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news
Paula Radcliffe (right) at the 2007 Great North Run (CC BY 2.0 by Conor Lawless)Paula Radcliffe "the female version" of Lance Armstrong? His nemesis Betsy Andreu thinks so
Betsy Andreu, who played a key part in the downfall of her husband Frankie’s former team-mate Lance Armstrong, has thanked Paula Radcliffe for confirming what she had been told – that the women’s marathon world record holder was considered by some to be “the female version” of the disgraced cyclist.
Andreu had asked Radcliffe whether she was the British athlete who four years ago threatened to sue The Sunday Times over an investigation it was conducting into allegations of blood doping against British athletes.
On Tuesday evening, BBC News sports editor Dan Roan tweeted video of a segment of an interview by the channel’s broadcaster Gabby Logan with Radcliffe at the IAAF World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar.
"We talk about how much money has gone into (this investigation)...i think USADA were maybe trying to regain face after the Coleman fiasco.."
Wonder what the US Anti-Doping Agency will make of Paula Radcliffe's take on their successful pursuit of the banned Alberto Salazar pic.twitter.com/IQnzRSgBTX— Dan Roan (@danroan) October 1, 2019
Logan had asked Radlciffe her thoughts about the four-year ban handed to the athletics coach Alberto Salazar following his four-year ban by the United States Anti-Doping Agency for "orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct."
In response to that video, Andreu asked Radcliffe whether she had been the athlete who, in an August 2015 Sunday Times story under the heading, A dozen top British athletes have recorded abnormal blood scores, threatened to sue the newspaper. Radcliffe confirmed that she was.
I did say that.l was in a distressed state of shock at what they were threatening. I truly admired Walsh’s & your fight that exposed Lance for the bully and fraud he was. Now they were going to run a false, damaging story and I knew I was completely innocent.
— Paula Radcliffe (@paulajradcliffe) October 3, 2019
In response, Andreu said:
Thank you for answering at least this truthfully. I was always told you were the female version of Armstrong. Thanks for confirming.
— betsy andreu (@betsyandreu) October 3, 2019
The Sunday Times story was written by the newspaper’s Insight investigative reporting team, which said that it was not naming the athlete – who insisted they had “never cheated” – “because the source who leaked the doping data requested that athletes who had never been banned for cheating should be kept anonymous.”
The report added: “On three occasions during their career the athlete’s test results were so ‘abnormal’ that there was only a one in a thousand chance that they were natural.”
The newspaper listed a number of events where medals were under suspicion and, separately, the championships they related to. While the data related to all countries and not just Great Britain, the lists included both the marathon and the 2005 Helsinki IAAF World Athletics Championships, where Radcliffe won gold.
It said that it met the athlete in a hotel lobby to discuss the findings, adding: “In reference to this newspaper’s long-running legal battle with the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was obliged to repay libel damages after admitting he had cheated, the athlete said: ‘You print it and I sue you [and] you won’t be getting any money back in future like Lance Armstrong — I promise you that’.”
In November 2015 UK Anti-doping, which had received Radcliffe's blood test history from the IAAF, said it had “come to the same conclusion as the IAAF review that there is no case to answer.”
Salazar’s ban relates to when he headed up the Nike Oregon Project, where Mo Farah trained during 2011-17, the period when he won four Olympic gold medals. Radcliffe remains an ambassador for Nike, and her husband Gary Lough, who was her long-time coach, now coaches Farah, potential conflicts of interest that were not acknowledged during the BBC interview on Tuesday.
Radcliffe, who at times appeared uncomfortable, told Logan that Salazar had “overstepped [a] line.” She also suggested that lack of sanctions against individual athletes meant that they were not guilty of doping.
She said: “We've all talked about in the past about how Alberto, in particular, will push it right up to that line. He's been very conscious of trying to find out where the limits lie and how close he can push it to get those last little bits of gains to compete with athletes that, in his mind, in other parts of the world, are really cheating. He's overstepped that.
“He probably should hold his hands up and say, 'I did, I overstepped. The rules were broken, I will now take the punishment for that'.
“Because no athletes have been sanctioned, have real anti-doping [rules been] transgressed by athletes? I don't think so. Otherwise we would have seen athletes banned at this point."
