Weisel's Legal Peril - will the rich cat sell his cycling monkey outto stay above the fray?

If Lance Armstrong were found to have been on drugs, and his S.F.
handlers knew it, sponsors could demand their money back, and perhaps
change sports in the U.S. forever

Fifteen years ago, former Boston newspaper hack Dan Osipow answered an
ad to valet a San Francisco financier's bike racing hobby, and went on
to play a central role in the greatest and perhaps most peculiar story
in the history of sports management, as the U.S. Postal Service
underwrote Lance Armstrong's Tours de France-winning comeback from
cancer. Now Osipow's stepping down to take a job Dec. 12 with a
private firm that markets UC Berkeley's athletics programs.


"Leaving something historic behind is tough," says Osipow, who held
senior titles at Tailwind Sports and other companies controlled by
S.F. investment bank owner Thomas Weisel to handle ownership of
Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service, and later Discovery Channel, cycling
teams. Osipow was also behind the creation of the four-year San
Francisco Grand Prix bicycle race, which was canceled last month.

"I can recall being in a Chart House restaurant with Tom, myself, and
one other person in 1990, and after perhaps many glasses of wine, Tom
pounded the table and said, 'We're going to put together the first
American team to win the Tour de France.' The fact it happened nine
years later is an amazing achievement," Osipow adds.

Osipow and Weisel's achievement has the potential to morph into
something even more amazing than helping bankroll Lance Armstrong's
Tour wins. The two men helped put in place an unusual contractual and
legal situation that -- if widespread accusations that Armstrong's
wins involved using banned performance-enhancing drugs were ever shown
to be true, and his handlers were shown to have known about it --
could transform all of American professional sports.

If legal investigations under way in Dallas about Armstrong's alleged
drug use were to somehow show the Texan cheated with his handlers'
knowledge, it could put in motion a chain of events with the potential
to purge banned drugs from baseball, football, and anywhere else
athletes are alleged to employ them.

Sponsorship and bonus-payment agreements entered into by Weisel-
controlled companies created a situation in which performance-
enhancing drug use could theoretically be construed as a form of
financial fraud, defined here as a situation in which a party
misrepresents the truth in order to obtain money. If such a definition
were ever to hold up in court, it could open a floodgate of legal
questions.

When the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Barry Bonds and Jason
Giambi told a grand jury they used steroids, could this have meant
ticket-buying fans might have been defrauded? Could fans file a class-
action lawsuit? What about the Giants' commercial sponsors? Could they
sue, too?

With millions of dollars in potential lawsuits at stake, teams would
do everything they could to make absolutely sure their athletes didn't
use banned drugs.

That's quite a potential legacy for a former sportswriter from Boston.

Last March, I was at a seminar in which Charles Grantham, former
executive director of the National Basketball Players Association,
described how the NBA recovered, marketing-wise, from drug scandals of
the mid-1980s. I asked if he ever thought the United States would
treat drug use in sports the way countries such as Italy do, with laws
defining it as a form of fraud, in which someone obtains money by
making false claims. Grantham suggested such a law could never pass in
the U.S. because too many interests would oppose it. In the audience
was Wharton business instructor John Percival, and he piped up to say
that such a change would have to come in the form of litigation.
Plaintiffs would have to allege they'd been defrauded as a result of
banned-drug use, and a court would have to sign off on such a claim.

Such a precedent could change the way sports drug use is viewed --
from a potentially bad example for youth to a form of illicit means of
financial gain.

In a lecture hall populated by academics, a lawyer, and a couple dozen
journalists, however, nobody seemed to have ever heard of such a case.

As it happens, there's a legal situation that roughly follows those
lines being mediated right now in Dallas. SCA Promotions, a company
that event promoters pay to underwrite sports bonuses, has demanded to
see Lance Armstrong's medical records before it pays $5 million for
his 2004 Tour win.

Weisel's Tailwind Sports paid SCA to underwrite the risk of paying out
Tour win bonuses to Armstrong. But last year, a book titled L.A.
Confidential published a litany of drug allegations against the
cyclist.

SCA posted the $5 million bonus apparently due Tailwind for
Armstrong's '04 Tour victory into a custodial account and privately
requested information from Tailwind Sports in order to evaluate the
allegations contained in L.A. Confidential. Tailwind responded
aggressively by immediately filing suit.

SCA is asserting that it was wrongfully asked to pay out money based
on drugs fraud -- a basic concept with the potential for broad
application in sports.

