TOBIASYOUNG
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

In the heart of Sonoma County cycling country, where oak-lined back roads breed some of the best cyclists in the world, dismay greeted the confirmation Saturday of a failed drug test by Tour de France winner Floyd Landis.

Local riders said the doping scandal has disgraced one of the toughest endurance tests in all of sports, tossing out suspected top riders before the race and then ending in scandal.

It also cast a shadow on the fledgling Amgen Tour of California, where Landis rode to victory five months ago in a race that included a stop in Santa Rosa cheered by tens of thousands of spectators.

But it also may help clear the ugly side of a demanding sport, making it more popular and healthier in future years, said local riders.

"It's going to hurt the sport, but a lot of good will come out of it," professional rider Steven Cozza of Petaluma said. "I think it's going to clean the sport up. The more people get caught, the better."

Cozza, interviewed while traveling with the U.S. professional team to the Tour of Utah after winning two medals in the U.S. National Championships held in Pennsylvania, echoed the sentiments of other North Bay riders when he said the sport will become stronger from these scandals.

"The sport will survive," he said. "The best thing I can do as a cyclist is promise my fans I'm a clean rider so they know they are following someone who is clean and not a cheat."

Local riders and team leaders said the scandal could make it tougher to get sponsors for everything from local racing to the 2,211-mile Tour de France.

"It definitely has deep repercussions," said Laura Charameda, director of Team Swift, a junior cycling team based in Sonoma County.

"I am just sad for the sport," she said. "It's incredibly disappointing to all the racing fans and all the people who just love riding their bikes."

But she said most riders will continue to ride and compete and the sport will return to glory.

Coaches and riders said the sport is clean on a local level. Team Swift, for example, has a zero tolerance policy and never has had a rider test positive at any race, Charameda said.

"All of the local racing you're seeing is clean racing," Charameda said. "I know that as a fact."

She said at big events such as the national championships, where the team won a record five medals in July, the riders were tested often.

Riders said they don't want to convict Landis and hope he can still somehow prove his innocence. But they expect months of legal skirmishes before he is either cleared or stripped of his title. If he loses, it would mark the first Tour de France winner to be stripped of a title by doping allegations in the 103-year history of the race.

"This is a great opportunity to help clean up this sport," Charameda said. "This is huge. A Tour de France winner possibly losing his title."

Instead of sending a message to young riders that they have to cheat to compete, Charameda and other local riders said the message is they have to stay clean to win.

It takes years and years of hard work, training and natural methods to improve performance, riders said.

For example, Cozza just trained for two weeks on the high altitude roads of Lake Tahoe to increase his red blood cell count, which helps endurance and strength in the same way the banned drug Epo does.

"You can get strong and fast so many ways naturally, it is almost pointless to take stuff," Cozza said. "Most of us, we definitely support a clean sport and believe you can win clean."

Jim Keene, co-owner of Norcal Bike Sport and the Bike Peddler, sponsors local racing teams and events such as the Wednesday evening mountain bike races in Howarth Park.

He said doping problems come into play mainly when riders at top levels have so much money and fame at stake and are pushed so hard they succumb to the illegal substances.

But the tests are getting better at catching cheaters, and race organizers are becoming more serious and strict, he said.

"It's something the sport can recover from as long as there is a really concentrated movement to get this doping under control," he said. "In some ways I'm glad this is happening now. What I hope for is a sport where I can encourage a kid to take up biking."

He said California cycling and the Amgen Tour are "going to be just fine. Californians are cycling crazy," he said.

For a few days, the tale of Floyd Landis looked like a Disney movie in the making. Now he appears to be headed for the History Channel.

Landis came a step closer Saturday to being the first man stripped of a Tour de France title for doping when a backup urine sample came back positive for prohibited levels of testosterone.

With the news that his B sample confirmed he had taken synthetic testosterone, his cycling team, Phonak, immediately fired him, and Tour de France organizers said they no longer consider him the 2006 champion. Landis officially will keep his title, however, until his appeals are exhausted and the International Cycling Union, the UCI, declares him ineligible.