“The athletes themselves have done nothing wrong at this point.”
The 45-year-old also insinuated that USADA’s investigation had been motivated by Chris Coleman, who won the men’s 100 metres at Doha, escaping a potential two-year ban for missing three anti-doping controls within 12 months due to a technicality.
The inference seemed to be that by banning Salazar, the agency was trying to save face – even though its investigation into him had lasted four years.
Radcliffe said: "We talk about how long this investigation has gone on, how much money has gone into it, because people were waiting for something big.
"I think USADA thought it was something big, I think USADA are trying to maybe regain a little bit of face also for the Coleman fiasco and everything that's gone on.
"In going with this, they've maybe been thinking that it's something along the lines of a Lance Armstrong – which was huge.”
Armstrong, who was also sponsored by Nike during the peak years of his career, received a lifetime ban in 2012 and was stripped of results including his seven Tour de France titles he had won between 1999 and 2005.
Frankie Andreu admitted in 2006 that he had taken EPO when riding with Armstrong at the 1999 Tour de France and subsequently provided testimony to the USADA investigation into the US Postal Service team.
In a 2005 court case, Betsy and Frankie Andreu both testified that they had been present in a hospital room in 1996, when Armstrong was receiving treatment for testicular cancer, that he had admitted to doctors using performance-enhancing drugs, including EPO.
Armstrong won that case, but would finally admit to doping in January 2013, three months after he was sanctioned.
Today, he posted a response on Twitter to Roan’s post of the Radcliffe interview … a pair of eyeroll emojis.
— Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) October 3, 2019
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
- mdavidford 6 min 5 sec ago
I didn't realise that the English weren't permitted to respect the law. As I am, I'd better stop doing so immediately.
- Cugel 47 min 53 sec ago
Frankly, British Cycling and its forebears have always been a poor organisation from the perspective of everyday cyclists, even amateur racing...
- Destroyer666 1 hour 2 min ago
I really don't get from the text or the pic how the shifting mechanism is supposed to work - what exactly is being pushed and pulled? What is used...
- OnYerBike 1 hour 46 min ago
Don't forget your hi-viz and lights, folks. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c7086eepzpxo
- hawkinspeter 9 hours 22 min ago
They most certainly do "separate like that"....
- nick h. 12 hours 6 min ago
Read it again. You seem to have missed what this is all about.
- Secret_squirrel 15 hours 8 min ago
Thanks Neil!
- slc 15 hours 14 min ago
All arguments I am hopeful to see validated, especially (a) and (b) combined....
- hawkinspeter 15 hours 47 min ago
Well, on Lundy the only predators are the humans, and they're far more likely to buy some farmed non-Soay lamb from the pub than try to chase a...
- mdavidford 15 hours 48 min ago
"Just a little bit off the sides"
Add new comment
49 comments
Xena is either a troll or an idiot, so best not bother with her drivel I suggest....
That's a tall tail...
Hawkinspeter is the squirrel version of Lance Armstrong. Allegedly.
Nothing to see here
SquirrelArmstrong.jpeg
Xena is very angry, steroids can do that to a person... Xena is the Lance of cycling forums, Betsy agrees!
Wouldn't it be marvellous if spending a few hours trawling youtube videos of questionable provenance and then applying "common sense" to a pile of speculation and unsupported "facts" could make you into some kind of recognised authority on pretty much any subject?
Didn't the athletes at the 84 Olympics all answer a question about would take 50/50 on your life for a gold medal and 93% said yes?
That's the mentality of athletes. Don't put cheating out of their radar.
As for Radcliffe. I will always remember her sitting at the side of the road in tears just a few km from the finish line at the Greek Olympics. I sometimes wonder about that. I wonder if maybe the tears were because she knew she would fail the drug test if she crossed the finish line. And of course not crossing the finish line only cements the opinion of English patriots that she could never be a doper. Now a multi millionaire living in Monaco. No couldn't possibly be a doper and no reason to be as I snuggle up next to the fire with the Sunday Times Supplement on a cold autumnal Sunday afternoon.
He didn't invent emails, email systems had already been in use for a few years.
Hey Xena, you've not done 9/11 yet.
Anything you think we should know?
