In related news, you can add Alberto Contador to the list of guys who are not X Busy Scissors.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/feb/06/alberto-contador-ban-tour-cycling
Andy Schleck might be clean.
Just seen that Cumbrian - big news! I thought the wee man had gotten away with it tbh. Andy Schleck retroactively wins the Tour.
You know something about Sastre that I don’t?
Unreliable and biased statements, no matter how many there are, do not somehow add up to proving any form of truth. If that were the case, then Glen Beck really did rape that girl back when, since I can get several people to say he did just to get him convicted.
Bad witnesses are not just bad because they can’t go to trial, but because, get this, they aren’t convincing evidence. The face remains that there is no actual condemning evidence, and thus assuming the guy cheated means you are willing to assume lots of other people cheated. And, if everyone else cheated to, then how was it unfair?
It isn’t, and I for one don’t think Armstrong’s wins need an asterisk even though I think he was most likely doping. Dope or no dope, he was clearly the best rider of the decade by a large margin. I’ll never be an Armstrong fan because I found his wins to be unexciting, achieved by executing a boring, technical strategy to perfection. Win the TT, good TTT, don’t let anyone get away in the mountains. Perhaps make an opportunistic attack here or there, but nothing daring. Meh. Where was the drama we saw in last year’s 18th and 19th stages in the Armstrong years?
But there’s no denying he was the best. That “don’t let anyone get away in the mountains” is easy to say and very, very difficult to accomplish. I wouldn’t give him greatest of all time status, maybe not even second, because of his exclusive focus on the Tour as compared to the breadth of accomplishments of Merckxx and the like, but he’s in the discussion even if he did dope.
So I don’t really think it’s a big deal if he was cheating. But if you believe that he was, then his self-righteousness on the issue is really grating. Mind you, if he really was clean, then it’s totally justified.
In other news, Andy takes the high road wrt news of Bertie’s suspension:
In the previous thread I said:
It has nothing to do with him Armstrong personally, it’s just that too many of them have come clean after the fact/have turned out to be liars. Maybe it’s not fair but if you lie down with dogs…
However I’m not always sure it diminishes their accomplishments, performance enhancing drugs are not miracle drugs. You could dope me up all you want but I still wouldn’t be able to clear the first mountain.
Unless you recognise degrees of plausibility, by your Glen Beck method, nothing can be proven by any testimony.
There have been any number of witnesses who have come forward to say they saw LA doping. Some, like Landis, seem to be a bit hare brained. Many less so and with less motive to lie. There are plenty of people who have been convicted on the evidence of other criminals. You can’t discount other doping riders and their testimony so easily.
Many people when discussing this topic confuse, or at least don’t explicitly distinguish between, the question of whether - one cycling fan to another - one thinks LA probably doped and the question of whether he should suffer any legal sanction.
The standards of proof are very different. I think LA doped. It seems highly probable. I don’t think he should suffer any sanction unless he is proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have done so, and so far as I know there isn’t evidence to that standard.
Bear in mind that despite the highly inaccurate title to this OP, and the inaccurate impression given by the CNN story linked, the Justice Department investigation which just concluded neither “cleared” LA of doping nor was even concentrating on whether LA doped. It was a fraud investigation. Fraud is a very difficult thing to prove, and it involves proving far more than whether LA merely doped. The USADA has said that it continues to investigate whether LA doped, and will be examining with interest the evidence that the Justice Department obtained, though it seems that much of that will not be available to the USADA.
I said it was, when exactly?
So I’m guessing we no longer suspect him for the blood doping my gym teacher used to rag on about? I honestly don’t know/care, but I thought the verdict was out on the Great One.
How do we know he’s even legally eligible to represent the U.S.A.? I want to see his birth certificate.
The only problem with this is, the response will be along the lines of, “Refresh my memory: how many urine tests did Marion Jones fail?”
Then again, the problem works both ways; if there is any of Lance’s blood/urine left over from those tests, and some day they test it and discover something that wasn’t on the banned list at the time but has since been discovered to be a masking agent, he would end up with “an asterisk” even if there was no known drug at the time that could have been masked by whatever they found.
It stops being a competition about who is the best athlete and becomes a competition of who has access to the best drug laboratory.
As I’ve said, there was no test for EPO at the time when LA is accused of using it. It’s not a matter of masking agents. There just wasn’t an available test. LA has done such a good job of saying over and over that he didn’t fail tests that people have trouble accepting that the unstated assumption (that there was an effective test) is complete bullshit.
Samples said to be those of LA from the 1999 tour were tested in 2005, after a test for EPO had been developed, and were found positive for EPO. Wikipedia has a reasonable treatment of the subject. There is much kerfuffle about procedures and privacy and identification, all of which are sufficient to make it impossible to say what the truth is beyond a reasonable doubt. However, IMHO the probability is that the samples were what the lab said they were (LA’s) and the reason they tested positive for synthetic EPO is because LA was using synthetic EPO.
Everyone didnt. Someone didnt make the cut, or lost a trial, or was way at the back with a lot less dollars.
We just never hear about them, once a sport has too many cheats, it just becomes ‘everybody’ and they get forgotten.
Otara
Lance apparently bang to rights but case closed - evidently has the US attorney in his back pocket
[Warning, link to weak-ass conspiracy theory content]
As we can see from the Barry Bonds case and others, these kinds of allegations are very hard to prove, especially years and years after the fact. The argument that the government shouldn’t bother spending this much time and effort on cases like this is a lot stronger than the argument Bonds and Armstrong didn’t do anything, in my opinion.
I want to believe Lance Armstrong never doped. I really really want to…
Seems like an appropriate thread: US Anti-Doping Agency charges Armstrong
FTA:
You’d have thought the U.S. Attorney’s office, after two years of investigating, would have issued an indictment if there was actual fire to go with the smoke, but perhaps different standards of proof are coming into play?
Your link isn’t working.
Aargh! Serves me right for linking to the Post. Try this one.
And if that doesn’t work—I tried loading it in preview and it pulled up a registration request—here’s theHouston Chronicle’s version of the story.
I suppose you could just Google for WaPo stories with Lance Armstrong, filed in the last four hours.
How could Lance have been cleared in February and then charged in June?