Do you think Lance Armstrong took drugs to win the Tour de France?

In My Humble Opinion
21

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
I think the most compelling argument for “yes he did” is the fact that he won seven in a row, when “everyone else” was doping. How can you be clean and beat a race full of dopers once, let alone seven times?
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There’s dopers and then there are Dopers. A dead muskrat could beat a gaggle of Dopers any day.
Lance did it. How could he not if every guy in the top five ( and every other guy in the top 20) did dope? I mean, c’mooon. The Choir Boy-Boy Scout Act of Lance’s is really tiresome.
What I don’t get is why don’t they run two TdF’s at the same time. Drugs vs Natural. (and a 3rd race: Beer)

22

[QUOTE=Boo Boo Foo]
Look… here’s the bottom line - to the best of my knowledge, every single rider who finished in the Top 5 of the Tour de France for EVERY SINGLE YEAR that Lance Armstrong won the race has since been busted for either blood doping or drug doping. Think about. For 7 years, every single magnificent human specimen that Armstrong raced against in the Top 5 has since been busted. Given that LA was also getting injected on a daily basis but we know not with what, I’m happy to flow with the body of evidence.
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You could also interpret this that if the testing was good enough to catch everyone else, and didn’t catch Lance, then perhaps he was doing any illegal drugs? If you start with the assumption that the testing is good enough to catch everyone else, then why was the testing unable to catch LA?

That’s certainly a reasonable conclusion to draw from the same body of evidence. I’m not saying I believe it to be true or false, but the logic listed above seems lacking to me.

23

[QUOTE=minlokwat]
If you look at Lance while he was going through chemo, he like other cancer patients was stripped bare of all of his lean muscle mass.

Using that as a starting point, if one were to begin the exercise regime that Armstrong undertook, it seems reasonable that the concomitant muscle tissue build-up would be well beyond those who have to burn off fat and then work from there. Do I have a scientific cite for this? Nope. Speculation in its purest form. (Please spare me your substitutions for ‘speculation’ in the ensuing rebuttals - I’d prefer to keep this civil.)
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A noble suggestion. Unfortunately, recombinant erythropoitin was used by Armstrong (quite legitimately I would add) for over 15 months during his cancer recuperation. It was during that period that Armstrong was legally allowd to train 800km a week while using EPO and who knows whatever else. He was a totally surprise entrant into the Tour de France in 1999. Most people had forgotten who he was - he’d been off the radar for 3 years by that stage.

As my earlier posts noted, Armstrong had a long list of medical exemptions due to his cancer, and the UCI and WADA have a policy of not publishing that list if all the rules are followed properly. The speculation is that LA kept up an anti-cancer regime during his winning TdF years with some very esoteric stuff which also helped him - either in artificially keeping hs body fat percentage down, or maintaining his pretty high VO2 capacity. Seen a photo of Lance lately? He’s back to his pre cancer weight now. His body fat percentage is back up to where his body naturally wants it to be now. But for 7 years he was as gaunt as a concentration camp detainee. That was always the bellringer for me. His body fat never once deviated, unlike all the other pros who go up and down 5 kilos during the on/off season.

24

[QUOTE=Telemark]
You could also interpret this that if the testing was good enough to catch everyone else, and didn’t catch Lance, then perhaps he was doing any illegal drugs? If you start with the assumption that the testing is good enough to catch everyone else, then why was the testing unable to catch LA?

That’s certainly a reasonable conclusion to draw from the same body of evidence. I’m not saying I believe it to be true or false, but the logic listed above seems lacking to me.
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Sadly, a logical fallacy. The majority of positives amongst Armstrong’s competitors have taken place due to criminal investigations and confessions. There’s the rub - the testing WASN’T good enough to catch them - at the time. It has taken years of police footwork, following the trails, and then letting the riders confess themselves.

25

[QUOTE=Shirley Ujest]
Lance did it. How could he not if every guy in the top five ( and every other guy in the top 20) did dope? I mean, c’mooon. The Choir Boy-Boy Scout Act of Lance’s is really tiresome.
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The good oil I heard from Nick Gates (a teammate of McEwen’s) is that Armstrong has to keep up the “Choir Boy” thing - forever. Apparently, his Nike contract stated he had to suffer massive financial penalties (as in millions and millions of dollars have to be repaid) if he ever tested positive, or was proven to have used doping.

A 3rd party bit of gossip - I know. But it’s a gossip item very openly talked about in Pro Cycling apparently.