An arbitration hearing is scheduled for January.

SCA's case could be bolstered by allegations published in August in
the French newspaper L'Equipe, which stated that frozen urine samples
from doping tests taken during the 1999 Tour de France, which were re-
examined this year, showed the presence of the banned blood-enriching
product EPO in Armstrong's system. A test to detect EPO wasn't
developed until 2001. The French lab re-examined testing results from
1999, when many cyclists were assumed to be using the drug because
they could avoid detection. Armstrong responded with a vigorous crisis
PR campaign, appearing on Larry King Live to deny he'd ever cheated.

Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, was quoted as
saying the situation bolstered the need to establish a protocol for
retesting urine and blood samples from the previous eight years, so as
to find traces of substances that might have been misused by athletes
before tests to detect them had been developed.

If a Postal Service team member were shown to have doped during the
past five years, the prospect for such an investigation could be
particularly ominous for the Weisel sports companies where Osipow
served as an executive. Starting in 2001, sponsorship agreements
between the U.S. Postal Service and these companies included strong
anti-drugs language under which the contracts could be thrown out if
team management knew of athletes' drug use and looked the other way.
Copies of the agreements I obtained had the sponsorship amounts
blacked out. Press reports, however, have claimed the USPS paid out
around $10 million per year during the agreement, underwriting
Armstrong's Tour victories between 1999 and 2004.

The Postal Service is considered a government agency under an 1863
federal law called the False Claims Act designed to root out fraud
against the government. That means that any insider who believes he
has evidence that would hold up in court showing Armstrong used drugs
while his team management knew yet quietly looked the other way could
potentially reap a bonanza under legal provisions that give whistle-
blowers a share of any lawsuit's proceeds.

"Like most cycling fans I would be reluctant to believe Lance
Armstrong, or any other member of the U.S. Postal Service Team, used
performance-enhancing drugs. But if that were indeed the case, and the
company was aware of that at the time, the company may very well have
exposure for treble damages under the False Claims Act," says Paul
Scott, a former U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney in San
Francisco specializing in cases involving the act.

I asked Scott, and a different False Claims Act specialist who spoke
off the record, to review pages from copies of sponsorship agreements
between the Postal Service and Weisel-affiliated companies. I asked
them to consider an imagined scenario in which a team member was found
to have improperly used drugs, the team organization knew about it,
then hid it from its government sponsor.

"The default clause would seem to indicate that compliance with the
drug clause was a condition of payment. If that were the case, and
they violated the drug clause, and they knew about it, and they
continued to solicit payment from the government with that knowledge,
they may very well have a problem with the U.S. government," Scott
said.

Osipow says he has confidence the L'Equipe reports will not shake the
good relationship the Postal Service had with Weisel's organization.

"It's past history, and they know about the relationship they had with
us at the time. It's past history. They have the utmost faith in [team
manager] Johan [Bruyneel] and Lance. And they have the utmost faith in
our program. And they leave it at that," Osipow says. "It was
difficult news, but you have to recognize the source of the story, and
the history behind it. We believe Lance. Everybody in this
organization believes Lance."

Adds Postal Service spokeswoman Joyce Carrier, "Unless someone proves
any differently, we have no reason to not trust what the team has told
us."

In America the idea that beloved champion Lance Armstrong might have
cheated is seen as a truly extraordinary allegation. This isn't so in
cycling-savvy Europe, where sports headlines are routinely dominated
by doping trials of athletes, doctors, trainers, and other bike-racing
hangers-on.

In Europe, police raids and customs searches frequently ensnare
athletes who had passed many doping tests as drug free. That's because
many of drugs believed to be used by performance-seeking athletes are
still undetectable with current dope-testing methods. There's a
cornucopia of biotechnology-bred medicines that mimic substances that
naturally occur in the body, and are therefore extremely difficult to
detect. Some of these drugs have a second, shadow use in improving
athletic performance. Such drugs include synthetic human growth
hormone and various cutting-edge anemia drugs, which boost the body's
ability to produce oxygen-carrying blood cells.

Last October, an Italian court convicted sports doctor Michelle
Ferrari on doping charges after a series of SWAT-style drug raids on
cyclists' hotel rooms.

According to the book Lance Armstrong's War, by Daniel Coyle, Ferrari
had been known to offer choice quotes to Italian reporters such as
this: "The limit is the antidoping rules; everything that is not
prohibited is allowed," and "If I were a rider, I would use the
products which elude doping controls if they helped to improve my
performances and allowed me to compete with others."

