OK. Do you have any other genius ideas after your splendid “survive testicular cancer and get to use PEDS” proposal. Does a suitably awful injury mean I can start the next TdF on a Suzuki?
If you don’t care he cheated, fine. If you don’t believe he cheated despite the mountains of evidence, fine. But if you don’t care that he cheated, why do you care that it took a long time to prove that he cheated? And of course the main reason it took so long to prove is that he used sophisticated methods to cheat and used his clout to keep people quiet (and because he was far from the only cheater in cycling). So I don’t see how these complaints have any merit.
I don’t care about cycling at all but I thought it was clear years ago that he was doped to the gills, unfortunate as that is given the way he’s inspired people and the work he’s done. If you (speaking generally here, not about you in particular, StusBlues) have argued for years that he didn’t cheat and this is a witch hunt, resorting to ‘fine, I don’t care anyway, and what took you so long?’ is kind of ridiculous. It’s just grumbling.
He sued, otherwise intimidated, and slandered numerous people whose only crime was telling the truth. Emma O’Reilly, Frankie and Betsy Andreu, Greg Lemond, and others. Lance used his leverage at Trek to destroy Lemond’s bicycle line, for example. Labelled O’Reilly an alcoholic and a prostitute and sued her for far more money than she had because she talked to a writer about her experience working for Team USPS.
He perjured himself during the case with SCA (a promotional firm that had insured the performance bonuses in his contract, and didn’t want to pay out because of doping allegations).
He has repeatedly bullied and threatened people who have testified at various doping proceedings. Famously in the 2004 Tour he chased down a break containing Filippo Simeoni who had just testified in a case against Dr. Michele Ferrari, the doctor behind all of Armstrong’s success. Lance sends his whole team to the front of the peleton to chase down the break (unusual, as the break didn’t contain and GC threats) and once caught tells Simeoni that he’s going to “destroy him” for the testimony against Ferrari.
Sends threatening texts to Levi Leipheimer’s wife, tells Tyler Hamilton he’s going to make his life a living hell, leads the pro pelaton in pushing Christopher Bassons completely out of the sport, slanders Floyd Landis after Landis spills the beans after getting caught.
And on and on and on. Perjury, fraud, intimidation, witness tampering. And drug trafficking. Okay, no murder, protection rackets, or prostitution, I’ll give you that.
People want to believe. Once they start believing, they stop thinking.
True in this thread, other threads, and in life.
I just want to say that while I have no particular interest in cycling or Lance Armstrong specifically, I want to commend Boo Boo Foo for providing some of the most, if not the most informative posts on this subject.
Thank you for your calm and rational posts.
Your “far from the only cheater in cycling” is one of the understatements of this entire thread. I personally thought all along that he was cheating, and I really don’t care, given MHO that just about everyone else in the GC upper classification was too.
To try and put some meat on that opinion, I looked at one of LA’s TdF wins, 2002, and did a ‘Where are they now? with respect to the top GC riders’ involvement with doping. From the top:
[ul]
[li]1 Lance Armstrong: Duh.[/li][li]2 Joseba Beloki: Implicated in Operacion Puerto. Cleared by Spanish courts.[/li][li]3 Raimondas Rumsas: Wife caught with drugstore’s worth of PEDs on last day of 2002 Tour, he got rung up for EPO in early 2003. I’m going to go out on a shaky limb and say he was cheating in 2002.[/li][li]4 Santiago Botero: Also implicated in Puerto. Colombia cleared him.[/li][li]5 Igor González: Rung up for salbutamol, banned from 2003 TdF. FWIW, UCI didn’t suspend him.[/li][li]6 José Azevedo: No positives, and the most dirt I could find on him was that he once was on Saiz’s team, and Saiz was the director for Liberty Seguros and one the primary guys implicated in Puerto.[/li][li]7 Francisco Mancebo: Implicated in Puerto. Retired immediately afterward. Came back a few years later. (That it was after a string of other riders being acquitted in the assorted Puerto litigation was, I’m sure, purely coincidental.)[/li][li]8 Levi Leipheimer: Suspended for recent admitted involvement in doping with U.S. Postal, which he rode with in 2000-2001. I’m sure he stopped all PED use when he rode with Rabobank in 2002. And so on… [/li][/ul]
Your guess is as good as mine how much you all value Beloki and Botero’s clearances of involvement in the 2006 Puerto scandal by their respective national court systems. Even if they were involved in Puerto, it still doesn’t mean that they were dirty in 2002. Further, reading a few accounts of Puerto, it looks like it was a giant witch-hunt. OTOH, you only usually catch these guys when someone rats them out or their name’s on a doping schedule. Or their coach/doctor gets popped by Customs. Still, the above list is kind of damning, at least to my layperson’s eye. I like watching cycling on t.v., but am a complete newb to the sport. I’m sure an expert could come up with more instances of suspicion and dirt; this is what I found with a few minutes at google and wiki.
