Lance Armstrong

[Signal]

Originally Posted by Balanzed

I guess that what professional cycling has become is a competition in who has the best medical team and that no matter how good the governing part of the sport is to detect new forms of doping, they're still playing catch-up to the huge monied teams who can afford having the best of the best chemist at their disposal.

Perhaps- but they are/were by far the most tested.

Unions/regulations etc prevented regular or frequent testing of Football/baseball/basketball until pretty recently.

Can you imagine how many football palyers would have tested positive in the late 80's/90's...They still are only tested 1-2 x a year. Can you imagine them being tested after every winning game? Cyclists are.

[Jurgen]

Originally Posted by Signal

Perhaps- but they are/were by far the most tested.

Unions/regulations etc prevented regular or frequent testing of Football/baseball/basketball until pretty recently.

Can you imagine how many football palyers would have tested positive in the late 80's/90's...They still are only tested 1-2 x a year. Can you imagine them being tested after every winning game? Cyclists are.

But even at the level of testing that Cyclists go through many are able to get by for multiple years it seems.

Oh hell yes, Football? king of the steroid sports. Still being used hugely would be my guess.

[Signal]

Originally Posted by Jurgen

But even at the level of testing that Cyclists go through many are able to get by for multiple years it seems.

.

I've gone around with this in my melon over the years, comes down to two sides of the fence-

1. The cyclists are way ahead of the testing, both with coveing techniques and prehaps foreknowledge of the test/procedures and timing (as is the case with US pro sports, the testing is rarely random and follows predictive patterns).
Pro- would explain the lack of positives caught
Con- Most of the testing (post Festina in 1999) has been very aggressive, random both in and out of season, and testing both winners and random participants at races. Also would be difficuly for those without huge budgets to keep up any cover up. The cycling community is pretty tight (a few hundered guys, each sort of tied to each other). Smaller teams would certainly catch wind of larger, organized doping and would have played along (hoping to get on a better team next year) or would have called them out to level teh field.

2. THere simply are not as many cases of doping/or as widespread as implied- ie: they passed because they WERE CLEAN at the time (only to get caught later. Many of the modern tour tiders that have been busted were actually caught ot the Velta or GIro, or some "B" race- during a recovery or training race
Pro- Makes sense, noting most who have admitted doping outlined only episodic use.
Con- They've been dirty all teh time- the screening just sucked

[Lobby]

Where I'm stuck is the unfairness of this "double jeopardy." Yeah, I know this isn't a criminal case, but how often does a guy have to win in court before he's declared innocent? Heck, not guilty would be good enough.

And what about the cost for Lance for all this? When he was a successful cyclist, he prob had loads of cash. Now?

This whole thing screams of unfairness...

[Signal]

Originally Posted by Lobby

This whole thing screams of unfairness...

Agreed.
And to what end (the chronic investigation), to justify years of $$$ spent, so ultimately they can give a title from 10 years ago to a confirmed doper?

[squish]

Originally Posted by Lobby

Where I'm stuck is the unfairness of this "double jeopardy." Yeah, I know this isn't a criminal case, but how often does a guy have to win in court before he's declared innocent? Heck, not guilty would be good enough.

And what about the cost for Lance for all this? When he was a successful cyclist, he prob had loads of cash. Now?

This whole thing screams of unfairness...

Except that the last round they found that lance didn't break any laws, they didn't say if had had juiced.

And if recall Lance himself has always claimed something to the effect of "I've never failed a doping test" not that he hasn't doped just that he hasn't been caught.

[Balanzed]

They have been pumping, sniffing, eating, injecting shit into their veins since 1903 and it's still the teams being way ahead of the governing part of racing.
I do remember that one of the doctors from Le Tour said something to that effect, that in a lot of ways the governing part will always be trying to play catch up to the scientist that provide racers with illegal ways of enhancing their performance, because it's much more difficult to test for things you might not even be aware of being used than it is to know what you're specifically looking for. This was the case with EPO where the governing part were really late in discovering the outspread abuse among riders.
There's a lot of things that riders can do that are absolutely legal and that have raised their ability to go from race to race without serious injury to their health, and that is all thanks to the involvement of scientist too, but it's a slippery slope and the limits are constantly being challenged and or moved because we know more about the human body than a 100 years ago.

