Wonder how this will effect the 2011 TdF?
I don’t believe Hincapie.
I believe every Tour De France winner since 1975 has been jacked up on PED.
Well how else was Armstrong supposed to beat a bunch of other dopers?
When you consider how many of the elite TDF riders of the past 10 years ended up with positive tests (Ulrich, Landis, Vinokourov, Basso, Rasmussen, Contador, Mayo, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.), I’ve always admitted that I was using willing suspension of disbelief with Armstrong since he never was caught. It sure seems like the whole sport was doing it and it was simply a cat and mouse game. Armstrong was the best mouse perhaps.
My biggest problem with the whole Armstrong situation now isn’t 60 Minutes (it’s cool if they unearth new stuff) - it’s that my tax dollars are paying for the DOJ to spend millions of dollars investigating Armstrong for conduct that is a decade old and that hangs by the slender reed of his association with the Postal Service. Defrauding the US government is the hook. Really? I’d rather have the DOJ going after real criminals rather than a retired cyclist. Felt the same way about the Barry Bonds case, but that’s another story.
I find it hard to believe that all of the other great riders were doping, and yet Armstrong was dominating them without doping. Unlikely.
However, he was never caught, so there is no proof.
I don’t care about athletes using PEDs, especially when they are all doing it.
As an old road racer I have a few comments:
1. As Maitre Jacques once said: “Nobody rides The Tour on mineral water.” Shall we shame Merckx now? And Poulidor? And Hineault? And LeMond? And the rest? Drugs (even alcohol, tobacco, and amphetamines) and the Tour go back to its founding in the turn of the century. Ask Tom Simpson.
2. Lance has endured possibly THOUSANDS of random high-tech drug tests and has never been positive. His enemies are legion. They hate him, and the USA, and all he stands for. Is this - and a jealous anti-Lance Velo press - not enough? Can we not just let it go?
3. Armstrong is perhaps the greatest athlete of all time. Athletism at that level is a cutting edge marriage of art and science and psychology... And medicine of all kinds.
4. If doping is a cat-and-mouse game, let it be so. What about the altitude chambers the top athletes sleep in to boost RBC levels? Why is it legal just because it is not a pill?
5. Many people cannot believe Lance’s O2 to power-output levels. I can. Lance, unlike any other cyclist with the exception perhaps of LeMond rebuilt himself as a TOTAL cycling monster after health tragedy struck, and he deserves the credit and acclaim he has won.
6. Lance defines the term CHAMPION. He is in a league all his own. Never underestimate the ability or desire of good but lesser men to want to destroy the Champion.
That’s my say.
Marion Jones never failed a drugs test.
PEDals??
There was an article in a European newspaper several years ago that detailed the investigations into use of banned substances in the sport of cycling.
After a day of competition cycling a team would be chosen to be tested. The team doctor would always have several of the backup riders on the team set aside as non-drug users, so these guys would be sent to the testers first.
While they were testing those guys, the doctor and trainers had about 45 minutes to put IVs in the riders and flush the drugs out of their systems. Since they tested the guys in a serial fashion, they had time to do this.
The whole system is set up so that they can claim they are doing random testing but still give the teams time to take care of any evidence. It’s like most sports, there is a wink and a nod to testing for banned substances but there is little effort to actually stop it.
Too him long enough to come forward... /S
Bad. Cheryl will now divorce him!
Unless he was tested positive all those many times, they have no case. It is a matter of he said/he said.
The other thing that no one points out is that he SPECIFICALLY trained for the TDF, concentrating on that race alone, and only using the other races as training rides. Most of the other riders would wear themselves down by the time the TDF came around, where Lance was primed for it.
***Wonder how this will effect the 2011 TdF?***
Lance won’t win.
The powers that be have gone out of their way to try to catch him, and he has never been santioned, not even once.
That's the evidence that counts. He has come up clean, clean, clean.
Innuendo and sour grapes just won't cut it...
I don’t think Lance will win this year.
Maybe because he will not be racing.
They need to give it up and focus on the people still racing.
If you can pass the control and racing checks - well then, you passed.
> Hincapie has often been depicted as one of Armstrong’s most loyal teammates
That all ended a couple of years ago after the 14th stage of the 09 Tour when Hincapie blamed Armstrong for leading, or certainly not discouraging, the chase that managed to keep George out of his only real shot at yellow in his Tour career.
I don’t care what anyone says. Armstrong is still the best cyclist of all time.
Can someone explain to me what we gain from this? This is all for a fraud investigation really? It seems almost like they are creating the fraud to then punish. None of the sponsors would have any claim to being defrauded or not having got their money’s worth without these investigations now well after the fact.
I am a fan of Lance’s and very much want to believe that he was clean. If he wasn’t then so be it, I wouldn’t care too much if he were a normal athlete that I liked. He is not. Livestrong appears to be a very good charity. To destroy Lance is to destroy Livestrong. I think that is a very bad thing and I don’t see how anyone can see any good from it that outweighs that bad.