If one riders uses PED’s, should the team be penalized?
 

Interesting comments from Tom Dumoulin on his teammate.

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/l...d-fraud-438025

Made me wonder, should the entire team be penalized? Preidler rode in support of Dumoulin’s win at the Giro the year Dumoulin won.

I have a lot of respect for Dumoulin and believe his comments are sincere. But none the less, A rider that is doping obviously can add more support to the team leader. Should this in any way tarnish Dumoulin’s win?

I do not intend this to be a flame war on dopers, far from it. Rather how doping impacts not only a rider but also the team, the race and race organizers.

If a team knew it would be stripped of a title if one member was found to have doped, would it greatly lessen the incidents of doping?

I realize I maybe in the minority but I do believe both the UCI, WADA, and race organizers are doing what they can to clean up the sport.

Would this type of action help to further clean-up the sport?

That's the way it works in the military; one person eff's up, the entire unit gets punished. That way, peer pressure usually results in greater compliance, and also the unit polices itself, not waiting for outside factors to catch problem individuals.

ahhh, no. If one sailor is busted on a random pee test and even if his buddies knew it..the whole branch/division doesn't get punished. BUT, I've seen peer pressure in action tho..in letting the 'powers' know somebody is f'ed up..anonymously..we called it 'AnyMouse'...

As for the bike racer guy...I doubt nobody knew it, I think the team should get punished somehow...

Beat me too it. Sure didn't sound like the military I spent 22 years in.

Maybe... but we are not a militarized society so not every military rule applies.

That's a really bad standard to use, unless you want to accelerate sponsors leaving what is already a shallow pool of support for the sport.

LOL, no kidding. :confused: Never said it did or should, just round the other response inaccurate.

Maybe that's what the sport needs though? Obviously the oversight against doping and other cheating still doesn't work. What does it take for the Peloton to be truly clean and competing fairly?

If you don't have sponsors, you don't have a sport, at least as has existed for the last century.

I don't subscribe to the you-have-to-burn-down-the-village-to-save-it theory.

A good point, one I didn’t consider. Maybe in the short term but perhaps attract more sponsors in the end?

I do remember way back in the day, if someone blew an assignment or messed-up during football practice, we all had to run laps. But this was H.S. And we didn’t have any sponsors. 🤣

Yah burn it all down and see if we can have it come back actually clean.

Heck kick the team out if the DS has doping in their background too, no matter how committed they sound to clean racing now.

Even on "clean" teams, riders still get busted. Tommy Danielson riding for Garmin comes to mind. The culture there was supposed to be as anti-doping as it got, but it still happens. Not sure what else they could have done, to be honest. At a certain point, dopers are going to dope.

Riders get desperate, looking for the results that will get or keep them in the game. It's not as open as it once was in the Festina days, and the dopers generally keep it as quiet and compartmentalized as possible to avoid getting caught through a targeted test because somebody talked.

Most professional positives are coming from places like South American and Eastern European countries, where anti-doping bodies are not as strong. In the more developed nations, the dopers are more sophisticated and doping rings like Aderlass get unraveled through confessions.

One positive doesn't make the team dirty. A string of them?

On his clean team run by a doper. No surprise.

The sport has never been clean. Ever. Tough to see how that changes when you ask guys to ride as fast as humanly possible over 2,500-ish miles in a three week period with two rest days.

A positive should trigger an investigation and additional testing of the team. If the investigation reveals a systemic problem, repeated violations, or team complicity (prior knowledge, or lack of institutional control), the team should be punished.

Otherwise, what's to stop doping up the domestiques to carry the contender to the threshold-- contender puts in a few minutes of work, contender wins, contender is clean, team claims the "clean" victory.