Poor journalism by road.cc
she said she heard people were calling Paula the Lance Armstrong of athletics m not that's what she thought
bill H, I agree, her comments seem to suggest that everyone is pushing the limits. So the tests designed to give a bit of 'wiggle room' for those that may be different are pushed to the limits by everyone 'cheating' up to the line. So is nobody actually competing drug free, just within a prescribed set of limits?
Passive aggressive much Betsy - Radcliffe may or may not have cheated but the leap Betsy makes could win the pole vault clean, without a pole.
Athletes need to be held accountable but so do the media - if they had enough evidence then surely it would have been revealed.
I don’t like the phrase ‘... really cheating.’ used by Radcliffe, it suggests that some forms of cheating (TUE’s anyone?) should not be taken seriously.
In this case she is voicing what she imagines Salazar was thinking, her own opinion may be substantially different.
Her opinion is that, she is a paid Nike mouthpiece (like Cram) and they never, never go off on one about Nikes antics. They defend the swoosh in this instance, they defend Salazar, they defend Nike funding the lab and doctor involved, they defend Nike actively working to get Gatlin off his 8 year ban, they defend Nike funding Salazars legal team and continuing to do so. Nike are the bad guys here and those who take the $ are no better. Everyone impartial in athletics has known it for decades.
Well, despite global warming, the ancient signs of fall are upon us. Chill in the evening air, leaves turning color, people’s thought turning slowly away from outdoor activities, certain cycling websites trying to juice up the “click count” by dragging out old references to Armstrong...
wake the fuck climate change is BS .check the link see for your self
Hers where your Greta comes from . Not organic but politically motivated check the link have a truth bomb .
https://youtu.be/9Jpk8Ix1CCg
Mr Mann of the IPCC wonder boy found guilty of scientific fraud . They make the data up . Check the link for your self
uphttps://principia-scientific.org/breaking-news-dr-tim-ball-defeats-micha...
if you want to really wake up take a look at this ,this interview is with the chap who I invented emails
https://youtu.be/_eKb9HigTQw
enjoy or stay asleep and be a sheep .
It's so lucky that we have a plucky band of billionaires, politicians and oil companies to bust this conspiracy by 95% of the worlds scientists
I am curious: when you say climate change is BS, do you mean that you don't think that the climate is changing or that you don't think that human activities have affected/caused said changes?
please take a look ,at both vids . The 1st will show you how the IPCC , government manipulated the data on more than one occasion
the second video will give you an idea of what’s going on in academia right now and how corrupt it is and the 3rd vid will open up your eyes to the big picture of what’s going on .
try this ,https://youtu.be/hJujb-VnaCM
now look at this interview with the chap who invented email https://youtu.be/_eKb9HigTQw
https://youtu.be/3PrY7nFbwAY
You haven't actually answered my question...
I don't think a youtube video is going to open my eyes as they inevitably talk a load of rubbish without any proof or references. The reason they use videos is to catch out gullible people (i.e. people who already want to believe in vast conspiracies and thus feel validated by the rubbish in the video).
He didn't event email. It was already in use.
He definitely didn't invent email, but he did write "The Internet Publicity Guide: How To Maximize Your Marketing And Promotion In Cyberspace." which is probably a clue as to how authentic he is. He's also a rich Republican if that's any relevance to his views.
Without an inappropriate squirrel gif, your post lacks any authenticity.
Typical of Xena's type that he takes that dubious claim at face value without doing even the tiny bit of research needed to check it. The guy wrote an email program as a geeky teenager in 1979. There's no evidence that subsequent email programs derived from his, nor that his was the first. The claim appears to be pure self-promotion. Lots of geeky teens were writing programs in 1979 (including me) but they don't claim to have 'invented' whatever type of program they wrote (space invaders knock-off in my case - maybe I 'invented video games'?)
Not even Lance's off-scores hit 115. Yeah of course she was clean LOL
No one has been able to get near Paula's 16-year-old WR time despite a load of doped up East Africans giving it a good crack.
"I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles."
Bob Beman's long jump World Record? Jonathan Edward's Triple Jump World Record? Choose your own facts....
Beryl Burton’s 12 hour record , Seb Coe’s 800 metre record?
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