Probably not the best time to be tossing this one out there, what with all the fuss about LA, but this has been sitting on my puter for a couple of weeks now, best to just get rid of it.

Ten years back, in 2001, the UCI put out a document bigging up all they had done in the fight against doping - The UCI: 40 Years Of Fighting Against Doping. This was partly a fightback at all the criticism they'd received following the Festina affaire and partly as a pre-emptive strike against WADA.

Most of the document concentrates on the nineties, but in the introduction Hein Verbruggen tries to big up what the UCI achieved in the sixties, and through the seventies and eighties. The beginning of the fight against doping is what interests me here.

Initially I was going to just pick the best pieces from Verbruggen's intro and make some snide comments about them. Then I thought that would be unfair. So what I've done is left the full intro as it was and stuck a few footnotes in to either expand upon what Verbruggen said or point out how much horse manure he was spreading. This way you get to fully enjoy the delights of Verbruggen's prose.

The downside of doing this is it doesn't present very well in HTML, so I'm attaching it here as a PDF - along with the full PDF from which the intro is extracted, as I can't find it any more on the UCI's own site. I can't imagine as there's many of you will be all that interested in it, but for the two or three of you that may be, enjoy.

The UCI: 40 Years Of Fighting Against Doping - Introduction (annotated) (PDF)