what are we talking about here?

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

Lance cheated no one. Not his sponsors. Not the public.


Lance cheated SCA Promotions since they paid him for winning but he cheated to win.


He cheated the public because he convinced many that his recovery from cancer and TDF wins was due to hard work and his own abilities.

His wins were due to hard work and his own abilities. All those pros worked their asses off and were supremely talented. That the UCI bamboozled the rubes by pretending that doping is not baked into the sport, forcing all the riders to lie, does not detract that that.

How stupid were SCA to enter a sport rife with corruption and to believe they had somehow found the golden child that could win clean

My point stands. No one got cheated but those too naive or those so willing to overlook the obvious that they pretended to be virgin till it all came out.........

SCA got exactly what they paid for. A winner in a doping sport during the greatest doping era and for them to think it was clean is just beyond hysterical

He cheated the public because he convinced many that his recovery from cancer and TDF wins was due to hard work and his own abilities.


His wins were due to hard work and his own abilities.


And drugs, lots and lots of drugs.

Your capability for mental gymnastics never ceases to impress.

https://medium.com/...coaches-9ffb9277a5f3

This needs it’s own thread

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Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting

“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”

As has almost every win for the last 125 years

The only difference now is we issue TUE's

So because everyone cheats and has cheated for a long time, I am not allowed to believe cheating is wrong. Really great logic.

Do you apply this to all laws? Do we decide what is “right” based on what one can get away with? Why have rules at all - cut the course, use a motor, who cares? After all everyone always cheats.

Yeah, the old "Everyone does it" argument.

I know one young cyclist who went to Belgium (from the US), was quickly told he'd have to get on the program if he wanted to be a pro cyclist, decided he'd rather not, and came home. There must have been others. (Of course the "winners" were all cheating, so that makes it OK.)

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

And...Jaja was 5th in M50-54 yesterday, after Jeff Fieldhack's DQ, and in that, JaJa knocked Bob McRae from the podium (and his dream)...tell me how that seems to not totally suck after JaJa's history with UCI racing, for Bob to miss out by only 13 seconds. Knowing the guy in front of you having that sort of background is just--crappy.

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He cheated the public because he convinced many that his recovery from cancer and TDF wins was due to hard work and his own abilities.[/quote]
If I had cancer and whatever he was having killed my cancer, I'd use it and be happy too

As has almost every win for the last 125 years.


So you think Lance should be reinstated and allowed to compete? What about all the other athletes serving suspensions right now? Should they be pardoned since it's been going on for years?


Why bother testing at all?

Just get a TUE. I think WADA is pretty lenient on meds for life-threatening illness.

This post so needs a Like button.

Or maybe SCA was smart and just playing the game? Feigning self-righteous anger and filing lawsuits is all part of the schtick, right? Or are only the dopers allowed to play that game?

Same. My buddy was a 3:40 1500m runner in the “EPO” era of the 90s. He learned pretty quickly that he wasn’t getting into a lot of meets in Europe unless he improved drastically - -and the way many were doing that was drugs. He left the sport.

Another female runner in my club missed the oly 1500m final by one spot. At least one finalist (I believe more) subsequently tested positive - Effectively cheating the other woman out of the spot in the final, and possible additional sponsorship dollars and national card funding.

For every doped athlete there are clean athletes getting bumped. They are definitely getting cheated.

Also let’s not forget the “high responders” theory: some people arguably respond to drugs better than others. So this isn’t really a level playing field if everyone takes drugs - the high responders are rewarded more.

The idea is that take the top twenty drug users and take them off drugs, the finish order might change when they are all clean. So maybe Lance doesn’t win seven tours if the peleton stops doping.

There were many threads on here going to probably around 2005 where some sceptics started looking at the circumstantial evidence/gossip and asking questions and for many years were shouted down. Then eventually we started having things like "I don't believe it until Big George admits it too". Now everbody knew what he was doing.

I can't speak for that guy you quoted, but I do think Lance should be reinstated and allowed to compete (if it has been 4 years, or whatever the other dopers get). The others serving current suspensions should not be pardoned until their 4 years (or whatever the term is) is finished.

I think Lance is getting fucked compared to the others.

That all being said, I would prefer they ALL get lifetime bans. You cheat, you're done.

So maybe Lance doesn’t win seven tours if the peleton stops doping.

He did not win seven tours because he was doping. He won seven times because he was doping AND he controlled every other aspect of the competition to his advantage. He had the best team, he worked the aero angle better, he was definitely OCD about a lot of the details that mostly people don't get. And he had whatever it is that champions have that allow them to take the pressure and the attention and feed on it to win instead of folding and failing.
I believe he would have won just as many races if you take away the drugs as he did with them. If you believe his story, he was already a near-top 30 finisher at the Tour as a 21-year old still carrying swim muscle (or so it looks) and baby fat. But that was about as fast as you finished in the 90s without EPO.
Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for the guy, beyond the fact that he was made a scapegoat for the entire unchecked EPO phase of cycling. He got what he deserved. But the others (Indurain, Riis to a lesser degree, Pantani, post-lance Contador) that preceded him should also have their stuff erased along with most of the podium finishers and probably everyone in the top 20. There is the issue. You have to erase nearly two decades of results from cycling. Instead, the Tour and UCI in general agreed to sacrifice Lance and move on. It's hypocrisy of the worst kind, especially when you learn that most of the venerated cyclists were using something during their career. Bernart Thevenet admitted to using drugs in his two Tour wins and the French still love him.

True.

He won 7 tours because he was doping better than everyone else.

Try reading Tyler Hamilton's book "The Secret Race". A couple of few points:

1. If everyone is doping it does NOT mean it is a level playing field. Some are helped more than others. In particular, if you have a high natural hemocrit level your advantage is reduced or erased as everyone is doping the level up to the max 50% allowed. If your edge was that you had a legit natural 48 or 49%, oh well...

2. USPS had training camps with Dr. Ferarri (probably the best doping Doc in the peloton, who was not allowed to work with other teams at the time). There were multiple levels of training, some with all of USPS, some with Lance and his top climbing helpers, and some with just Lance. So not equal treatment even on USPS alone. (I really wonder what went on in the Lance only camps.)

3. Lance a couple of clear violations of the doping code that simply "went away". That, along with his large "contributions" were advantages not shared by other cyclists.

Edit: I kept having to correct myself on the above statement as I kept starting to type "Team Sky" vice "USPS" . I wonder why?

Yes to follow on what you (and I) are saying - Lance was undoubtably an amazing rider - perhaps the best ever.

However, it is not ironclad that if you took him, AND everyone else off the dope, that he would still win seven.

He might, but maybe Jan doesn’t respond to dope as well as lance, but has a higher non-doped ceiling than a non-doped Lance. In that case the gap narrows.

We will never know, but the fact that not everyone responds to doping in the same way, means that if everyone dopes we don’t necessarily have the same level playing field as if no one dopes.

No! LeMond was super clean those were just Vitamin B shots they gave him! Yeah that's what we will go with.