Brian Smith tweet has got me quite excited:
That would be the first interview in years and would be a great way to mark the 25th anniversary of his King Of The Mountains title.
Biological passports: Is that it?
Five riders named as having produced values irregular enough to warrant sanction was never going to be enough to meet expectations that had built up over months. I think my initial reaction on twitter summed it up pretty well:
“@stephenfarrand Not even enough to qualify as anti-climatic. at least Fofanov had the decency to be on a team that made it newsworthy”
Perhaps the problem lies in how the blood/biological passport has been explained and perceived. Lack of information and a the desperation of fans to see an end to the latest phase in the arms race have led to it being forced into a place it was never meant to be.
Was it ever going to bust everyone? Probably not and maybe some were wrong to hope it would.
Was it allowed to grow a reputation to be feared as the ultimate weapon against doping? Almost certainly, but who is responsible for that is more difficult to define. One person who certainly shouldn’t be blamed is Anne Gripper who has resurfaced now that the first results are out and perhaps shed some light on it how it works:
“The passport software actually interprets the raw blood results and it provides information for the experts to review. It also requires the human touch and knowledge of an expert to look at the data and interpret it. Just because a profile exceeds certain limits we’re looking at doesn’t mean that the rider is doping. The experts then decide if the results can’t be explained by anything pathological or physiological or if the rider has been doping through manipulation of his blood.”
Read the Anne Gripper interview on Cyclingnews.com
I don’t think these first cases will be the last but whether it becomes an effective weapon against doping remains to be seen.
Betting on the Tour de France 2009
Way back in 2006 I made my most successful tip on the race ever: I told a friend who does a fair bit of betting to take Flooyd Landis to win on Betfair at around 70/1. He might well have put a hundred quid on him while I didn’t, not wanting to jinx his bet. Regardless of what happened after the race, it paid out in July.
It was probably a month or two out from the start when he placed his bet and that’s when the market tends to be at its ripest for picking. But there’s still some pretty good prices to be had, even on some of the most obvious favourites you can still make a reasonable return on a 5 quid fun bet if it comes off.
For me the obvious value is currently in the sort of riders who don’t get the sort of talk up that Armstrong, Contador and Evans will. They tend to be a bit longer odds until the race starts to shake out.
Most striking is the price on the defending champion, Carlos Sastre, who can still be picked up at the equivalent of 27/1 and last year’s 4th place rider, Christian Vandevelde, at monstrous 129/1. Denis Menchov, 3rd last year and winner of the Giro D’Italia 2009, at 15/1 looks decidedly short odds by comparison.
Perhaps it’s a case that the money going into the market isn’t as smart as it should be. Vandevelde’s price probably reflects his injuries at the Giro but if he has a good Tour de Suisse, then it could come in pretty quickly.
If you are an experienced gambler and know how to balance your books, I imagine that there’s good money to be made in lay betting, something which I’ve never been able to get my head round. Looking down the list there’s plenty of riders who are unlikely to even start (Alejandro Valverde, Andreas Kloden, Ivan Basso) so it might be worth checking what the policy is. Betting on them not to win would seem to be all too easy, so obviously I’ve missed something.
Closer to the time you should see head-to-head bets appear (ie X vs Y) which are usually fun and frequently poorly chosen meaning that a bit of cycling knowledge can go a long way, for example in sprints.