Jive talkin'

Wow. The UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) is the governing body for professional cycling, and they are normally very much on the side of drug testing and rarely take the side of the athletes. Which makes their recent press comments about the 1999 TdF urine samples even more powerful. They get in the face of not only L'Equipe, but also WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency). Here are a few choice nuggets:

``How could this be done without the riders' consent?'' the UCI said.

It [the UCI] also asked WADA to say if it allowed the results to be disseminated, which UCI says is a ``breach of WADA's anti-doping code.''

``We have substantial concerns about the impact of this matter on the integrity of the overall drug testing regime of the Olympic movement, and in particular the questions it raises over the trustworthiness of some of the sports and political authorities active in the anti-doping fight,'' the UCI said.

``We deplore the fact that the long-established and entrenched confidentiality principle could be violated in such a flagrant way without any respect for fair play and the rider's privacy,'' it said.

UCI singled out WADA president Dick Pound for making ``public statements about the likely guilt of an athlete on the basis of a newspaper article and without all the facts being known.''

It also criticized the article in L'Equipe as ``targeting a particular athlete.''

Here's a link to the complete story.