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The first race of the roller-ski
season always used to be a 30km on the flat course at Eelmoor, but
this year something new: a 1 hour race on the much more interesting
1 mile cycle circuit at Hayes.
A blistering hot day, with
quite a strong wind, the leading pack off the start was me, Peter
Moysey, Alan Eason, and, from the past, Jeremy Knight (who used
to win all the British races until his retirement 5 years ago).
Jeremy lasted 3 laps, and I put on a burst after 30' that dropped
Alan. At 45' another burst put me well ahead of Peter, but I eased
off, and he caught me again at 58', just in time for my finishing
burst.
On a different note, it was
good to see that the IOC has acted on the Austrian skiers who left
blood transfusion equipment in their accommodation at the Olympics.
See the IOC
press release and article
on Sportserver. Good that the coach and chiropractor were also
banned, but curious that the Austrian team doctor was not banned:
that encourages a 'head-in-the-sand' approach to individuals' doping.
WADA has also just announced
a protocol for differentiating doping cheats from some inadvertent
victims of the fight against doping - sportserver
article. While there is obviously sense in having only genuinely
performance-enhancing drugs on the list, there are also plenty of
non-performance-enhancers that disguise cheating, and it is easy
enough to say that you only took an over-the-counter cold remedy
when in fact you injected stimulants. I think it is impossible to
reliably distinguish inadvertent from deliberate drug-taking.
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