Okay, so it’s no secret on this board that there have been greater romances in the history of our tiny spinning globe than that of between me and Lance Armstrong. Although I always have held great respect for his accomplishments, and I still do, I do dislike him on a personal level. Many of his teammates such as David Zabriske and Floyd Landis especially have said that there was no such thing as friendship under Postal or Discovery, it was all about getting ordered around and doing what Lance and team management said. He did an absolutely shitty thing last year when he chased down a break with Filip Simeoni and told him to either drop the break or that he wouldn’t leave. This was not a sporting act, this was maffia-boss assholishness to shut up a rider that had spoken about his own personal experience with Mr. Armstrong’s long-term advisor, Dr. Michele Ferrari, adviding him to take EPO, a banned blood booster. In retrospect, even Mr. Armstrong has admitted that this action was a mistake.
Whenever I’ve stated that I belive that Lance was doped, this board has generally reacted rather poorly to the suggestion.
An IMHO thread where I get bitched at for providing my opinion and prefacing it with an IMHO:
Finally, the hors categoire thread on it, where I pitted the way the Armstrong chased down Simeoni. This is an act which Lance Armstrong has since admitted was a poor idea, but never apologized for, of course.
You get the idea. Whatever people like to claim, the fact is that the UCI, WADA, and other dope control organizations are still unable to successfully detect dope usage. In the 2005 Tour, Dario Frigo’s wife of Fassa Bortolo was discovered with large amounts of EPO and growth hormones at a French border checkpoint. He was obviously doped, but he never tested positive for it. We can’t even seriously catch EPO, which has existed in the pro peloton for nearly 17 years, let alone anything as insidious as HGH, IGF-1, etc. My opinion on Lance Armstrong’s doping was not one based upon sheer hate or whatever others have suggested. It was a sudden and otherwise inexplicable massive speed increase in the peloton’s speed around 1990. It was the information that I had heard from ex-teammates. It was what several close personal assistants had publicly stated about him. It was a positon that was reasonably based, and a position that is now vindicated.
Which brings us up to today. Here’s the story.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/cycling/2005-08-24-tour-director_x.htm?POE=SPOISVA
In 1999, after every stage win, Lance Armstrong was dope-controlled with a urine test at least. These samples are divided into A and B samples. If the A comes back positive, the B still exists to double check the result. Both need to be psotive for a rider to be found guilty of a dope offense. All testing is done confidentially through the assignement of a unique sample number for every sample that’s been taken in the history of WADA.
With the best testing methods of the time, Lance Armstrong’s A samples were declared negative. When accusations regarding dope arose, Mr. Armstrong provided his negative test results to the media. This paperwork included the sample numbers of the test.
From the 1999 Tour, all of the unused and negative B samples were frozen at -20 celsius for another five years.
In 2004, more advanced EPO detection methods have been developed that look for protein byproducts of synthetic EPO metabolism in the urine rather than electrical conductivity tests which existed back in 1999. These new tests are more sensitive.
The WADA orders the lab holding onto the frozen urine from the 1999 Tour to be retested using the new EPO testing method because they’re curious how prevalent EPO was before this more sensitive testing procedure. 12 positive samples come back in addition to a lot of negatives. These samples are reported, “annoymously,” by sample number only. The WADA doesn’t match up the numbers with the riders because the test results are supposed to be confidential anyway until both an A and B sample have been tested and come back positive.
August, 2005: The French newspaper L’Equipe takes a look at the new WADA test results. They see the sample numbers and compare them with the sample numbers from Armstrong’s negative test results in 1999. Of the twelve positives, six belong to Lance Armstrong.
Lance Armstrong is now retired. In the three and a half weeks since he’s retired, he likely hasn’t doped again. The A samples from 1999 were all used up in 1999 for the initial test. He’ll never be sanctioned or held responsible for his EPO use. He’ll deny it all and say that, “It’s just the French!” as he always had, but he can never again claim to have never tested positive on a dope control. In fact, he’s now failed six.
In retrospect, you do have to admit that what he did to Simeoni was rather shitty. The lies about dope use? Well, I suppose he had to so that he could race. What else could he say?
Let’s all hope that in the very near future, WADA gets their science together to comprehensively test for dope use in the peloton such that a negative result actually means something and we don’t have quite as many rider’s wives showing up at border checks with a couple of kilos of EPO and horse pills for, “their ailing mother in law.”