Possibly some of the above posters could convict me as being the one who did it.......did any of you work on the Police force that investigated those crimes?
My dad did, I'll have a word with him....
I suspect they're gonna catch LA via the backdoor, which is a cunning wheeze but could backfire. Sounds like they're gonna name and shame sseven people including LA, prove 6 did do some doping/helping doping and thus the implication is LA is guilty. Dangerous tactic that isn't going to resolve anything unless they nail him on his own with his own results etc. etc.
Can we wait and see please.
I doubt he'll ever be proven guilty..
..or innocent!
Oh no. Hes guilty as sin. As proven by drug addicts and internet followers of le Tour 😉
It is worth repeating that those who think "They were all cheating so it's a level playing field" are being naive. It isn't just a case of popping a pill & then going faster. A lot will depend on the skill of the doctor in giving the right drugs in the right doses (that's why they got paid so much.) Even then, different people respond in different ways to doping. Someone percieved as naturally awesome may just have a body which responds better than others to the pharmacology they have available.
omeone percieve as naturally awesome may just have a body which responds better than others to the pharmacology they have available.
In the same way as some people have bodies that respond better to training than others..
The concept of a level playing field in any form is always naive. It's just down to which bumps in the field you approve of.
"Although he never tested positive" that is a bit of an untruth.
You need to look a bit further than the wiki.
Failed tests yes, convicted? no. Death stopped play:-(
Bit like lance but saddly no longer here
hora you can wait for the results but tbh nothing will convince me he is anything other than a doper - no one is that awesome. He was able to beat exceptionally talented athletes like Ulrich and Pantani and not have cheated NO ONE could have done this.
I doubt anything will convince his fan boys either who will shout set up /witch hunt, never failed a test etc
I cannot see LA admitting it and have a road to damascus moment he star would plummet and the sense of smugness from the "doubters" may cause the world to stop spinning
I really does take some incredible personal faith in him to ignore the evidence
" He was able to beat exceptionally talented athletes like Ulrich and Pantani and not have cheated NO ONE could have done this"
I understand what you are saying and it is hard to beleave.
But during the time in question i think that dopers had gone from "i need something to get me over that hill" to "i need something all the time to be the best."
With that comes a certain amount of failure, crash and burn if you like. So they could be beaten with a more consistant approuch.
But we'll see about LA.
Fanboy?
What an exceptional story though. He cameback and not just to live a careful life but to live a life that was at the peak of physical endurance for ANY man.
Simple awesome. Clean or otherwise.
Simple [s]awesome[/s]annoying American who is not as good as other cyclists in history but somepeople want to bum him regardless. Clean or otherwise.
In the same way as some people have bodies that respond better to training than others..
The concept of a level playing field in any form is always naive. It's just down to which bumps in the field you approve of.
I tend to approve of the bumps which aren't cheating.
Do you follow Lance on twitter?
He'd have a teeny weeny bit more credibility of his mantra wasn't "Never tested positive" but "Never taken performance enhancing drugs".
The fact that they're planning on letting self admitted dopers ride the Tour and Vuelta this year before banning them at the end of the season, when they are coincidentally retiring from the sport, makes it look like nothing more than a hatchet job aimed at Armstrong.
If you don't give them some sort of reduced ban/penalty for their testimony, who on earth would come forward on a voluntary basis? Seems quite reasonable if these people (amongst the dozens AT LEAST who know what happened) put themselves out that they don't end up with lifetime bans.
He'd have a teeny weeny bit more credibility of his mantra wasn't "Never tested positive" but "Never taken performance enhancing drugs".
Got to agree. There's an air of the Richard Virenque about his comments (Virenquesque??)
he has though al but as part of his cancer treatment so he cannot really say that tbh but it is an interesting phrase he uses.
What an exceptional story though. He cameback and not just to live a careful life but to live a life that was at the peak of physical endurance for ANY man.Simple awesome. Clean or otherwise.
Yes it is simply awesome however he achieved it as he still worked his arse off.
If you don't give them some sort of reduced ban/penalty for their testimony, who on earth would come forward on a voluntary basis? Seems quite reasonable if these people (amongst the dozens AT LEAST who know what happened) put themselves out that they don't end up with lifetime bans.