One of the most interesting revelations in Coyle's book is the
extraordinarily close, nine-year relationship between Armstrong and
his personal trainer, Michelle Ferrari. Ferrari spent a week per month
with Armstrong during the spring, and was with him full time during
weeks leading up to the Tour. Ferrari flew with Armstrong to training
camps off the coast of Africa, to Texas, to Spain, wherever the
athlete was undergoing his meticulous process of training, testing,
and training.

Key to Armstrong's success has been this attention to training detail,
and his endless appetite for information related to his physical
preparation.

If this information were to ever see the light of court proceedings,
and if it were to somehow conclusively show that Armstrong's team
looked the other way as he doped, the results just might reverberate
throughout professional sports.

A: Could you please provide the link when you post something like that, or
at least where it was published and when? This goes back to... what, 2004?
I'm not sure. Whenever the last year the SF GP was held.

B: Interesting article that says various things could change the world of
sports forever, including investigations that were well underway at the
time. That was maybe 7 years ago. What has happened since? Did this article
show us the future or is is illustrative of things that are postulized but
don't happen?

C: Your subject line. Regarding the article you posted, Weisel did *not*
sell his "cycling monkey" out back then. Has Weisel's character changed
since, or is the situation more perilous now, or what? What's your take on
that?

--Mike Jacoubowsky
Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReaction.com
Redwood City & Los Altos, CA USA


"Choppy Warburton" wrote in message
...
If Lance Armstrong were found to have been on drugs, and his S.F.
handlers knew it, sponsors could demand their money back, and perhaps
change sports in the U.S. forever

Fifteen years ago, former Boston newspaper hack Dan Osipow answered an
ad to valet a San Francisco financier's bike racing hobby, and went on
to play a central role in the greatest and perhaps most peculiar story
in the history of sports management, as the U.S. Postal Service
underwrote Lance Armstrong's Tours de France-winning comeback from
cancer. Now Osipow's stepping down to take a job Dec. 12 with a
private firm that markets UC Berkeley's athletics programs.


"Leaving something historic behind is tough," says Osipow, who held
senior titles at Tailwind Sports and other companies controlled by
S.F. investment bank owner Thomas Weisel to handle ownership of
Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service, and later Discovery Channel, cycling
teams. Osipow was also behind the creation of the four-year San
Francisco Grand Prix bicycle race, which was canceled last month.

"I can recall being in a Chart House restaurant with Tom, myself, and
one other person in 1990, and after perhaps many glasses of wine, Tom
pounded the table and said, 'We're going to put together the first
American team to win the Tour de France.' The fact it happened nine
years later is an amazing achievement," Osipow adds.

Osipow and Weisel's achievement has the potential to morph into
something even more amazing than helping bankroll Lance Armstrong's
Tour wins. The two men helped put in place an unusual contractual and
legal situation that -- if widespread accusations that Armstrong's
wins involved using banned performance-enhancing drugs were ever shown
to be true, and his handlers were shown to have known about it --
could transform all of American professional sports.

If legal investigations under way in Dallas about Armstrong's alleged
drug use were to somehow show the Texan cheated with his handlers'
knowledge, it could put in motion a chain of events with the potential
to purge banned drugs from baseball, football, and anywhere else
athletes are alleged to employ them.

Sponsorship and bonus-payment agreements entered into by Weisel-
controlled companies created a situation in which performance-
enhancing drug use could theoretically be construed as a form of
financial fraud, defined here as a situation in which a party
misrepresents the truth in order to obtain money. If such a definition
were ever to hold up in court, it could open a floodgate of legal
questions.

When the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Barry Bonds and Jason
Giambi told a grand jury they used steroids, could this have meant
ticket-buying fans might have been defrauded? Could fans file a class-
action lawsuit? What about the Giants' commercial sponsors? Could they
sue, too?

With millions of dollars in potential lawsuits at stake, teams would
do everything they could to make absolutely sure their athletes didn't
use banned drugs.

That's quite a potential legacy for a former sportswriter from Boston.

Last March, I was at a seminar in which Charles Grantham, former
executive director of the National Basketball Players Association,
described how the NBA recovered, marketing-wise, from drug scandals of
the mid-1980s. I asked if he ever thought the United States would
treat drug use in sports the way countries such as Italy do, with laws
defining it as a form of fraud, in which someone obtains money by
making false claims. Grantham suggested such a law could never pass in
the U.S. because too many interests would oppose it. In the audience
was Wharton business instructor John Percival, and he piped up to say
that such a change would have to come in the form of litigation.
Plaintiffs would have to allege they'd been defrauded as a result of
banned-drug use, and a court would have to sign off on such a claim.

