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How are the mighty fallen
Oct. 11th, 2012 09:11 pmOne of my parents - I think it was my mother - loathed Jimmy Saville. Which could be difficult in the 1970s, because he was on TV and radio a lot. Most people around my age will remember not just Jim'll Fix It, but specific ones like 'the one with the dog' - one girl had a day with dogs and ended up being given one. Now we're wondering what price she paid for it.
When some Radio 1 DJ's declined to play punk rock, he had a programme that did, typically featuring live performances. On one, the guests were The Vibrators, and a young woman in the studio audience asks where they got their name from. Silence. Then Saville says that people had seen the band's gear being taken into the BBC, in large boxes marked 'Vibrators' and gone "Never..."
The details in the US Anti-Doping Agency's case against Lance Armstrong come as less of a surprise. (The BBC links to a Google Doc version which you can't download, but the original is here, although annoyingly the numerous appendices are all separate PDFs.) Ditto that Johan Bruyneel - director of Armstrong's team - has also been charged. When he was announced as the new director of the guilty as fuck Astana team - to 'clean it up' - my eyebrows nearly hit the ceiling.
It's going to be interesting to see what the UCI does about the case. Currently, they're declining to actually take Armstrong's titles away. If they did, I wonder how low down the original 'General Classification' they would need to go to find someone who wasn't cheating. I can still go gosh at the performances, but not for nothing does a favourite history of Le Tour describe the period as an EPOch*.
Update: Ah, the BBC have reported that body that organizes the Tour de France has said that if (i.e. when) he does lose the titles, there will be no 'winner' for those years. That's how bad it was.
* EPO is one of the primary drugs used to cheat - it increases how much oxygen the blood can carry. From the USADA report: "Twenty of the twenty-one podium finishers in the Tour de France from 1999 through 2005 have been directly tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations or exceeding the UCI hematocrit threshold."
When some Radio 1 DJ's declined to play punk rock, he had a programme that did, typically featuring live performances. On one, the guests were The Vibrators, and a young woman in the studio audience asks where they got their name from. Silence. Then Saville says that people had seen the band's gear being taken into the BBC, in large boxes marked 'Vibrators' and gone "Never..."
The details in the US Anti-Doping Agency's case against Lance Armstrong come as less of a surprise. (The BBC links to a Google Doc version which you can't download, but the original is here, although annoyingly the numerous appendices are all separate PDFs.) Ditto that Johan Bruyneel - director of Armstrong's team - has also been charged. When he was announced as the new director of the guilty as fuck Astana team - to 'clean it up' - my eyebrows nearly hit the ceiling.
It's going to be interesting to see what the UCI does about the case. Currently, they're declining to actually take Armstrong's titles away. If they did, I wonder how low down the original 'General Classification' they would need to go to find someone who wasn't cheating. I can still go gosh at the performances, but not for nothing does a favourite history of Le Tour describe the period as an EPOch*.
Update: Ah, the BBC have reported that body that organizes the Tour de France has said that if (i.e. when) he does lose the titles, there will be no 'winner' for those years. That's how bad it was.
* EPO is one of the primary drugs used to cheat - it increases how much oxygen the blood can carry. From the USADA report: "Twenty of the twenty-one podium finishers in the Tour de France from 1999 through 2005 have been directly tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations or exceeding the UCI hematocrit threshold."