I understand that they need to offer them something to get them to testify but if this is the case, how can you knowingly let a rider like Hincapie ride for Cadel Evans in the Tour and give him a potentially significant advantage over other riders?
If this is the case then it would just serve to tarnish the win if Evans were to take the yellow jersey.
Do you follow Lance on twitter?
No.
He blocked me as I dared to ask why he moaned so much about being tested.
Well I would expect they don't think they are doping now as these offenses are going back quite some time. According to the news reports I read, they've admitted to PAST doping not that they're racing today doped. I'd assume that they're tested and viewed as clean, particularly the Garmin guys.
Do you follow Lance on twitter?
No, he blocked me for daring to suggest that getting his team to stop on the final day of the tour to change kit was disrespectful to the winner of the tour. The last day is the winners day, and his hijacking of the media coverage was pretty low
So, if they strip him of his titles, is the second placed person also likely to have been doping?
My feeling is yes.
if you look at actually who came second its a resounding yes.. Most of them have admitted or been convicted...
it was so much better in the old days when cyclists were real men and only took coke, amphetamines and alcohol to improved their speed and hopped on the odd bus
Lance has the best tweets.
LOL at realman
Lance has the best tweets.
no way. they belong to NY velocity of toto fame.
Lance has the best tweets
Particularly when he slammed a bloke about to go under the knife to cut out a tumour but who, oddly, didn't want anyone to buy him a Livestrong bracelet.
I can't believe Lance is doing ironman.
So, if they strip him of his titles, is the second placed person also likely to have been doping?My feeling is yes.
[url= 
]Interesting chart of Armstrong TdF top 10s showing known dopers[/url] - riders in grey have been busted or otherwise closely implicated at some time (not necessarily in that year's Tour though).
No, he blocked me for daring to suggest that getting his team to stop on the final day of the tour to change kit was disrespectful to the winner of the tour.
the race organizers made them change,
they didnt set off, change and then change back,
they set off in the changed kit and had to change back
the winner of that tour cheated anyway
2.5 pages added in the last 4 hours, good work chaps and chapesses.
Are we any closer to an answer or am I still going to have to wait for an official verdict?
I can't believe Lance is doing ironman.
Is this a gay porn flick?
Bobsleigh.
I can't believe Lance is doing ironman.
He's not. Banned.
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That's a pretty cool livestrong helmet.
Lance has already had his legacy tainted, in many peoples eyes he will never been seen as the greatest cyclist of all time (even though he is), surely for the anti Lance groups this is enough? Time to stop the witch hunt and move on FFS
Yeah right. drugs or no drugs the guy isn't fit to clean Merckx or Hinault's shoes.
The bottom line is what is the motivation for all the people people who have come forward to testify against him? Read into it, the UCI was/is rotten to the core and Armstrong was totally immersed in it. He had the most prolific performance enhancing durg doctor in the business working with him even after he was given a lifetime ban from cycling. He knew positive tests against him could be swept under the rug just like they were in the Tour of Switzerland. He was directly and indirectly worth a lot of money to the UCI.
If people like Landis and Hamilton can be thrown under the bus then Armstrong absolutely should be too.
Do you never get bored with this?
Followed by Hinault, de Vlaeminck, Coppi, and then Bartoli, Le Mond and then Kelly.
I'm faintly (that is, just a little bit) puzzled why these riders are placed on a pedestal when they won their tours in a time of widespread doping. Why is that? Is it that we don't like to stick the boot into old men? Is it that we simply don't like brash Yanks with "go get em" attitude? I'm genuinely puzzles by this.
My own heroes are Hinault & Indurain - absolute machines in my eyes. Was indurain a doper? He was/is a physical freak with a massively high lung and heart volume, but even then, did he dope?
Why is the focus on Armstrong so much? Why do we care? I just love watching the tour, and couldn't give a flying **** if they're all or none on dope - I still love the sport and spectacle.
Main reason is the others has some style or panache IMHO
LA was like a machine in the TdF but he rarely even competed in the other grand tours and never won any bar the TdF, never won and day races or classics etc ...this does limit his legacy for those who follow cycling beyond the TdF. He is the greatest at the TdF but not even close to the greatest of all time
Re why do we forgive them the doping [ not all did on that post iirc] - is it because they have not built a legacy and multi billion industry around their image selling the dream of them and all that jazz whilst promoting cancer surviving by being paid 200 k a time to appear at events ?...LA built the pedestal he stands atop and many perceive it to be one built on utter BS rather than it being about the bike.
if he said I worked my arse of but I did what everyone else in the peleton did and I still beat them then fair enough ...his message is nothing like that at all.
