here’s something from an article this morning on sporten.dk. It’s about Damsgaard being very pleased that the french doping authorities declaring a rider positive eventhough the substance is not one formally on the list that can result in a declared positive. His view is that WADA are too narrow in what they declare positive .

“It’s fantastic that the AFLD apparently has decided to screw WADA’s rules and are (busting/convicting) the riders medically, because they can, and then let the legal issues come in second hand”

He is very pleased that a case such as this has occured because he believes it will end up in CAS and there will then be a ruling on how to deal with all the EPO-like drugs that are not yet on the banned list.

This is where it gets interesting. It then says that he has “in his work” come across 5 athletes with suspicious bloodprofiles. After controlling the EPO parts of tests that WADA have declared negative he came across EPO, only of an unknown variety. He is now trying to have these five sanctioned, hoping their cases will end up in CAS.

” We need to get a case to CAS. I thought my cases would get there first but now AFLD will probably beat me too it, which is fine. With CAS there will be experts capable of deciding whether it is legally possible to make a judgement in these cases.” says Damsgaard

Now I don’t know if he does testing of this kind for other athletes except those from CSC and Astana or if he has done this research on completely different riders (he has access to tests from the bloodpassport-program too I believe) but there is a pretty big risk that Riis and/or Bruyneel will have some trouble soon.

It’s a little worrying that they use the phrase :”All tests conducted under the WADA CODE have been declared “negative.” because in the context of the article that could mean “but if I use a wider definition we have some positives”.

teach me humility, but please let all those 5 riders be on Astana…..

rock.