USADA [note: not UCI] has said the Tour titles should not be given to other riders who finished on the podium.
The agency said 20 of the 21 riders on the podium in the Tour from 1999 through 2005 have been "directly tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations" or other means. It added that of the 45 riders on the podium between 1996 and 2010, 36 were by cyclists "similarly tainted by doping."
THis is the saddest part. It shows that the Tour de France and Professional Cycling are a complete joke and the entire sport should just disintigrate into irrelevancy.
There is not a single cyclist out there that can now be considered a champion and taken seriously. It is a very sad indictment and tragic for the one or two cyclists that might actually be clean.
Okay, so let’s assume that’s true. Lance Armstrong was probably cheating, and probably so was everybody else but one who was on the Tour winners’ podium during his run, and probably so were four out of every five guys on the podium the next five years after (and the ADAs were up and running during all this, by the way, and even if they weren’t, you’d think UCI would want to keep cycling clean and Amaury Sport wouldn’t want to get cheated out of the prize money). This is not a cheating problem. This is a complete, chronic, endemic loss-of-institutional-control problem. That’s why I’m not ready to crap on Lance. He’s not the cause. He’s a symptom.