LONDON: Cycling’s world governing body has yet to release any documents to an independent commission it set up last year to investigate allegations over the Lance Armstrong doping scandal, a hearing was told yesterday.
“It amazes me that we’ve had no documents whatsoever,” Britain’s 11-times Paralympic champion Tanni Grey-Thompson, one of the three members on the commission, told Ian Mill, counsel for the International Cycling Union (UCI).
Friday’s hearing was intended to set up the procedures, fix a timetable for witness statements and the date for a hearing, set provisionally for April 9-26. However it hit immediate stumbling blocks.
Mill said there had been “no desire to suppress or conceal any documents,” with 16 files of material available, but cast doubt on the commission’s need for them, with the possibility of a broader ‘truth and reconciliation’ hearing being set up with other bodies.
In increasingly testy exchanges between the commission members and UCI lawyer, it was made clear that the process could take up to two years, if the commission were not suspended entirely.
Mill said it was clear in any case that the proposed April hearing would not be capable of going ahead and a report would not be ready for June.
Responding to concern expressed by the independent commission chair Philip Otton, who had expressed a fear that allegations against the UCI risked being “kicked into the long grass,” Mill said: “We’re not trying to kill this inquiry, we set you up.” “Now you want to knock us down,” said Otton, before withdrawing the comment.
Otton said it was “blindingly obvious” that there was immense public interest in determining why and how Armstrong’s US Postal Service team was able to engage in systematic doping without detection or sanction.
Armstrong has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles after a USADA report, that included testimony from former team mates, revealed what it called “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.” The UCI, who dope tested Armstrong 218 times without a positive result, set up its independent commission to investigate allegations made against it in the affair.
Mill said the UCI was open to a truth and reconciliation process, with the world anti-doping agency WADA and the US anti-doping agency USADA, but subject to changes to the WADA code to allow an amnesty to be offered to those testifying.
“The UCI has accepted that a truth and reconciliation process was one they wish to engage with, notwithstanding that it was limited to the problems of doping in the sport of cycling,” he said.
“WADA has accepted that it’s code would require to be changed so as to enable the sort of amnesty to be offered which would be likely to result in important evidence being made available.
“We have asked WADA to tell us how and when such a change to the code can be achieved.” Mill said the independent commission appeared to envisage such a truth and reconciliation process forming part of their inquiry, but that might not be the case.
“That was not what this (independent) inquiry was designed to do,” he said, pointing out that the UCI had spent a considerable sum on the commission and funding another longer and broader one was beyond the resources of the UCI alone.
“If others, in particular WADA, are being asked for help to fund the process then they have to have the opportunity to discuss and agree with us the process itself and we envisage that,” added the lawyer.
“It therefore does not follow that this commission will ultimately be involved in that process.”