26

Of course he did. But why should anyone care?

I am definitely an advocate for eliminating all drug rules. These people make a living off what their bodies can do. If they choose to enhance their performance, why is that a crime? If you don’t want to dope, then don’t. And the whiners who complain that “the people who don’t dope are at a disadvantage” well guess what - that’s the industry and it’s their JOB. It’s like whining about how unfair it is that everyone else has a computer because you choose to use a typewriter.

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I give him the benefit of the doubt.

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Aside from his cycling abilities, I always thought Lance dominated the TdF largely because that’s pretty much the only race he did seriously, while the other racers had much busier racing schedules. Add to that his highly specialized training, teamwork and support, attacking in the mountains in a big way, and keeping his challengers at bay once he held the lead.

In any event there’s no way that Lance won 7 consecutive tours simply because he had The Good Stuff. If he did, please offer up more than “He must have a very good doctor”, “the suggestion was made”, “whatever else”, and my favorite: There’s no way a straight guy can beat a bunch of dope fiends.

I’m not saying he won on bananas and energy gels either. I agree with DrDeth in that he probably took what was allowed and was careful not to go further.

If he out-doped everybody illegally, for seven years, under such intense scrutiny, then by god he deserves a yellow jersey for that.

Also, would the UCI really let Lance take a drug regimen that would give him such a clear advantage over the other riders?

29

[QUOTE=mack]
Aside from his cycling abilities, I always thought Lance dominated the TdF largely because that’s pretty much the only race he did seriously, while the other racers had much busier racing schedules. Add to that his highly specialized training, teamwork and support, attacking in the mountains in a big way, and keeping his challengers at bay once he held the lead.
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Quite the converse actually. That, in itself, is what made Armstrong’s performances so suspicious. Think of it like Pete Sampras sitting out 4/5ths of every tennis season, doing one warm up tournament and then winning Wimbledon 7 years in a row. Just not possible. Tennis is as much about match fitness as it is about court craft. Just being good enough to get a pro contract, and then being good enough in your team to be selected for a Grand Tour is a Himalayan achievement in itself. To then sit out 85% of every season, deliberately missing all the ultra high intensity that ONLY racing can give you, and then win the same Grand Tour 7 years in a row - every year against guys who’ve later tested or confessed positive? You do the maths. In the history of the sport, every TdF winner had always prepared by riding thousands of miles of Spring Classics, and many other major stage races. No one, ever, had won a Tour de France coming out of the blue, with zero racing, after cancer no less like Armstrong did in 1999. Let alone 7 years in a row. At the very least, the guy took far more from the sport than he gave to it.

Another analogy I would use is a racehorse say, who wins the Kentucky Derby 5 years in a row, and doesn’t compete in any other horse race either before, or after, for the entire year. There’s only so much you can achieve by training, and then after that, there’s race fitness. To have superior race fitness without racing smacks of alarm bells.

As I noted earlier, Armstrong’s body fat percentage is the real giveaway. He claimed for years his bfp had permanently dropped after his cancer and it would stay that way forever. Well, it’s up now to where he was back in 1995, and moreover, all the research indicates that the human genetic body fat minimum never drops - ever. It always gently slides upwards as the years go by. What I’m getting at here is that singularly, the most powerful single factor a pro cyclist can influence in their favour is personal body weight. Somehow, after the cancer, Armstrong trained legally on EPO while he recovered (and that’s a fact) then did his first drug test 4 weeks before the 1999 TdF, he dropped his body fat percentage to way lower than his genetic minimum had ever allowed it to go before, he held it there for 7 years straight, missed 85% of the season each and every year, hardly raced whatsoever, and beat the the best in the business - all of whom were racing and training over 25,000 km per season - many of whom have since been busted or confessed positive.

[QUOTE=mack]
In any event there’s no way that Lance won 7 consecutive tours simply because he had The Good Stuff. If he did, please offer up more than “He must have a very good doctor”, “the suggestion was made”, “whatever else”, and my favorite: There’s no way a straight guy can beat a bunch of dope fiends.
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I agree, pre cancer, at best he was a one-day champion, and a very fine one. Post cancer, he was a Grand Tour champion - which in the 100 year history of the sport is a transformation never seen before. All I’ll say is this… I rode in the 1984 Olympic Road Race. I rode in 3 World Championship amateur Road Races. Even as recently as 2 years ago, I have photos of me racing with current Tour de France pros - as a 43 year old. Yeah, I think I’m entitled to talk as a bit of an authority.