Such a precedent could change the way sports drug use is viewed --
from a potentially bad example for youth to a form of illicit means of
financial gain.

In a lecture hall populated by academics, a lawyer, and a couple dozen
journalists, however, nobody seemed to have ever heard of such a case.

As it happens, there's a legal situation that roughly follows those
lines being mediated right now in Dallas. SCA Promotions, a company
that event promoters pay to underwrite sports bonuses, has demanded to
see Lance Armstrong's medical records before it pays $5 million for
his 2004 Tour win.

Weisel's Tailwind Sports paid SCA to underwrite the risk of paying out
Tour win bonuses to Armstrong. But last year, a book titled L.A.
Confidential published a litany of drug allegations against the
cyclist.

SCA posted the $5 million bonus apparently due Tailwind for
Armstrong's '04 Tour victory into a custodial account and privately
requested information from Tailwind Sports in order to evaluate the
allegations contained in L.A. Confidential. Tailwind responded
aggressively by immediately filing suit.

SCA is asserting that it was wrongfully asked to pay out money based
on drugs fraud -- a basic concept with the potential for broad
application in sports.

An arbitration hearing is scheduled for January.

SCA's case could be bolstered by allegations published in August in
the French newspaper L'Equipe, which stated that frozen urine samples
from doping tests taken during the 1999 Tour de France, which were re-
examined this year, showed the presence of the banned blood-enriching
product EPO in Armstrong's system. A test to detect EPO wasn't
developed until 2001. The French lab re-examined testing results from
1999, when many cyclists were assumed to be using the drug because
they could avoid detection. Armstrong responded with a vigorous crisis
PR campaign, appearing on Larry King Live to deny he'd ever cheated.

Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, was quoted as
saying the situation bolstered the need to establish a protocol for
retesting urine and blood samples from the previous eight years, so as
to find traces of substances that might have been misused by athletes
before tests to detect them had been developed.

If a Postal Service team member were shown to have doped during the
past five years, the prospect for such an investigation could be
particularly ominous for the Weisel sports companies where Osipow
served as an executive. Starting in 2001, sponsorship agreements
between the U.S. Postal Service and these companies included strong
anti-drugs language under which the contracts could be thrown out if
team management knew of athletes' drug use and looked the other way.
Copies of the agreements I obtained had the sponsorship amounts
blacked out. Press reports, however, have claimed the USPS paid out
around $10 million per year during the agreement, underwriting
Armstrong's Tour victories between 1999 and 2004.

The Postal Service is considered a government agency under an 1863
federal law called the False Claims Act designed to root out fraud
against the government. That means that any insider who believes he
has evidence that would hold up in court showing Armstrong used drugs
while his team management knew yet quietly looked the other way could
potentially reap a bonanza under legal provisions that give whistle-
blowers a share of any lawsuit's proceeds.

"Like most cycling fans I would be reluctant to believe Lance
Armstrong, or any other member of the U.S. Postal Service Team, used
performance-enhancing drugs. But if that were indeed the case, and the
company was aware of that at the time, the company may very well have
exposure for treble damages under the False Claims Act," says Paul
Scott, a former U.S. Department of Justice trial attorney in San
Francisco specializing in cases involving the act.

I asked Scott, and a different False Claims Act specialist who spoke
off the record, to review pages from copies of sponsorship agreements
between the Postal Service and Weisel-affiliated companies. I asked
them to consider an imagined scenario in which a team member was found
to have improperly used drugs, the team organization knew about it,
then hid it from its government sponsor.

"The default clause would seem to indicate that compliance with the
drug clause was a condition of payment. If that were the case, and
they violated the drug clause, and they knew about it, and they
continued to solicit payment from the government with that knowledge,
they may very well have a problem with the U.S. government," Scott
said.

Osipow says he has confidence the L'Equipe reports will not shake the
good relationship the Postal Service had with Weisel's organization.

"It's past history, and they know about the relationship they had with
us at the time. It's past history. They have the utmost faith in [team
manager] Johan [Bruyneel] and Lance. And they have the utmost faith in
our program. And they leave it at that," Osipow says. "It was
difficult news, but you have to recognize the source of the story, and
the history behind it. We believe Lance. Everybody in this
organization believes Lance."