Do we have good chain of custody for Armstrong’s samples from his TdF period? Also, do we have the same number and type of sample evidence from the other 7 guys I listed above in 2002? I.E: if we’re going to take away Armstrong’s titles because he was cheating, how do we know that the guys we’re giving the championship to weren’t also cheating? In an doping-rampant environment, doesn’t equity require that we also prove that the candidate for the win was clean? And how can we do that if we don’t have the physical sample evidence that we do for Armstrong? Of course, since Armstrong ultimately didn’t contest USADA taking away all of his competitive results since 1998, this is moot.
I sympathize with the irritation of some posters, with TPTB spending this much time and cash to snare Armstrong, when the doping happened 5-10 years ago, and most of the GC classification was cheating right along with him. I also find the talk of yanking his titles for cheating really amusing. Has anyone warned Bjarne Riis? I guess we could stick asterisks on all of LA’s titles…
Better yet, borrowing a page from Bob Costas talking about MLB’s steroid issues, just draw a line around the doping era, explain that enough people did it that it’s inequitable and futile to try and pick out the clean ones—at least prior to 2006, and move towards a clean future for the sport. Cycling, to its credit, is a lot cleaner than it was. Still wouldn’t surprise me if, to pick on them for no reason, the Schleck brothers were implicated in a later doping scandal, but at least it appears a lot cleaner to the layperson (me) than in the 90s-early 00’s. Which is what was needed to keep the sponsor/advertiser euros/dollars flowing into the sport.
I really like, and have learned a lot from, the contributions of Princhester and Boo Boo Foo to this thread. Thanks.
This is precisely what they want to happen. This is what the other major American sports franchises want as well. As long as it appears clean, they can carry on business as usual. If there is something bad going on, they can make a few examples of a few high-profile athletes and then move on, but what has changed? “Nothing to see here, everyone go about your day, nothing to see here…”
IMHO, if they are really serious about anti-doping (any sport), it is a lot of work to try and actively ferret out the cheaters - seems like they are always a year or two behind. Why don’t they make the penalties for using and being caught so outrageously bad that people will just say, “screw it, it is not worth the risk”? Something like, “When, not if, you are caught cheating with PEDs, your career as a professional athlete is effectively over. Lifetime ban from the sport, and any victories expunged and/or asterisked in the record books.”
I know we would like to give people a second chance here, but why let them think taking the first chance is worth it? Why don’t they make the penalties harsher than just a two-year (cycling) suspension?
Also, yes, a lot of the posts here have been good examples of fighting ignorance - thanks! I hope we are, in fact, at the start of the post-doping era in pro cycling.
Chris Horner seems to be coming out this completely clean so far, compared to every other American.
What’s changed is the institution of a testing program and serious penalties for people who get caught (and most of the people who get caught are not high profile). According to you they don’t really want these programs to work and aren’t really invested in them, so why go to all this trouble? How do you explain this extremely protracted investigation into Lance Armstrong, for that matter? He’s been retired for years.
You can adjust the penalties (which has happened in every sport, I think) but it’s difficult to make people not want to cheat if they think it’ll work for them - especially if they think they’ll get rich. By this reasoning, nobody cares about stopping murder or bank robbery either. I mean, those crimes keep happening, right? Obviously nobody actually wants to stop them.
I am not saying they don’t want them to work, what I am saying is that they it seems the level of testing going on in the NFL, etc. does not approach the level of testing that is going on for cycling. Do they test football, baseball, basketball, hockey players at each game? I don’t know.
Why are they targeting Lance? I am speculating here, but echoing what has been posted in some of the other threads here, cycling is an easier target than the others, since there is no powerful US cycling organization with an army of laywers to protect it’s interests. And, the major victories all occured overseas and not in the US. It is easy to target cyclists because they are relatively small-time compared to those athletes involved with one of the unionized, major US sports. Someone wanted to push this issue with Lance, and there is no one other than he to push back. Do you think if there was such an investigation in the NFL that the league would tie it up in the courts for years?
Don’t forget, Lance retired, then came back after a couple of years, drawing more attention to himself. Why he did this, I don’t know.
Sure, crimes keep happening, but the penalties ARE severe for the examples you use, and that alone probably gets more than a few people to not go thru with it.
Very good question. The short answer is… they’re not targeting Lance. Not in isolation.
However, Armstrong is an extraordinarily persuasive, manipulative individual. He is acutely aware that if he plays the martyr card (especially in the context of his philanthropic work) then by extension he can prey on our empathetic response mechanisms - thereby manipulating us into feeling sorry for him.
In truth, the USADA investigation from beginning to end has been a comprehensive highly professional investigation into a systematic deception by an antire professional sports team - from management down. Regrettably for Armstrong, he was sufficiently stupid to wire over one million euros to his doping doctor on behalf of his teammates - straight out of his bank account. Even after that doctor was banned by the Italian Olympic Committe in 2002 - for life. That’s why he’s in the cross hairs - and he deserves to be.