[QUOTE=mack]
If he out-doped everybody illegally, for seven years, under such intense scrutiny, then by god he deserves a yellow jersey for that.

Also, would the UCI really let Lance take a drug regimen that would give him such a clear advantage over the other riders?
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Every single rider in the Pro Tour peloton is on a medical program of some sort. The UCI and WADA do NOT publish prescription exceptions specifically to avoid recriminations after the fact. Armstrong almost certainly never took a banned substance. I have no qualms whatsoever. The question he was never asked was “Lance did you ever take an experimental medical presciption for your anti-remission treatment which, while not banned, allowed you to keep your body fat percentage below your genetic minimum for 7 years? Or alternatively, allowed you to keep your hermatacrit levels right on 52% for 7 years straight? Honestly?” If someone had asked him THAT question, he would have lied if he said no. Those 4 injections a day that Robbie McEwen was referring to contained more than just placebos.

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Oh, just as another point to add… don’t for a moment believe that I don’t respect Armstrong as a fierce competitor with a magnificent racing brain. It’s totally inappropriate to assert that Lance’s medical program was responsible for his wins, in isolation. In fact, it’s even inappropriate to suggest that drugs even gave him a “clear advantage”. What happened is he managed to get lighter than ever before, he got to use EPO (legally) for 15 months, he got himself screaming fit for 1999 and then he held that level. But his race craft, his team, his natural born talent, all of it added up to a tiny miniscule advantage that, when combined with a tiny bit of good luck each year, resulted in 7 wins.

In my opinion, a clear advantage was never evident in Armstrong’s racing. What I saw was a guy who, through an amazing set of circumstances, was able to transform himself from a powerhouse one day rider who never once got under 80kg, to a gaunt concentration camp pro cyclist with a heamatocrit level of 52% and a body fat percentage of 4% and he held it there for 7 years.

My position is that none of it happened naturally. All of the surgery, all of the recovery, all of it was the most esoteric state-of-the-art science available - and never once did he go above 4% body fat for 7 years, and never once did he get sick. In my considered opinion, that’s impossible without being on some serious gear.

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If you can’t prove that Lance broke any rules, why does it matter so much to you that he used performance enhancing substances? Caffeine can enhance performance, but nobody cares if an athlete drinks some coffee. Sure, Lance took stuff that was way more sophisticated than coffee, but his assertion is that he never failed a drug test, which as far as I know is a fact.

As far as explaining how he wins 7, maybe he has genetic advantages (i.e. he’s literally a “freak”) that allow him to have the low body fat as long as he maintains dietary discipline. But it’s much harder for critics to begrudge him on that than be able to point to doping.

Lance cannot and does not need to prove he is clean or disclose his cancer meds. The onus is on the racing organizations to prove doping and Lance has thus far cleared a battery of tests.

32

[QUOTE=Boo Boo Foo]

In my opinion, a clear advantage was never evident in Armstrong’s racing. What I saw was a guy who, through an amazing set of circumstances, was able to transform himself from a powerhouse one day rider who never once got under 80kg, to a gaunt concentration camp pro cyclist with a heamatocrit level of 52% and a body fat percentage of 4% and he held it there for 7 years.

My position is that none of it happened naturally. All of the surgery, all of the recovery, all of it was the most esoteric state-of-the-art science available - and never once did he go above 4% body fat for 7 years, and never once did he get sick. In my considered opinion, that’s impossible without being on some serious gear.
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While I have nothing but admiration for your cycling achievements, I don’t believe anyone can be on “serious gear” for 7 years and not have their body collapse into a pile of goo serviced by failing organs. The level of secrecy required to keep such an advanced regimen away from prying eyes for so long rivals the Manhattan project and I’m sure not a few of his teammates would like to rat him out. I’m sure they signed agreements to the effect that whatever happens in medical stays in medical or their balls will be cut off but still - someone somewhere after seven years would have come up with something. And while I don’t have a cite for this, I imagine that any doctor or pharmacist dealing in experimental drugs for the sake of fueling a professional cyclist is flirting with career suicide or maybe worse. Not that that would stop some from doing so.

Landis barely washed the champagne out of his hair before he was called on the carpet. A lot of guys never made it to the start and most of the top cyclists have been busted in some way. Why not Lance? Maybe if Lance raced more and therefore exposed himself more some flaws would show up in his uniquely miraculous veil of pharmaceutical secrecy. But so far the investigations to date, a rival’s drunken boasting, “cutting edge anti-cancer stuff” and Armstrong’s oddball physiology doesn’t add up to It Had To Be The Drugs. Again, with all due respect.

