Article at Armstrong '100 percent' committed to return to cycling - ESPN
Thirty-seven seems very old for the TdeF. I don’t know what team he will be on.
He’ll race for Johan Bruyneel and Astana which makes them decidedly the strongest team. I’m curious to see whether he’ll race in support of Alberto Contador who is clearly the leader and the future of the team. I have a hard time believing that he will…
As for the whole drug testing aspect…it seems kind of self serving to me and does nothing to assuage my suspicions about the previous seven wins.
I wish there was a way to just know for sure, 100%, black-or-white on the doping thing. I don’t know whether to love or hate this guy, and that sucks.
You don’t know that with anyone though. The fact that he is returning in this new mega anti-drug era of the Tour says something. He could just rest on his massive laurels rather than risk the total destruction of his reputation by coming back now.
Jeez, first Michael Jordan, then Brett Favre, and now Lance Armstrong. Give it up, guys. Go out on top and not when you run a major risk of becoming a pathetic afterthought and glory hound.
Anecdotal, I know, but one of my best friends is a pro cyclist, and he and everyone else I’ve asked who is involved in the sport is sure that Lance doped. None of them have any connection to him or any of his teams, but insider speculation is that he doped like hell, and that his many talents included (1) apparently discovering the perfect doping schedule and (2) managing to hide it.
Part of this is because Lance was so far above the competition while the competition was doping. Part’s because his feats are superhuman to begin with. And part’s because “I hear so many rumors from so many people, and only one of them has to be true.”
Again, everyone I know is almost fifteen years younger than Lance is, and the most experienced have only been Category 1 or pros for two or three years. But all of them - not just the guys I know, but their friends, their coaches, their coach’s former teammates, and on, and on - think he was doping.
So, perhaps they’re jealous, perhaps they’re wrong, perhaps they’re less informed than they think they are, perhaps I’m talking to the wrong group of people. But there seems to be a consensus.
That said, I still don’t know whether to hate Lance or not. “Everyone else was cheating, too” isn’t much of a defense, but what else can cycling fans have when talking about recent history?
:dubious::rolleyes:
From the article linked in the OP
Speaking just for myself, I would love to be so over the hill that in my first race run at an average altitude of 10,000 feet I came in second to the World Champion over a 100 mile course.
It should be fun to watch. History in Pro Cycling would suggest that he’s on a flogging to nothing, but who knows with this guy? Personally, I’ve always felt there was a question mark hanging over him, but to his credit, this time around he’s apparently opening up his entire training program and dietary regime to the press, and he’s invited them to essentially follow his life almost as though he’s living inside the Big Brother house.
Good luck to him I say. The sport certainly needs him, in the context of having a truly dominant champion. Don’t get me started on some of the pissweak pretenders these past few years.
37 is getting on, especially in a sport which requires over 25,000km per year in racing and training. I guess the thing that counts is if your budget is so perfect, that you don’t have to worry about one single thing in life, then I think it can be done. But it won’t be easy… oh boy…
I’ve heard this, too - lots of belief deriving from evidence that seems exclusively circumstantial. “How else would he have compiled that sort of record?” I’m willing to go with “innocent until proven guilty” here.
And, as has been noted, his chances of getting by with doping during this comeback are slim to none. So this will in some sense be a measure of his undoped capabilities.
I’ve always been one who’s been suspicious of Armstrong. Coming back at age 37 with an open training regimen seems to me to be the ultimate challenge to the detractors.
On one side or the other, there’s going to be some serious crow chowing going down.
That’s the thing. If he wins clean all it proves is that he can win on a tour that is cleaner than it was back when he won. If he loses he’ll just trot out that he’s 37 and still had a respectable performance.
I have no clue how he’ll perform but if he can keep up with the climbers on CSC I’ll be surprised (Contador can which is why I don’t know how this whole thing will work).
Even if he provides all blood tests I’m not sure how this really proves he’s clean since he’s never tested positive before (aside from the 1999 blood that was tested a few years ago with a new test). All this proves to me is that Johan Bruyneel has found a new way to beat the system. Gawd I hate him (Bruyneel).
