He was someone that you’d look upto and think ‘wow, it really is possible to comeback and do well in this world’. All bollocks.

Thing is, that still rings true. He came back from being riddled with Cancer and still did something mere mortals couldn’t do, juiced out of their heads or not.

Given everyone he beat was juiced up (or at least all his close competitors) I find it hard to beleive that anyone thought he was beating them clean. Isn’t this the entire reason people were suspisious with no evidence? Recovering from Cancer and winning the tour is one thing, doing it by beating people who were found cheating is a step to far for me.

Congratulations on being so cynical that you never thought that despite a complete lack of evidence to suggest he was juiced (that or you’ve managed to convince yourself that you had foresight at the time

indeed foresight is a wonderful thing, but I don’t think it takes a genius (for the aforementioned reasons) to work out well before he got caught or indeed retired that he was also cheating. I think that his results were all the evidence most folks needed. I can honestly say that without the benefit of hindsight.

That said, knowing he was also juiced didn’t bother me in the slightest, I kind of took it as a given when watching road cycling that they were all up to their eyeballs. Its not something I ever gave much thought to. You had to cheer for someone and it didn’t spoil my enjoyment in the slightest. For me his only ‘crime’ is being a total asshat, which I admit I didn’t know when he was winning all those tours.

As for Hora, wasn’t having a go at him…given his rabid hatred of the man nowadays I’m struggling to see how I was to know he use to be his number one fan.

Morecashthandash, well Geoff was a professional footballer who’s raising money riding a bike….
Are you telling me that Lance can’t raise money for charity in any other way than riding ahead of the very event he cheated for so long? Of course he could! find something else, somewhere else, Somewhen else! He’s sticking two fingers up and rubbing salt in because that’s the antagonistic, unrepentant, God complex type of man he is.

I think that his results were all the evidence most folks needed. I can honestly say that without the benefit of hindsight.

And yet that was not what most said at the time
i am not sure when I knew tbh but he had certainly won some tours before i realised. We all thought he was clean as we did not know the scale of the problem.

Few at the time were saying it like we now know it is not least because LA never failed a test, sued and won against the book published in 2004 saying he cheated etc. said it was about the bike. We all slowly learnt over time but no one was screaming cheat in 1999 and those who claim they always knew must be very late to following cycling

To all you Lance apologists I’ll leave you with what Olympian Nicole Cooke said: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-drugs-retires

Good night.

i am not sure when I knew tbh but he had certainly won some tours before i realised. We all thought he was clean as we did not know the scale of the problem

yeah i agree, like you i didn’t realise straight away, but i think most folk were suspicious after he’d won 2 or 3 times.

As for Hora’s link…if thats the ‘i made less money than all the cheats’ (can’t open link)comment, then I fully sympathise with her…point is its equally applicable to many others, yet only seems to ever get wheeled out when the bogey man’s name is mentioned.

Interesting observation by Vaughters on the Armstrong effect on his return in 2009…

@SSbike @julienpretotRTR @PaulKimmage That was so true. Somehow in 2009 it was a big no-no to talk anti-doping anymore.

— Jonathan Vaughters (@Vaughters) March 19, 2015

Tpbiker the link is openable and abit more than just money.

don’t see an issue with this, the UCI should keep their noses out of things that don’t concern them.