Adds Postal Service spokeswoman Joyce Carrier, "Unless someone proves
any differently, we have no reason to not trust what the team has told
us."

In America the idea that beloved champion Lance Armstrong might have
cheated is seen as a truly extraordinary allegation. This isn't so in
cycling-savvy Europe, where sports headlines are routinely dominated
by doping trials of athletes, doctors, trainers, and other bike-racing
hangers-on.

In Europe, police raids and customs searches frequently ensnare
athletes who had passed many doping tests as drug free. That's because
many of drugs believed to be used by performance-seeking athletes are
still undetectable with current dope-testing methods. There's a
cornucopia of biotechnology-bred medicines that mimic substances that
naturally occur in the body, and are therefore extremely difficult to
detect. Some of these drugs have a second, shadow use in improving
athletic performance. Such drugs include synthetic human growth
hormone and various cutting-edge anemia drugs, which boost the body's
ability to produce oxygen-carrying blood cells.

Last October, an Italian court convicted sports doctor Michelle
Ferrari on doping charges after a series of SWAT-style drug raids on
cyclists' hotel rooms.

According to the book Lance Armstrong's War, by Daniel Coyle, Ferrari
had been known to offer choice quotes to Italian reporters such as
this: "The limit is the antidoping rules; everything that is not
prohibited is allowed," and "If I were a rider, I would use the
products which elude doping controls if they helped to improve my
performances and allowed me to compete with others."

One of the most interesting revelations in Coyle's book is the
extraordinarily close, nine-year relationship between Armstrong and
his personal trainer, Michelle Ferrari. Ferrari spent a week per month
with Armstrong during the spring, and was with him full time during
weeks leading up to the Tour. Ferrari flew with Armstrong to training
camps off the coast of Africa, to Texas, to Spain, wherever the
athlete was undergoing his meticulous process of training, testing,
and training.

Key to Armstrong's success has been this attention to training detail,
and his endless appetite for information related to his physical
preparation.

If this information were to ever see the light of court proceedings,
and if it were to somehow conclusively show that Armstrong's team
looked the other way as he doped, the results just might reverberate
throughout professional sports.

Yes its old - google any part of the text with quotes and you will
find the source

yes nothing happened - but this time yes

Will Weisel sell out now?

I found the original

http://www.sfweekly.com/2005-12-07/n...s-on-steroids/

On Aug 6, 5:49*pm, Sneakyfox Pepsifranke
wrote:
I found the original

http://www.sfweekly.com/2005-12-07/n...s-on-steroids/

Doh.
Your mastery of cut and paste is without equal.
Now shorten the ****ing posts up a bit and provide the link if people
want to read more.

It's a formula, but it works.

R

Choppy Warburton wrote:
If Lance Armstrong were found to have been on drugs, and his S.F.
handlers knew it, sponsors could demand their money back, and perhaps
change sports in the U.S. forever


You lost me right here. It wont change sports anywhere for 15 minutes,
in any way that matters.

On Aug 7, 12:26*am, "K. Fred Gauss"
wrote:
Choppy Warburton wrote:
If Lance Armstrong were found to have been on drugs, and his S.F.
handlers knew it, sponsors could demand their money back, and perhaps
change sports in the U.S. forever

You lost me right here. It wont change sports anywhere for 15 minutes,
in any way that matters.

None of this affair will change doping in sports. It's obvious that
smart people can dope safely, effectively, and with little chance of
getting caught. Hell, even stupid people can do it if they can follow
instructions. If LA is guilty of anything, it's being stupid and
trusting too many people with his doping practices.

Brad Anders

On Aug 7, 10:31*am, Brad Anders wrote:
On Aug 7, 12:26*am, "K. Fred Gauss"
wrote:

Choppy Warburton wrote:
If Lance Armstrong were found to have been on drugs, and his S.F.
handlers knew it, sponsors could demand their money back, and perhaps
change sports in the U.S. forever

You lost me right here. It wont change sports anywhere for 15 minutes,
in any way that matters.

None of this affair will change doping in sports. It's obvious that
smart people can dope safely, effectively, and with little chance of
getting caught. Hell, even stupid people can do it if they can follow
instructions. If LA is guilty of anything, it's being stupid and
trusting too many people with his doping practices.

Brad Anders

Only secrets that are kept are those only known by one.