Smart PR or the Real Deal?
After having several of their riders denied admission to this year’s Amgen Tour of California the Rock Racing team has announced a new “aggressive internal team anti-doping program.”
Of course, they’re not the first team to announce that they were going to take matters into their own hands when it comes to proving that their riders are clean. Team High Road, Slipstream, they’re all doing it now. In fact, today it almost seems as though if you don’t announce that you have an “aggressive internal team anti-doping program” then you must be guilty already.
I don’t know. Of course we have to encourage and support any serious measures undertaken by any of the teams that are really going to help make the sport more fair, but sometimes I wonder about the validity as well as the motivation behind these “aggressive internal team anti-doping programs.”
Do any of the teams ever follow up by making public the progress and results of these “aggressive internal team anti-doping programs?” How motivated are they really to catch their own guys?
Again, I’m a huge fan of anything the teams are doing to help the sport but I’ve worked in the world of PR for a long time and doing a big proactive PR move like announcing an “aggressive internal team anti-doping program” in order to inoculate yourself against potential future scandal is PR 101.
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February 27th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I applaud all the teams that are taking this pro-active approach to having a clean team. And yes, I think they should be motivated to catch their own teammates. If you love the sport, you should love the CLEAN sport. A team member who is knowingly violating the policies should be busted. And I would rather see the busting coming from inside a team than from an external party because the whole team loses then.
And that’s my two cents.