When agencies compete for the right to test athletes it cannot be anything other than divisive for the sport as a whole.
WADA turned down a request from the French Anti-doping Agency who wanted to carry out their own tests at the Tour de France.
Claiming “that it has access to confidential information from police and customs that it cannot share with other organisations”
And with that hangs a serious problem.
Our sport can only suffer from the lack of a unified face.
Whilst I don’t want to come down in any direction on the Ramussen case a couple of years ago at the TDF – I can have sympathy with Ramussen’s contention over jurisdiction.
For as long as he was complying with testing from UCI, should he really have DOUBLE the calls on his availability simply because of being a Dane, where Contador had only UCI restrictions because of where he lived?
At the time it SOUNDED like very much like a grudge to settle by the Danish federation, for the unwillingness of Rasmussen to compete on a Danish stage, and whether or not that was actually so is almost irrelevant.
Open a crack, and the media will crowbar it out to a chasm.
It cannot help the image of sport when federations seem to be bickering over jurisdiction.
So please agencies – have these discussions behind closed doors, then pronounce a decision with a unified face
Surely if there is sufficient cause to suspect a crime is being committed under french law with proper evidence for the same then there are procedures that can be used to pursue that.
I have to assume the evidence is far more circumstantial than that and that the TDF is as much arguing from a “rights” point of view than prima facie evidence of crime.
I can understand of course how the TDF is concerned about the damage done to its name. Sat where I am the Rasmussen affair was not handled with nearly enough discretion by the TDF.
