On Aug 11, 6:59 pm, "Doki" <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > That means "welcome to my killfile".
>
> I know what it means. I just couldn't see why Tony was killfiling the bloke.
I would suggest that the reason is that Tony simply spat his dummy out
when some of the nonsense he was speaking about the Armstrong and
Landis doping cases was pointed out to him. If you look at the
'Armstrong and doping on American radio' thread you will see that Tony
is a 'conspiracy nut' who believes, for example, that Landis's data
was forged or at the very best tampered with and that there has been a
'cover up' going on ever since. Now, many people who want to hold such
views are motivated by completely unrelated factors, such as a desire
to bash the French whenever possible, but I thought that he had simply
been misled as a consequence of drawing all his information from the
Armstrong/ Landis misinformation machines. I simply pointed out some
of the error this had led him into but this caused him spit his dummy
out, so I can only assume that his zealous defence of Landis and
Armstrong reflect some other factor other than a desire to know the
truth.
For example, Tony claimed that Armstrong was cleared of all charges of
drug use in the SCA hearing. In reality although much evidence of drug
use was uncovered by SCA - the company that was due to pay him a 5
million dollar bonus on the event of him winning 6 Tours - all this
evidence was ruled to be immaterial to the case, with the hearing
concluding that it was simply a matter of contract law. That is, if
Armstrong was the official winner of 6 Tours, SCA had to pay up, end
of story. Also the contact fee and legal costs/ 'damages' were not
awarded to Armstrong by any court, rather the money paid to Armstrong
was agreed in an out of court settlement between SCA and Armstrong.
In fact Armstrong's camp has always been very careful to avoid legal
cases which might well lead to further information about doping coming
to light, with the usual tactic being to threaten legal action with
the intention of intimidating the witnesses into silence before going
to court. When he tried to prevent the publication of the French
language version of L.A. Confidentiel' Armstrong actually lost his
case and was fined for abuse of process. They then decided not to
appeal or fight the case further as, in the secretly taped words of
Bill Stapleton, Armstrong's agent: "... the best result for us is...drop
the fuc-king lawsuit and it all just goes away. Because the other
option is full-out war in a French court and everybody's going to
testify and it could blow the whole sport."
Again, in the case of Landis Tony argued that 'space aliens' must have
'Sucked Landis dry of epitestosterone' as it was his abnormally low
level of epitestosterone which led to his abnormal T/E ratio test,
which in turn led to those carbon isotope tests being done which
provided definitive evidence of testosterone use by Landis. Tony, once
again mindlessly parroting the stories put out by the Landis camp,
argued that the tests must have been in some way fraudulent of false
due to this low epitestosterone level and dismissed what I said when I
pointed out that in a T/E ratio test the ratios are measured
independently of any measure of their absolute levels. I backed my
claims up by reference to WADA Technical Document - TD2004EAAS which
specifically states that.
"The concentration of testosterone and epitestosterone (equivalent to
the glucuronide) should be estimated but should not be used to
determine the T/E value."
http://www.wada-ama.org/rtecontent/document/end_steroids_aug_04.pdf
I also pointed out that there are a number of well-know causes of a
depleted level of epitestosterone, including steroid use and drinking
alcohol. In fact the Landis camp appeared to be well aware of this
immediately after his positive test. At first they claimed that Landis
had an naturally unnatural level of testosterone in his body. However
as soon as it came to light that the T/E ratio test was out due to a
depleted epitestosterone level they then switched tack and claimed
this was due to the steroid he was using for his hip and him and
drinking Jack Daniels the night before the stage he won. As one
sportswriter in America pointed out the fact that Landis's excuses
multiplied and constantly changed as though produced by 'A thousand
monkeys with typewriters' itself undermined the credibility of his
claim to be clean.
http://sportsline.com/columns/story/9590157
Also worth a read:
http://sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=dw-peoplesvoice081006&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
Anyhow, as the above stories show, not everyone, even in the US, is
hoodwinked by the Armstrong and Landis propaganda machines. It's just
a pity that so often when these matter are discussed, those who
question the Armstrong/ Landis versions are bullied, insulted,
'killfiled' and all the rest in a manner much reminiscent of the famed
'digital brownshirts'* in the employ of the Republican party in the
US!
(* For those not familiar with the term see:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8D2IU703&show_article=1)
As to why I am happy to see 'Team Disco' go, I'll post up a couple of
reasons why in a moment.