Oscar Pereiro of Spain, the race's runner-up, stands to replace Landis as the winner, but it may be as long as seven months before the case is resolved. Either way, the story of the man who fell to 11th place and fought back with a stunning surge in the 17th stage won't end in a pretty way.

Landis, who has offered several excuses as to why his testosterone levels were high, but none as to why some of it was synthetic, maintained his innocence Saturday.

"I have never taken any banned substance, including testosterone. I was the strongest man at the Tour de France, and that is why I am the champion," Landis, a 30-year-old who lives in Murrieta, said in a statement.

"I will fight these charges with the same determination and intensity that I bring to my training and racing. It is now my goal to clear my name and restore what I worked so hard to achieve."

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency now will receive documentation of the tests from the French lab that conducted them and likely will begin disciplinary proceedings that could result in a two-year suspension for Landis. If Landis is banned, he can appeal to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, which has the final word on doping cases.

Excuses won't matter, though. Under doping rules an athlete is responsible for anything found in his or her body, and the burden is on the athlete to prove he or she is innocent.

Landis' lawyers have suggested to reporters that they will question the validity of the carbon-isotope ratio test that determined the testosterone was synthetic, and the integrity of the lab that tested him, the Chatenay-Malabry lab outside of Paris, which has been accused of mishandling specimens in the past.

Unless his lawyers can prove the lab mishandled his samples, however, Landis will be stripped of his title no matter how the excess hormones got in his body.

Landis' employer, however, did not wait for legal particulars.

"Landis will be dismissed without notice for violating the team's internal code of ethics," Phonak said in a statement. "Landis will continue to have legal options to contest the findings. However, this will be his personal affair, and the Phonak team will no longer be involved in that."

Tour organizers also don't care to wait for the appeals process to play out.

"It goes without saying that for us Floyd Landis is no longer the winner of the 2006 Tour de France," Tour Director Christian Prudhomme said. "Our determination is even stronger now to fight against doping and to defend this magnificent sport."

Landis' positive drug test is the most recent disgrace in a string of doping scandals that have tainted cycling over the years.

On the eve of the three-week Tour last month, nine riders, including three favorites, were disqualified for being implicated, or for their teams being implicated, in a doping ring in Spain.

Nearly 60 riders, coaches and others in the sport have been linked to that drug ring.

The cloud of doping has hung over the sport for years. In 1967, the British rider Tommy Simpson collapsed and died during the Tour. Amphetamines were found in his jersey pocket. In 1998, the entire Festina team was thrown out of the race after drugs and doping supplies were found in a team car. Even Lance Armstrong, who won seven straight Tour titles before retiring after last year's race, has had his reputation tarnished by accusations that he used performance-enhancing drugs, although he has denied them.

Frankie Andreu, who was the American director of the U.S. Postal Service team when Landis and Armstrong were among its riders, said he hoped Landis had a legitimate reason for failing the test, but no matter how the case turned out, he said the bad publicity was "horrible for cycling."

"The sport is in as big of a mess as it's ever been," said Andreu, a Tour commentator for OLN. "It's not up to the Tour or anyone else to clean up cycling. It's up to the riders. They are killing the sport by cheating, and it takes away from sponsors and fans who want to be involved."

Pereiro said he now considers himself the winner of the Tour de France, but said he regretted not being able to celebrate properly - in Paris, wearing the winner's yellow jersey.

"I would have liked to have lived that day. It would have been the best day of my life, as a sportsman," he said.

Pereiro also felt bad for Landis.

"I consider him my friend, it surprised me and hurt me to hear what had happened to him," he said.

The Truth is Out There
September 12, 20006
Cycling News
E.M. Swift

Is the truth finally catching up with Lance Armstrong, and is this one race the seven-time Tour de France champion may not be able to win?

In Tuesday's New York Times, two of Armstrong's former U.S. Postal Service teammates admitted to having used EPO, an illegal performance-enhancing drug, at some point in 1999, the first year Armstrong won the Tour de France. While neither said they saw Armstrong do the same, the implication was that the drug use was common knowledge within the team. "The environment was certainly one of, to be accepted, you had to use doping products," said one of Armstrong's teammates, who requested anonymity, fearing reprisals from the notoriously vindictive Armstrong, who still wields considerable power in cycling.

