A novel use of the word "exonerate"
Vrijman, who headed the Dutch anti-doping agency for 10 years and later defended athletes accused of doping, said on Wednesday that his report "exonerates Lance Armstrong completely with respect to alleged use of doping in the 1999 Tour de France".Contrary to what Mr. Vrijman--an independent investigator into accusations (i.e., uncontradicted lab results) that Lance Armstrong's blood from the 1999 Tour de France contained the banned substance EPO--insists, what today's reports describe is the very definition of a technicality. As in the criminal setting, we need to separate whether someone can be convicted of a crime from whether we believe they actually committed the offense. This is akin to the O.J. Simpson case: if you think Simpson's acquittal means he did not cause the deaths of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman, then you can now believe that Lance Armstrong wasn't using EPO in 1999.* * *
Vrijman said the laboratory had analysed the samples only as part of a research programme for the detection of EPO, so there was no way of confirming the tests.
"If you look at how the result was obtained it was so different from the analysis procedure required by Wada... it doesn't even qualify as a finding," he said.
"It may suffice for research purposes but as a valid doping result - no way."
He said samples may be used in research programmes only on the condition that all information tracing them to an individual is removed, but this was not the case.
Vrijman added: "Sometimes with doping cases you can say it was a technicality.
"These are not technicalities, these are fundamental issues which should have been done completely differently." - BBC, May 31, 2006
posted at 2:04 PM
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