kadel wrote:
Rabobank said they would shut down if the court decided the team management had known about Rasmussen's whereabouts. Which the court certainly has done. So now we just have to wait for Rabobank's decision and see if Rasmussen has destroyed dutch cycling and a big sponsor in cycling..

MortChill wrote:


lol, like they will stop sponsoring, get real

Mads_0 wrote:


Well, that was the announcement from Rabobank(the sponsor, not the team) a little while ago. If it was revealed that the team had been aware of Rasmussens true whereabouts and the drug test he missed, they would pull all sponsoring of both the ProTour, Continental and National teams. Also, they would no longer sponsor cycling events or smaller teams around the country.

That's what they said

The director of a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accredited laboratory has strongly criticised a recent scientific article which cast doubt on WADA's urine test for erythropoeitin (EPO), calling the study "scientifically unacceptable" and asking for its retraction. In the paper, which appears in the latest edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology (JAP), Danish researchers describe inconsistencies in the results of urine tests for recombinant human erythropoeitin between two different WADA-accredited laboratories.

Wilhelm Schänzer, director of the Laboratory for Doping Analysis in Cologne, Germany, said that the results of the study were "factually wrong, demonstrate great ignorance regarding the criticised method and the operations of doping control laboratories, and are based on a serious lack of careful examination of provided data".

In the report, two WADA labs (A and B) were sent samples from athletes before EPO administration, during a "boosting" phase (5,000 IU of EPO every other day), during a "maintenance" phase (dose given every 7th day) and post-treatment after the EPO administration had ceased.

Laboratory A found all boosting phase, six maintenance phase and two post-treatment samples to be positive for EPO, while Laboratory B failed to declare a single sample to be positive. The study was widely interpreted to mean that athletes could dope with EPO and escape detection.

Schänzer emphatically denied the accuracy of the study, saying that the Danish scientists misrepresented why the samples were being sent to "Laboratory B". In a letter to the editors of the JAP, he explained that the lab was not aware that the results would be published, and was under the impression that the samples did not come from athletes. The results, he said, "were not obtained by means of the accredited method for urine analysis," which means they were not subjected to the normal procedure for anti-doping controls.

The samples were only subjected to a "screening" analysis, according to Schänzer. The lab did not report any positives because a full procedure including the inspection of the results by a second laboratory would have needed to have been performed to declare a sample positive. Instead, samples which showed the presence of EPO were deemed "suspicious" - 15 samples were given this designation.

A true anti-doping control would be given either a negative, adverse, or atypical analytical finding, and Schänzer explained that the term "suspicious" is not used in a doping control analysis report. That word was used to underscore the fact that the results were not an analytical finding.

"Obviously the authors (and reviewers/advisors) were not familiar with rules and wordings commonly applied in doping control laboratories. This ignorance has led to wrong interpretations of results and caused a serious damage to the reputation of the rHuEpo detection method, the doping control system as well as laboratory B," Schänzer complained.

jacknic wrote:
Lance Armstrong is at it again: This time he states that CSC Saxo Bank and Rabobank should not be starting the tour when Astana is out. I get the Rabobank part, but why CSC Saxo?