So $4.4 million to conduct 6890 tests - that's about $650 per test,
which is
pretty steep in the medical realm but may not be unreasonable
considering
all the ancillary costs. In any case, though, I can't help but wonder
where
the people who call for a huge increase in testing expect the money to
come
from...for example, would they be willing to pay an extra $50 for
their
annual license to help support expanded testing? I bet that most would
not.

Andy Coggan


well US PRO charges US domestic teams almost $10,000 for UCI
registration and provides virtually no service for that fee. It would
be nice to see some of that money allocated for testing. Beyond that,
I'd be willing to pay an additional $1000-$2000 to that team fee if I
could be assured that the money would go directly to the testing of
cyclists in and out of competition. With a dozen teams or so, that
would be 20-40 additional cycling tests.

I also think it reasonsable to make some in competition testing as a
requirement for events of a certain threshold. Perhaps category A and
or B races must either provide for testing or pay into a pool for
random unannounced testing at a certain number of cat A and or B
events.

I would also suggest increasing the number of athletes in the testing
pool to include all US Pro license holders. This would probably be
outside of who the USADA needs to test but there is no reason that the
funding mechanisms above could be used to allocate supplimental
testing.

People are doping...regularly. And I don't mean ephedrine. The
Fuentes, Bergman, and DeCanio revelations are sad. And even sadder is
that as long as this continues, the clean but successful athletes will
always be suspected and their efforts doubted.

Bill Laudien
Sportsbook.com
(Sponsor of the Sportsbook.com Sprinter's jersey (temporarily)won by
Fuentes and who's team was cheated out of the gold medal round of the
team pursuit by Adham Sbeih)