Yeah, I do believe Lance was doped out of his skull, but I also believe that everyone he competed against all those years were doped out of their skulls. He just had the better scientist.
So in the end, it probably was much more a competition among your peers than anyone cheating more or less or getting more or less caught with the syringe in their veins.
If we're all equally bad, we're all equally good.....or some such nonsense.

They used to say about Le Tour de France "No dope, no hope!" and I don't think that has changed much. It is a race that is unbelievably hard and it has not gotten any easier. If you want to make a living racing bikes and not kill yourself, you've got to seek help to survive all those races through a whole season, because, next year the show starts again.

[cathulu]

It is time for lance to go down. The game is up, the biggest fraud in perhaps the history of sport will finally face the music. That is a good thing. Otherwise let everyone dope with impunity because lance gets away with it because he has done too much good! Too much good lmao. What good has he done but leave a pile of shit with the other turds in cycling. Cut the head of the snake I say.

Sent from my GT-I9100M using Tapatalk 2

[Chisenhallw]

Haters gonna hate, but I still believe in Lance.

[Jurgen]

Originally Posted by Chisenhallw

Haters gonna hate, but I still believe in Lance.

I just have trouble believing the miraculous. Yeah, some guy pounded every rival-- every rival who was shown to be dirty themselves. But he was clean himself?

Just can't see it.

[Uncle Pollo]

Originally Posted by Weirdo

That's the thing. They decide that Lance was doping and they take his titles away and give it to the next guy in line....who most likely was doping.

What's the point?

You actually make sense.

Stop that shit.

[Uncle Pollo]

Originally Posted by Balanzed

They have been pumping, sniffing, eating, injecting shit into their veins since 1903 ...

Earlier than that ... remember track racing?

I bet they used some kind of speed then ...

[bobobob]

Originally Posted by PolloAsesino

Earlier than that ... remember track racing?

I bet they used some kind of speed then ...

Coke a Cola

[Weirdo]

Originally Posted by PolloAsesino

You actually make sense.

Stop that shit.

Sorry.

I don't know what came over me. It's gone now, I'm better.

[Balanzed]

Originally Posted by PolloAsesino

Earlier than that ... remember track racing?

I bet they used some kind of speed then ...

They used nitroglycerine, strychnine, cocaine or whatever else they could get their hands on to alleviate the pain.
The history of bicycle racing is an interesting one, that's for sure.

It was weird for me when I realized that my childhood idol, who was a professional 6 days track racer, was most likely a serious dope head. I remember how huge those 6 day venues were when I was a kid in the late 60s and 70s. Everyone went to those things. It was a market, a festival and a national holiday all mixed into one. In my world it was bigger than football (soccer for the US guys) and I had uncles who would attend for all six days, never leaving other than to change shirts. The speeds with which those guys went around the tracks were ridiculous and they staid on the bike all through the night.
Human madness in its purest form.
Yup, they were drugged all right, but it was big business and still is.
It doesn't have anything to do with hating Lance or Indurain or Riis or Ullrich or Merckx or any of the great racers, it has to do with realizing what professional sports is all about and what people are willing to do to themselves in the name of competition and prize money. When parents point their kids in the direction of competing in sports and the kid take to it, have talent in it and are willing to push themselves beyond play and then become a talented amateur with more and more games, races, travels away from home, and one day have to chose to have it as a job, to try to reach the top of the mountain and they're being introduced into the highest echelon of their sport, where they'll meet and compete against the ones that were the reason they kept going through all the pain, their idols and the icons of their sport and they find that they are woefully unprepared to this level of human exertion. They look for answers why they're not good enough, and how the hell can they not be good enough, the people who are in the know let them in didn't they?! And then suddenly, after a couple of years, here comes the "Sorry, mate, but....everyone does it!".
Risk your life competing on the high level and retire before anyone outside can even think about a pension or walk away, back to a existence that you, btw, know nothing about because competition has been your whole life and all your friends are where you are right now?

That is what the question of doping is about. How far do we, the ones not competing, allow those who are to go in the name of our entertainment?
Faster, faster, higher, higher!
We all know that when the game is on, I wanna win, not you, me! You can be my best friend, and probably are, but I'm gonna beat you today come hell or high water and we're both gonna do our outmost and whatever it takes to get the prize.
If you could win everything, your biggest dream come through, what would you do to make yourself better than me on the last meters?

When we look at those who compete and what they're willing to do to win, maybe we should try to look at how the entertainment of us have sometimes huge costs for someone who tried to entertain us by going faster, longer, higher.