My opinion on Armstrong is this. I hate the entire peloton from the 90’s and early 2000’s because they have nearly ruined cycling. Armstrong was part of that peloton. Either you were dirty or you were clean and never said anything (aside from a few like Greg Lemond and three or four others whose names escape me).
What does that mean? He said plenty. Over and over he said that he never doped.
I may not be privy to the insider speculation, but couldn’t the first part be said of any top athlete? Then should we assume Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt are doping? I know Phelps has voluntarily undergone extra testing, but there’s a lot of clueless people and jealous competitors who think he doped. How many baseless accusations are needed before we should all be convinced?
That’s exactly why I included so many disclaimers. I believe it, myself, but not strongly enough to proselytize. It’s all “I know a guy who knew a guy who trained with a guy who was on Lance’s team,” pretty much.
I’m not one to automatically assume athletes are cheating just because they’re good. Before Game of Shadows was released I even defended Barry Bonds. But drm’s right - just about everyone was doping as much as was medically possible. For the one guy who beat them all to have been completely clean, despite all the public allegations and insider rumors, is almost literally incredible in a sport like cycling, in a race like the Tour de France.
Bolt and Phelps are different. Olympic testing is more rigorous than cycling testing in the late '90s, isn’t it? And track and field stars and swimming stars don’t need IVs of nutrients after every race, do they? I suppose they might at that level, for all I know about it, but when the Tour de France began, the goal was to make a race so hard that it wouldn’t be about who got to the finish line fastest but who got there at all. It didn’t end up working out like that, thankfully, but I’d still rank it as the toughest feat of endurance in the sports world today. Cheating would have made more of a difference there than it did in baseball (not specifically mentioned in your post, but as the only other sport I follow with a drug problem, it’s the only thing I feel fully comfortable using in an analogy), for example.
I only share my friend’s and acquaintances’ opinions to explain how I’ve arrived at mine, and to relate how widespread the suspicions are. I’ve asked everyone about it in case someone eventually has better information - a possibility now that my friend’s racing in the kind of (stateside) races that Lance has been in, and the “degrees of separation” are more likely to sink below three or four. Yeah, everything I’ve heard has been hearsay, but add all that to the hearsay in the public allegations - the former masseuse, the former assistant, etc., etc., and the likelihood decreases that everybody is making it up.
If this were a trial, then Armstrong would and should be acquitted. But outside of a courtroom, we don’t have to follow the “innocent until proven guilty” rule. If he turns out to have been clean, I’ll be very happy to have been wrong, and I’m sure everyone but L’Equipe will feel the same. But I think my belief in his guilt is more than a little justified.
I have to say, though, that some of the disqualifications in the last couple of Tours have upset me more than the doping ever did. I don’t remember the details on this one, perhaps someone who follows things better than I do can help me out, but wasn’t there a team barred from entry even though they had a completely different roster than they had when they were first suspended? There’s no doubt innocent people were punished there, and the idea that swift and irreversible penalties dealt out to the innocent and guilty alike will help the sport in the long run isn’t enough consolation to the people whose careers were ruined.
Cross country Olympic skiing and pro cycling are essentially the same sports in regards to the sorts of tricks the competitors like to use. Primarily, exogynous and endogynous blood transfusions of rec cell “only” blood, various stages of EPO and Human Growth Hormones. Steroids are usually not used because (A) they are REALLY easy to identify, with the exception of the BALCO affair, and secondly, body weight is the enemey of both disciplines. There are also other drugs which are designed specifically to reduce body fat, but they’re risky.
The big question regarding Lance Armstrong is not so much his ability to beat the best of the best during an exceedingly mirky period in Pro Cycling, rather, it was his dramatic transformation from an 84kg one day specialist down to a 72kg Grand Tour specialist. In the interests of fairness, in the 100 year history of the sport, nobody had ever done that before - and certainly not within light years of doing it so successfully. But hell, nobody had ever lost their gonads to cancer before, either.
Nope, not even close. There’s the irony. I’m onfirst name basis with Robbie McEwen and I recall in 2004 he told me he did over 35 drug tests during the previous season. This is why Pro Cycling had such a bad name. Regardless of the quantity of drug tests, riders were still clearly slipping through the net - and a lot of them too.