33

There is a minor problem with this analogy. The only horses eligible to run the Kentucky Derby are 3-year olds. Therefore, no horse can run the Kentucky Derby more than once. It seems to me that most horses than win the Kentucky Derby follow it up with the Preakness and the Belmont and then are put to stud.

Stepping away from horse racing, I agree with a lot of others. Lance Armstrong probaqbly did take drugs to win the Tour de France. There is certainly some validity to the suggestion that if everyone else took drugs, he probably did also. I don’t like the idea, but the accumulated evidence seems to suggest that he’s just too good to be true. And as others have said, his cancer treatments helped give him cover longer than some of the other riders.

34

[QUOTE=The Controvert]
If you can’t prove that Lance broke any rules, why does it matter so much to you that he used performance enhancing substances?
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You don’t get it, do you? He DIDN’T break any rules - otherwise he would have been busted. He took 4 injections a day - even during the TdF as part of his cancer anti-remission regime. It’s naieve to assert he wasn’t on drugs - of some sort.

[QUOTE=The Controvert]
As far as explaining how he wins 7, maybe he has genetic advantages (i.e. he’s literally a “freak”) that allow him to have the low body fat as long as he maintains dietary discipline. But it’s much harder for critics to begrudge him on that than be able to point to doping.
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There’s the rub, isn’t it? He DIDN’T have a genetic advantage prior to cancer that allowed him to lower his body fat percentage to 4%. Unless you’ve ridden in Europe up 2,000 meter climbs at race pace, you can’t begin to imagine how important even 2 pounds of less weight can make to your performance. His cancer treatment itself, while devastating, is the very stimulii which allowed Armstrong to lower his body fat percentage to a level he had never been able to achieve previously in 4 years of Continental cycling. And then, he was able to maintain that - even through the off season - for 7 years. It wasn’t natural - it was drug induced.

35

[QUOTE=mack]
Landis barely washed the champagne out of his hair before he was called on the carpet. A lot of guys never made it to the start and most of the top cyclists have been busted in some way. Why not Lance? Maybe if Lance raced more and therefore exposed himself more some flaws would show up in his uniquely miraculous veil of pharmaceutical secrecy. But so far the investigations to date, a rival’s drunken boasting, “cutting edge anti-cancer stuff” and Armstrong’s oddball physiology doesn’t add up to It Had To Be The Drugs. Again, with all due respect.
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Landis is a dumb fuck of epic proportions. Armstrong is stratosphericaly intelligent when compared to Landis. Look, I was a Lance fan when he first hit the scene in the '92 Barcelona Olympics. His pre Olympic press coverage was insane. But it became very clear after 93 thru 95 that he was never going to be a Grand Tour challenger - no shame in that - his physiology was simply better suited to one day classics which had “some” climbs, but not 3 days in a row in the Pyrenees. I can’t stress how important it is to be gaunt however. I can understand why someone would lose stacks of weight during, and immediately after cancer treatment. No problems there at all. But Armstrong maintained that uber low body fat percentage of 4% (and folks if you aren’t aware, if your body fat percentage is THAT low you’re usually just on death’s door) and he never got sick - ever. After having endured invasive surgery and system wide cancer no less. With all those bugs and coughs in Europe - with all the glandular fever that besets every cyclist whose body fat drops under 8% - it never hit Armstrong - ever. And now, he’s back up to a normal 12% like he was when he was 24 during the off season. All my years of experience in the sport says something didn’t add up. It wasn’t natural.

I’m not saying he ever once took a “go fast” banned substance during his 7 wins. But it’s a fact he took a shitload of stuff which we’ll never know about and his body enjoyed the benefits in terms of artificially lowerd body fat percentages.

36

[QUOTE=Ghanima]
Of course he did. But why should anyone care?

I am definitely an advocate for eliminating all drug rules. These people make a living off what their bodies can do. If they choose to enhance their performance, why is that a crime? If you don’t want to dope, then don’t. And the whiners who complain that “the people who don’t dope are at a disadvantage” well guess what - that’s the industry and it’s their JOB. It’s like whining about how unfair it is that everyone else has a computer because you choose to use a typewriter.
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I feel the same way. Perhaps there should be two different Olympics… a “natural” Olympics and a doped up Olympics. Let the free market take care of the rest.