Posted on 10/13/2012 4:43:34 PM PDT by Vision
Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong demonized her as a prostitute with a drinking problem, and had her hauled into court in England. Ultimately, a legal settlement was reached, and Ms. O’Reilly tried to pick up her life, sometimes talking about Mr. Armstrong and drugs, but to little notice.
Ms. O’Reilly said she was once in a room giving Mr. Armstrong a massage when he and officials on the team fabricated a story to conceal a positive drug test result. Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong told her, “You know enough to bring me down.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
But there’s a book. Sometimes I wonder if someone here gets royalties for that book. :-)
Doping is one of those strange rules, where apparently following the rules isn’t so cut and dried. In most sports, everybody knows you are going for any advantage you can. So part of the game is to push the limits of the rules.
Like in football, people are holding all the time, the key is whether the refs decide to call it. WIth tennis it was the rackets, people pushing the limits of what a “racket” really was. Golf has all the wierd golf clubs, and the different golf balls.
I loved the move “The Flying Scotsman”, where the guy kept developing better bicycles, and the people who ran the “sport”, who didn’t like him, kept changing the rules so he had to change his bike, eventually disqualifying him for some last-second rule.
So, “everybody” is against doping. But even casual sports people will take ibuprofen to cut down pain, will get cortisone injections, will do energy drinks and protein loading. People did hypobaric chambers, and did the thing where they simply stored off their own blood, and then got it re-transfused.
The sport had rules — we will test your blood, and if we find something, you will be punished. Imagine a baskteball game where, after the game, the referees sat down and watched the game in slo-mo, and retroactively applied penalties for every foul. It would be unworkable.
SO, if the doping test said you can’t have more than X amount of some drug, and you decided to use that drug but at less than X, and then later they decided to make it 1/2 X and re-tested your blood — were you cheating, or are they changing the rules? Suppose in NASCAR, they didn’t like who won, and after the race was over they decided to change some rule, and retested the car and disqualified the winner?
But now, some have decided that not only is getting caught later for something that met the “rules” at the time is a good thing, but that an athlete is evil and sick for even THINKING about trying to push the limits of the rules.
I’d understand if people were dissappointed in him, or were objectively in agreement that he deserved to be punished. But when I see people acting like they have cured the common cold, or repealed Obamacare, simply because they think Armstrong was caught breaking some rule, I wonder about their perspective on life.
I wonder if Great Britain’s laws actually allow people to sue over the outcome of a suit. If they win, can they be sued over THAT outcome? You could go on forever.
If so, apparently some of the riders were really stupid, because some really big names in the sport got caught and banned.
There were some football players that were a lot better at not getting called for penalties than others. It was part of the skill of the game.
If the stories were true, there's something to be admired about a guy who is able to push the limits and beat the system, over a period of a decade, while everybody is gunning for him.
If you read a book on this let me know.
The drug tests set the limit for how you can use drugs. The key is to use the drugs at lower levels than are prohibited by the tests, and at times not prohibited by the tests.
The tests define the limits of the rules, and beating the test is no different than the catcher who is able to convince the umpire that balls are actually strikes, or the wide receiver whose greatest skill is making the ref believe he was interfered with.
The advantage it might have had could go back to Armstrong's cancer therapy in 1996 which included EPO.
The pharmaceutical company providing it to him more than likely gave him inside information not available to others on its pharmacology. And from there he became skilled in its useage.
The company would have had a more than vested interest in his future success and given him what it could to aid in facilitating its useage and avoid its detection.
It would also have given him an excuse if he ever failed a drug test and an exemption for certain therapeutic useage.
Interestingly, most of those who are against Armstrong include the argument that NO cyclist wins without doping.
Which makes me wonder why they are so insistant that Armstrong be punished. If they are right, he was doing what everybody else did. Why they don’t think the entire records of all cyclists should be wiped out is the interesting question, and one that suggests they are more interested in seeing their hatred of Armstrong validated than actually bringing integrity to the sport.
If you believe that they all cheat, it could be they really are just upset that he pretends he’s the only one who doesn’t cheat, while they all got caught.
Maybe the wish that instead he would confess, so they wouldn’t all look so bad in comparison.
I can imagine that being “stupid enough” to get caught, as some here argue you have to be in order to fail a drug test, could make you bitter that others you “know” are doping are getting away with it, and pretending they are better than you are.
He may also be facing perjury charges in the US for this case:
You should read the book “Chariots of the Gods”. When you are done, you apparently will be convinced that aliens have visited the earth.
It’s funny that you think a book is evidence. For me, evidence is evidence.
I am a lover of fiction, and part of fiction is making things that are not true appear to be true — the better you do at it, the more people are brought into your story.
I find it tiresome when some people are trying to have a rational debate, and others keep shouting “read the book”, as if that is a counter argument to anything.
Anyway, I don’t really care what your opinion is of what interests the others here are FR. I try not to speak for others, just offer my own opinions, rather than hawking books.
It always seemed that the most likely avenue for Armstrong was his cancer treatment. Although that also shows the subjective nature of drug rules.
Armstrong was given specific permission to use a certain level of certain drugs that might otherwise be disallowed. How much? enough to still make it “fair” for everybody, but what is that?
What if we made a drug regime where everybody was allowed to test to a specific amount of a drug relative to their weight, so that people who were deficient in some factors could use drugs to “level the playing field”. That was the argument for Armstrong — that he needed these drugs, so it wasn’t fair to ban him.
They could have just as well said “We are glad you are getting cured of cancer, but while you are, you simply can’t be a part of our sport, because we have these rules”. But they didn’t — which shows they were NOT wedded to the idea of a drug ban, just that they could keep the sport from being a drug haven.
Armstrong would have been skilled at getting the “correct” amount of drugs, because he had to care about exactly what he tested. He would test positive for drugs, because he was taking drugs, and was limited in the amount, and had to keep that amount below the limits.
I don’t buy the company would have a vested interest — if they ever got caught, the bad would outweigh any good. And if Armstrong ever got caught, you could expect he’d blame the drug company for misleading him about testing.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what *evidence* they have against him, how it’s presented and whether it’s valid. I’d like to believe he didn’t do it, but so much testimony is already out there, it’s hard not to be influenced by it. The hearings/trial will be well-worth following to their conclusion.
Okay then name one manufacturer of EPO that is getting a bad rap over this scandal???
I agree, continuing to be uneducated while pushing your speculation is easy.
The records of all cyclists during the Armstrong era should be wiped out. If they were winning, they were cheating.
They should be wiped out because they forced decent people like Scott Mercier to quit the sport.
Then Bjarne Riis ended Indurain's win streak in a one time mastery of the tour. He later admitted to some usage of his own. I think Pantani did too, but why I think I remember that is sketchy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.