Sorry but her excuses are feeble and she takes no responsibility for her actions and CAS should be ashamed of themselves for caving in to the pressure undoubtly put on them to ensure EA was clear to compete at RIo. Can't have the golden girl of British cycling under a dark cloud now especially with all the fall out over Russian athletes
She is the professional, she eats, drinks, trains as a professional, she has one tiny thing to do to ensure she is contactable, that doesn't just mean turn up at a hotel, get a key and say nothing to the staff and turn your phone off.
We all know what hotel protocol is like especially even more so in todays climate, she knows what hotel protocol is like. Chris Froome took responsibility for a missed test due to hotel staff not letting a tester have the room number, he took it upon himself to ensure that that never happened again. That was big news, she would have known about it as other athletes would have done so being pro-active/following certain steps as British Cyling advised her should have being a priority, you know like leaving your phone on to be contacted for that period YOU CHOSE to be available for testing, that phone that the tester tried to contact you on!!
She then changed her story regarding whether she had challenged or not challenged the first missed test, UKAD says she didn't until the last test but either way the CAS decision is lenient in extremis in a system that was made more lenient with the reduction to 3 in 12 months not the 3 in 18 months as previously enforced.
That Ms Armitstead then missed another test due to her inability to abide by the rules and then another when she couldn't be bothered to notify the drugs agency of her whereabouts stating family illness Which she could do by smart phone/SMS/email/computer directly to the website is frankly at best a disgustingly cavalier attitude toward drugs and the system.
Notifying UKAD will not have changed the illness of the family member in any way and knowing she was on a final warning still elected to ignore the system in place, why jeopardise your whole career and reputation for a few minutes? No, you don't have to be a robot, but you have a known responsibility to comply and in that she hasn't, all that within 9 months! How many other athletes have missed three tests of recent times, why should Ms Armitstead be given more leeway? Frankly she, BC and CAS are making a mockery of this, reasonableness my butt cheeks.
The Nicole Cooke statement is VERY damning and rightly so.
People here need to understand why unannounced testing is important, micro-dosing can allow you to be under the test limits which are very high as the vast majority of doping done now matches chemicals that occur in the body anyway. This means that if you micro dope on a Wednesday have a good long sleep which come Thursday 6am will have reduced that level in your body to within the limits in that short space of time. It's laughably co-oncidental that the language used by her legal/PR team in her statement says 'never failed a test' instead of clarifying never used drugs.
Not being available until the following day as in Ms Armitstead's case with her subsequent testing after her race which she passed within those limits would give enough time for micro-dosing to not be caught, that's a simple fact that has been demonstrated previously.
Lapping up her and her legal teams blether by the majority on here, makes me want to puke, wake up for goodness sakes!
I hope she doesn't make the podium and if she does gets loud boos, she should do the decent thing and withdraw from the games.
)
