Former a two-or-three time Tour champ, and now just two, Alberto Contador has boldly called the kettle black.
After only just returning to racing a little over two months ago for a doping ban, Alberto Contador has stated he believes all dopers should receive immediate bans for positive tests. While he allows for the appeals process to work and all the judiciary hop-knobbing to run its course, the Spaniard stated he strongly believes life-time bans should be dealt to wrong-doers.
Of course, he’s innocent. Bert maintains that the loss of his 2010 Tour and 2011 Giro titles are an”injustice”. So even if a lifetime ban were in place, it wouldn’t, or shouldn’t apply to him, because he’s innocent. Right? No. Not at all. Contador’s post-dated two year ban was a sentence based on some serious evidence disproving his infamous ‘tainted beef’ story. Most notably, the presence of plasticizers in his blood, consistent with blood transfusions, is an almost universal sign of guilt for the UCI and IOC. By all indicators except Contador himself, he was guilty, served his time, and returned to the sport with an extremely short memory, or so it would appear.
And the life-time ban idea would surely skip the likes of Frank Schleck. Found at this year’s Tour with elevated levels of a diuretic in his system and booted from the race, Schleck immediately claimed the most reasonable explanation for his positive test: he was poisoned. At least Contador’s story didn’t stink of a James Patterson novel in Spandex. Poisoning has to be moved under the umbrella term of accidental ingestion, and its slightly easier to deal with there. So what if he really did take the product on accident? Without knowing? According to Contador, he deserves a lifetime ban.
Do you believe Contador and the Case of the Tainted Spanish Beef is just too wild to be made up? It’s given hack writers with Internet access (ahem) more than enough fodder to last most of last winter, and Schleck’s under-the-radar hearings are still being ironed out. Contador’s selective amnesia doesn’t acknowledge the small chance that some people have false positives, or accidental positives, or at least claim to, especially Alberto Contador himself, who lucked out with a retroactive ban that conveniently let him come back to win the 2012 Vuelta.
The doping problem in professional cycling doesn’t have one answer. It has a a million. But the lifetime ban, the death penalty, isn’t one of them. Feel invited to share your ideas in the comments area below.