USA Cycling dismissed anti-doping expert Dr. Paul Dimeo from its advisory committee this week over his views on the current state of anti-doping efforts as recently published in The Times.
Dr. Dimeo has a long history of addressing challenging issues in the anti-doping arena, but the Times article, which indicated that Dr. Dimeo thought currently banned practices such as blood transfusions or EPO should be legalised, caught the attention of USA Cycling and led to their re-examining his role on the advisory committee, even though he argued that his comments were taken out of context.
Cyclingnews spoke to USA Cycling CEO Derek Bouchard-Hall, after the article was published but before their decision to dismiss Dr. Dimeo, about how he came to be named as the chair of the USA Cycling Anti-Doping Committee.
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"Dr. Paul Dimeo is a leading academic in anti-doping research. He was very interested in this idea and helping us form it," Bouchard-Hall said.
"We knew he had unconventional ideas. He challenged the system and asked hard questions such as 'is this working?', 'are we treating innocent athletes fairly?'. We thought that level of challenge was good. We didn't want a bunch of people with the exact same ideas. We wanted a collection of smart people who think about this and who are willing to challenge what we're doing. That was the whole point of it."
But the statements in the Times seemed contrary to USA Cycling's goals of reducing doping. "We did as much vetting as we could. It was after we formed the committee and before we started that we saw these comments he had made to the London Times advocating the legalisation of banned practices such as EPO and blood doping, which are very dangerous and extreme practices. That view is completely inconsistent with our view," Bouchard-Hall said.
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