Nuthin but drug talk these days... we need to find another topic soon. Meanwhile, the developments on the doping front are fast and furious.
The biggest news is that CSC have announced a new doping control program which is "groundbreaking" and "uncompromising" but otherwise short on details. The team has a press release posted, and Eurosport has the generic news piece.
All we know is that the team expects to conduct some 800 tests over the course of the season. Those results will be supervised by a single doctor, made regularly available to the doping control agencies, and released to the media at season's end in report form. If anyone has more details, please chime in.
Frankly, though this is clearly a positive, proactive stance, it lacks any creativity compared to what we saw from the T-Mob. It's just blanket-surveillance. Don't get me wrong, this is probably good, and anyway Riis has a lot more credibility on the doping issue now than he did in his racing days. Dumping Basso was a demonstration that CSC are serious, like T-Mob. And maybe there's more that we aren't seeing. But I thought that T-Mob's approach could actually change the doping culture, making the riders invested in the solution. CSC's is kind of top-down and heavy-handed... a good way to catch cheaters, but not to win the hearts and minds.
I'm for what CSC are doing, but I hope there are other components to their program as well.