Blame Michael Rasmussen. That guy single handedly swung the pendulum from “nudge nudge wink wink” to “zero tolerance” than any other dickhead in the past 10 years.
Personally, I don’t really care if LA doped or not. The bottom line is he beat the best of the best at the time, who clearly were being naughty boys, which simply made it a level playing field if indeed LA had a secret recipe himself. He still needed the same natural talents he was born with regardless. With the proviso that is, that his cancer changed him quite remarkably.
For mine, the biggest asshole of all during that dark time was Tyler Hamilton. He got busted for blood doping at the Athens Olympics after winning the Gold Medal in the ITT. Then, on a technicality due to his B sample being incorrectly frozen, he got off. Then, just 2 weeks later at the Vuelta (Tour of Spain) he went positive again, and his B samlpe found him guilty as sin and he was banned for 2 years. But the asshole refused to return his Gold Medal nonetheless.
Tyler Hamilton is the guy we should be persecuting.
Thanks for the correction. That’s why I included “the late '90s” qualifier - I know testing in cycling now is obsessive. I’ve heard stories of people getting thoroughly tested after comparatively minor races (Guy greets you after you come in twelfth and win maybe $200. Guy follows you to the bathroom. If you don’t have to piss yet, he waits, and doesn’t let you out of his sight. Guy watches you piss into cup to make sure you aren’t using an artificial penis. Guy takes cup. Guy tests cup.); I just didn’t know how long they’ve been that intense about it.
Agreed completely. I became a huge fan of his after the Tour where he came in fourth with the broken collarbone - can’t remember if it was '04 or '03. After it was revealed he cheated during the Olympics I was really pissed.
Your first-name relationship with Robbie McEwan beats any of my connections, of course, but it was especially pleasant to see my friend beat Tyler Hamilton at Redlands this year. Hamilton was recently back from his suspension, and he didn’t seem like he cared about his performance as much as he used to, but it’s still nice to be able to (hypothetically, I never met the man) say, “Ha, we rooted for you when we were in high school, and now one of us can beat you in a stage race.”
I was thinking about that today, too. Hamilton didn’t seem to be trying as hard as he could have that week, and he’s supposedly trying to redeem himself after being banned for years. Regardless of how anyone feels about Lance, he’s competitive enough that we know he’s going to try as hard as possible to win, be it for himself or for his team.
Couldn’t you still compare his performance now to his performance during the disputed period? I realize that what the other racers are doing is significant in pro cycling, but couldn’t you compare his average speed while attacking then and now, for instance?
I’m not accusing Lemond of Doping, I’m saying that he spoke out against doping (or at least in the book From Lance to Landis by David Walsh it seems that he did).
If we’re talking about Lance, I happen to believe the people who say he doped (about a dozen people in the above book) but that isn’t really why I’m mad. I’m mad because there is no conceivable way for Lance to NOT know that there WAS doping going on during the nineties and he chose not to speak out about it. And like I said, I’m mad at everyone who doped for doping and everyone who is clean who said nothing.
I personally probably couldn’t, but there might be someone out there who could. That’d be interesting.
Cool. More power to him.
He’s too old? Let’s see the young guys do better. He’s going to be a burden on his team? Let’s see someone take advantage of it. He doesn’t stand a chance of winning an eighth time? Prove it. In the meantime, he’s about to create more hype and visibility for this event than the next dozen best cyclists. Even if I wanted to come up with an even remotely plausible reason he doesn’t belong in this event, I’d come up empty.
As for doping: When he first started winning, there was nothing but a bunch of allegations, inferences, rumors, whispers, “can’t bes”, and “doncha thinks”. Now, over a decade later, there’s a GREAT BIG CRAPLOAD of allegations, inferences, rumors, whispers, “can’t bes”, and “doncha thinks”. SSDD. I’m sick of this childish game. As far as I’m concerned, either someone comes up with some evidence, or Armstrong is what he says he is. (Alternatively, cycling’s doping commissions royally screwed the pooch, and it’s just too freaking bad at this point. I’m fine with that too.)