I assumed it was contractual. But I’ll still read it. After I’ve had an espresso. Or several.

admittedly I am much better at French nineteenth century novels than I am at this sort of thing. However, it seems (to me) that Astana handled it incredibly badly on a procedural & contractual level.

They should have (& I also must stress I’m summarising from memory here, not with the document open) done all sorts of things they didn’t do. They hadn’t specified to the rider what the “norms” were that he had to remain within, if they were different from the UCI ones (how can you break a rule if you don’t know what is); they didn’t do the further testing mentioned by andrewp above, which was a contractual agreement where the team had a suspicion of doping; they didn’t give the rider any proper opportunity to respond or appeal; Damsgaard (& I do feel this is damaging him for him) had said that the samples themselves had been passed to a WADA accredited lab but then admitted at the hearing that only the data had been. There are others, too.

The key thing for me, however, is precisely what andrewp says above. The judgment says that internal anti-doping procedures are louable, however, it is unfair to sack a rider immédiatement on the suspicion of doping. Contrary to a lot of what’s been said so far elsewhere, I think the important thing is this “immediately”, which is repeated again & again. But I don’t think it says a team can’t sack a rider who is suspected of doping but that they can’t sack them straight away.

But hey, it really needs a fluent French speaking lawyer to draw proper conclusions.