[metallicat]

Originally Posted by troutman

Witnesses Made Case Against Armstrong Potent


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/sp...tles.html?_r=2

Christiane Ayotte, the head of a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab outside Montreal: “We’re at the point that if we’re not using these indirect markers, you can just forget about a case. For example, oral testosterone and microdoses of EPO will be detectable for only 12 hours. You just about have to be there when the athlete is doping to catch them.”

Don Catlin, the former head of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, said there were fewer simple doping cases than ever because drugs are more sophisticated and athletes have more people around to help them dope.

“Athletes, particularly the most successful ones, have a complex network of people around them to figure out how to beat the drug tests,” he said.

The antidoping agency claims that Armstrong’s network included his teammates; his longtime team manager, Johan Bruyneel; two team doctors, Pedro Celaya and Luis Garcia del Moral; the team’s consulting doctor, Michele Ferrari; and the team’s trainer, Pepe Marti. Those people worked together in what Tygart said was a mafia-like scheme to conceal the doping on Armstrong’s teams and to keep those involved quiet about it.

Maybe the team around him was actually just that good, and were able to keep him from testing positive. It's entirely possible I guess. I don't feel like a conspiracy theorist (because god knows I'm not) because I want the doping company to be wrong, I just want them to be wrong because I wanted to see someone clean achieve amazing results when others around him were guilty of doping.