The other teammate was 39-year-old Frankie Andreu, a domestique who competed professionally for 12 years and was once Armstrong's close friend and roommate. He's now a motivational speaker and real-estate dealer in Dearborn, Mich. He said he only used EPO "for a couple of races" and was speaking out in hopes of cleaning up his tainted sport.

More interesting -- to me, anyway -- was the testimony the Times uncovered that Andreu and his wife, Betsy, gave last fall during a lawsuit between Armstrong and SCA Promotions. The company had withheld a $5 million bonus it owed Armstrong after he won the '04 Tour because of doping allegations. The suit was eventually settled out of court in Armstrong's favor, but in their sworn testimony the Andreus said that when they visited Armstrong in the hospital after he'd been diagnosed with testicular cancer, they'd heard him tell his oncologists that he'd used "steroids, testosterone, cortisone, growth hormone and EPO." Their testimony was disputed by the doctor who administered Armstrong's chemotherapy at Indiana University Medical Center. In the same trial, Armstrong testified that his doctors never asked him if he'd used performance-enhancing drugs, and that he'd never used those substances.

Which testimony is more credible? The Andreus' or Armstrong's? Ask yourself which party had the most to gain by lying. And why is that particular testimony significant? Because one of the possible side effects of prolonged steroid use is testicular cancer. It's impossible to prove, but if what the Andreus testified to under oath is true, than Lance Armstrong, role model and hero to so many cancer survivors, may very well have helped bring about his own cancer through his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Young athletes tempted to go down that road need to know if that's the case.None of what was reported in the Times is a shock to me. In 1999 I went to see Willy Voet, the Belgian trainer of the French-based Festina cycling team who was at the center of the '98 Tour de France scandal when he was arrested while crossing the border with literally hundreds of vials of EPO, growth hormones and testosterone.

Voet ended up spending time in prison, and by the time he talked to me he was a man filled with remorse. He, too, was interested in helping to clean up his sport, and had written a book in French, the title of which translates as Chain Massacre: Revelations of 30 Years of Cheating. It made him an outcast in cycling but painstakingly chronicled the drug culture that only now is recognized as having infected the sport. In the 1970s, Voet said, the drug of choice was amphetamines. In the '80s it was anabolic steroids and cortisone. In the '90s it was growth hormones and EPO. He described leaning out a car window to give a shot to a cyclist in the middle of a race. He recalled hiding condoms of clean urine in the anus of cyclists to fool drug-testers. He spoke of dripping IV bags of saline solution into their bodies after a race to lower the ratio of red-blood-cell volume to total blood volume to avoid EPO detection in the event of a surprise drug test.

If the 500 cyclists he'd worked with over the years, only two had ever failed a drug test. "A racer who gets caught by doping control is dumb as a mule," Voet told me.And how many of those 500 cyclists he worked with did not take drugs to enhance their performance? "I can count them on two hands. Maybe two hands and two feet if I'm generous," Voet said.

And where did the clean ones finish?

I wondered.

The back of the pack," Voet said.Armstrong never finished at the back of the pack. Neither did his onetime teammate, Tyler Hamilton, the '04 Olympic champion who was suspended for two years for blood doping. Neither did another former teammate, Floyd Landis, who failed a doping test after winning this year's Tour de France. Neither did Italy's Ivan Basso, or Germany's Jan Ullrich, or Spain's Francisco Mancebo, who finished second, third and fourth to Armstrong in the '05 Tour, all of whom have been implicated in the Spanish doping investigation that rocked the start of this year's Tour. Each disputes the allegations.

There's nothing new in any of this. Voet was telling the truth, but not enough people were listening. The sport of cycling is dirty, was dirty and will continue to be dirty until more athletes like Andreu and trainers like Voet come forward and break the code of silence. Remember those names. They're the heroes.Here's the thing about truth: It may take a while. It may take years. But truth's a tenacious battler. Eventually it will come out.