Armstrong gained the most by doing what he did. He brought incalculable pressure upon his team mates, many of who didn’t want to engage in doping, to do precisely that. It was an awful abuse of his position on the USPS Team as team captain. Worst of all perhaps, from a moral perspective is the misleading reinvetion of the Livestrong charity away from research funding to a charity which now raises awareness. The figures don’t lie. In the 15 years Livestrong has been running, only 8% of the $428m USD that has been collected has actually ever gone to cancer research. 54% has gone on wages, and 28% has gone on PR campaigns - and most importantly, not one cent has been given to basic research by Livestrong since 2006.
And yet, of the $170m USD last year in sales of Livestrong branded Nike clothing? How much do you think went straight to Lance Edward Armstrong? And not Livestrong? Try 7.5%.
It is almost impossible to calculate how much his world has come crashing down around him in the past 48 hours. Of his own doing. And worst of all, he can never confess. Otherwise he’ll go to jail for perjury.
He’s brought this on himself. Most of our problems in life are of own making. Armstrong has brought this on himself.
This is an excellent post, in my view. It is both gracious and magnanimous, and last time I checked, that’s as good as it gets. I find it impossible to gloat, or do the happy happy dance towards someone who shows this particular level of magnanimity, and all of us who might be feeling “told ya so” would do well to act the same way I rather think.
Even the true believers? I won’t even try and persuade them. They have their position and it’s based on blind faith, so I’m happy to walk away from that.
But the idiots who keep trying to use bullshit to drown out scientific facts? Nope, can’t help myself. The Sheldon in me comes out at that point.
You contradict yourself. The “excellent post” to which you refer is by someone who participated in a thread in 2005 to which I linked. In that thread LA’s EPO positives were cited and discussed, and you, BBF, posted to the effect that you found the lab findings which showed that LA had EPO in his samples highly credible. You argued over several pages with people who suggested to the contrary. PunditLisa, who you now say is showing great magnanimity, now describes the citations and information provided in that thread as “some random poster’s assertions”. The very person you are praising is someone who used bullshit to drown out scientific facts.
A poster who admits they were wrong may be admirable, but a poster who is unable to resist the temptation to attempt to re-write the history of what information they were given originally is not. Particularly when they take the opportunity to diss those who gave them that information. They are like a cow that gives good milk then shits in the pail.
It’s a messageboard. That stuff happens. She admitted she was wrong and that’s highly commendable in my book. Dragging up stuff that’s 7 years old to ram home your point, just because she used the words “random poster’s assertions” introduces a level of fog into this thread which increases the signal to noise ratio in my view.
I also agree with PunditLisa that there’s no reason, other than a desire to gloat, to force someone to really suck on a massive dish of “told ya so” - notwithstanding that I too want to see it happen. Sometimes epicly so. But no good will come of it, for mine.
If we continnue on this tack, it’s going to digress away from the theme of the thread - namely that Armstrong has brought all this on himself, and he’s no martyr. We should focus on that I rather think.
Not at every game, no. That would make very little sense for a 162-game baseball season or the 82-game basketball and hockey seasons. But there is regular testing of different types, yes.
Cycling organizations have been looking into this.
So according to you, the federal government would never investigate something lie BALCO and hold perjury inquiries regarding the testimony of baseball players?
This. Think you’re being unfair here Princhester. Back in 2005 there was much less publicly available evidence that LA was doping, and what there was attracted a huge amount of rebuttal from Armstrong’s camp. For poor laypeople like myself trying to distinguish between the good and bad science thrown around was nigh on impossible.
The fact is that we are all just “random posters” here, and trying to work out who’s right or wrong on an issue with this amount of noise and disinformation is pretty bloody difficult. Turns out that our suspicions were right, and PunditLisa was wrong. She’s acknowledged that, so fair play to her. It’s the ones who continue to deny all the evidence that deserve the criticism.
I stand by what I said. Reaching the wrong ultimate conclusion on the evidence is one thing. Being disingenous about what evidence was presented to you is another.
I see no disingenui…disingenoui…I see no attempt to deceive here.
There was huge amounts of back and forth claim and counterclaim. In that very thread you have clearly informed yet neutral people raising serious doubts about the claims based upon their experience of lab test procedures, the correct temp to store urine at, and basic errors that can and do happen that would make 6 year old specimens questionable test material*
Yes, in that thread people did put forward evidence that has now been shown to be accurate, but I don’t see any shame in having been wrong at the time, and not having been convinced by that particular report.
- and also make me very reluctant to ever accept a sandwich from someone who works in a test lab.
It’s when they hand you a test tube of something you really have to worry.
Looking back on the 2005 thread, it is quite evident that one of us should blush in shame over his behavior.