[url= http://www.cyclesportmag.com/features/lance-armstrong-the-end/ ]http://www.cyclesportmag.com/features/lance-armstrong-the-end/[/url]
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UCI have confirmed that no one has currently been given a 6 month suspension. The leak appears to have come from Bruyneel as he writes for the paper that printed the story of Hincapie et al getting 6 month bans.....just further distraction tactics from the Lance camp.
Thats not to say that they wont be getting the bans at some point in the near future though. (I'd imagine that they will announce it after le Tour though)
Why is the focus on Armstrong so much? Why do we care? I just love watching the tour, and couldn't give a flying **** if they're all or none on dope - I still love the sport and spectacle.
It is a very good question. I can only answer for myself.
With regard to the historic riders, I think the difference was that the drugs of choice allowed them to overcome pain rather actually enhance the performance and there would be a payback for using them. What we have got to remember is that cycling was certainly then a poor man's sport and the pay was very low. Half the time they took the drugs simply to stay awake when driving between events. It was a very tough life.
EPO changed all that and as it was performance enhancing, I came to love the tour during the Indurain era, my guess is that he took drugs but it is only a guess. However, he is a very reserved man who achieved what he did and then has gone on to live a relatively quiet life. Or to put it another way, he was arrogant on the bike but not off it.
I think that provides a huge contrast with Lance Armstrong, I could write for hours on this, but suffice to say people question miracles now more than they did before - witness the religious threads.
the article from that pic is very good
That an entire generation of cycling has turned out to be deeply tainted is beyond doubt. From the early 1990s through to really quite recently, you have to ask yourself how big race winners did it. Some have tested positive, or have confessed to doping (when trotting out the “never tested positive” line, it’s worth considering that David Millar, Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich and Bjarne Riis, to take a few examples, never tested positive).Blood boosting, either by transfusions or ‘Edgar Allen Poe’ [peleton slang for EPO], give such an unfair advantage to some riders that what results from their usage is not sport. Apart from the fact that such high climbing speeds as were being achieved from the mid-1990s onwards effectively deaden any tactical interest or finesse, these doping techniques aren’t democratic. It’s not the case that the same hierarchy exists with doped riders and non-doped riders – we often hear that it doesn’t matter if everybody is cheating because the strongest riders win anyway. Some riders gain more of an advantage than others from blood manipulation, Bjarne Riis being just one striking example.
Michele Ferrari, Armstrong’s old coach and one of the six defendants in the USADA action, is on the record as talking about the Texan being able to express a sustained power output of 6.7 watts per kilogram of body weight when he was winning the Tour.The late Aldo Sassi, who was respected as one of the best cycling coaches and whose reputation was spotless, concluded that a sustained 6.2 watts per kilo was probably the limit of human achievement under normal physiological conditions. Unpredictable and variables, such as length of effort, would skew the numbers a little, but figures above 6 are freakish – the absolute limit of human achievement. 6.0 would win a Grand Tour these days (Sassi was quoted in the New York Times as saying that in the 2009 Giro, only one rider – Denis Menchov – got above six). 6.7 is impossible. It’s over 11 per cent more than 6.0, in an elite area of performance where the margins between riders are impossibly thin. It would be the equivalent of a long jumper jumping 9.93 metres (Mike Powell’s world record is 8.95 metres, and that was a pretty freakish jump).
Armstrong rode up Alpe d’Huez in 37-36 in the 2004 Tour de France, one second behind Marco Pantani’s record (although there is debate about the measurements based on where the climb actually starts and finishes). The fastest time last year was 41-21, by Samuel Sanchez. That’s a difference of just under 10 per cent.
Sorry, USADA not UCI...
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Or perhaps there were just more talented riders in the Tour back then ? It's not impossible. I mean the standard of XC racing has dropped considerably since I retired. I could have kicked any of those girls racing today NO PROBLEM in my time (holds up sarcasm sign).
You can't make a valid comparison.
