[ChilliConCarnage]

I didn't read anywhere that it was "interfering" with the investigation.

 

[ChilliConCarnage]

You can't prove the Doctors were a hazard to public health unless you can prove they dispensed harmful drugs or harmful treatment to their patients. So the riders are the evidence - if they can prove that riders were given harmful drugs/treatment, they can prove thier case against the Doctors.

 

[ChilliConCarnage]

And what part of that requires the Spanish authorities to help ruin the careers of their witnesses? You don't see that as a somewhat odd aspect of the criminal investigation into a crime against public health?

Well, I think this case certainly differs from a typical "crime against public health" in that the patients are also participants, they understand and know the health risks involved and search out the Doctor to receive the treatment, making them complicit in the illegal activity. A typical "crime against public health" might refer to a case such as a water treatment plant that knowingly dispenses improperly treated water to an unknowing public. It's the same mindset in the U.S. war against drugs - the drug abuser is sentenced as severely (or more severly in some cases) as the drug seller.

But I think there is also the feeling that with the doping laws coming, since these athletes are using these treatments to cheat, there is no concern for the affect on their careers - or, rather, that it is implicitly hoped that their careers will be affected in lieu of legal punishment, or until such legal punishment can be metted out.

Ethically speaking, I would agree with that. If somebody is cheating, just because there is no specific ant-doping law on the books yet doesn't mean that I would go out of my way to help protect the career of the cheater.

My hope is that this does turn out to be a big affair, that any rider who can be proven to have availed themselves of this service gets their two year suspension, and that it creates a negative reinforcement against doping.

 

[ChilliConCarnage]

The worst aspect of cheating, in my opinion, is not the competitive inequality, but the fact that a clean rider can't win without suspicion. Just imagine if Lance was absolutely clean - never doped in his entire carer just as he claims - it's all the cheaters in the peloton that have ruined the reputation of the sport, and by extension, it's champion. So in the public's opinion it doesn't matter if he cheated or not, but that he was the leader of a dirty sport.

Cheaters suck. If it were not for the hazy science that make up the current doping test regimen, I would be all for a lifetime ban on any and all cheaters that were caught.