UKC

According the UCI press release and every broadsheet and bike site Jon Tiernan-Locke has been given a 2 year ban.

Cue the trolls and the Sky haters. What appears odd is that his previous team Endura asked the UCI to allow him into the passport system after his Haut Var and Tour of he Med victories but they refused.

With such compression between the conti and pro-conti teams (aside from Pro tour) shouldn't there be an opt in available, since these are the feeder teams and many are riding GC's on wildcards......

In reply to John Rushby:

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/jul/17/jonathan-tiernan-locke-ban-sac...

It's a no-win situation all round. I can't see what else Sky could have done to protect themselves - they can only work on the available data. The problem is that these passport cases will always take a long time to resolve, because of the length of time that the data is accumulated and the fact that the analysis itself is subjective (?).

And of course there's the catch 22 - if teams are doing lots of testing of their own riders, there is a suspicion that they are doing it to work out how to beat the tests.

BTW was Nibbles subjected to the sort of hostile questioning on doping that Wiggo and Froome were in their rest day pressers ?

In reply to John Rushby:

Contract terminated by Sky, as well. It will be interesting to read the UKADA report, (which is released after the expiry of his appeal period), as I think this one needs some clarification.

He may well have been doping, but I don't see, at the moment, there's sufficient data to make that call. This is from a Cycling News article, (http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/tiernan-locke-called-to-clarify-irregular-b... which further muddies the water.

"Although Endura were not part of the Biological Passport system at the time, owing to their continental status, Tiernan-Locke was monitored following his victory at the Tour of Britain. The baseline values ascertained after a season of passport measurements during 2013 are what testers are now claiming render his limited 2012 data as suspect."

Wonder if he'll appeal.