Lance Armstrong has now come clean and admitted that he doped his way through the various Tour de France wins, among other cycling events. Obviously most everyone suspected it anyway, so it isn’t really all that surprising. However, my question is just how did he get away with it all of those years? He was probably tested more than any other athlete for performance enhancing drugs and was ALWAYS found clean. How could he be tested so often and yet never be caught, while most everyone else that used the stuff always got caught? Am I missing something here?
Yes. 1) You can’t test for blood doping. Or HGH, from what I know. 2) Everybody else was doing it. Only a small number were caught, mostly because they didn’t do it right. It’s not hard to cover your tracks, as long as you stay away from the steroids and such.
Here’s the problem. What you are giving yourself is larger doses of hormones that your body already makes and that vary throughout the day and over time. If the normal range is from say 10-15 units and elite athletes can go up to 17, where do you set the cutoff? Is it 15?17?Do you make it higher because a super-duper-elite athlete might be at 18? The key to the doping is to get the levels from a normal 13 up to 16 or 17 but not high enough to be beyond the range used. (Numbers made up but they certainly could represent Hemoglobin concentration).
Months ago, Joe Rogan did a podcast with Victor Conte as the guest. Conte was one of the key people at Balco back in the day. The podcast is like 4 hours long, and they go through every detail of how doping works in every sport. It was pretty fascinating. All of sports is corrupt as hell.
They only test for certain things, and only at certain times, with various limits. So anyone smart enough can beat it with timing and planning. Conte said the testing routine is more of an IQ test than drug test. Just stop using before the test. The performance is still enhanced when they’re not on the stuff. The authorities also give the athletes benefit of the doubt in various ways to make it easier to cheat.
They didn’t. Far more cyclists were caught by lab busts or confessions before 2005, not testing. Even the ones who did get caught obviously passed hundreds of other tests.
"It took the authorities years and millions of dollars to develop a test for EPO, and “it took Ferrari five minutes to figure out how to evade it.” “The tests are easy to beat. We’re way, way ahead of the tests. They’ve got their doctors and we’ve got ours, and ours are better. Better paid, for sure.” Tyler Hamilton
You should read The Secret Race; a recent book from one of Lance’s Postal teammates that explains everything. Fantastic book. Basically, they knew when they’d be tested and could schedule around it, in addition to using methods that couldn’t be tested. They were always a few steps ahead.
Not to mention, how do you determine the range for clean high-level athletes? That requires having a large sample of high-level athletes that you know to be clean… But how, then, did you test them?
The whole self pitying thing about being banned is just sickening, he know that he is finished in the sport arena, he is just trying to make it seem such a significant punishment, probably to make us think that he has suffered enough, and that further pursuit is a waste of time.
Hard luck Lance, you’ve dragged my sport down about as far as it can go.
I expect he will be like the serial killer with he hidden body, trading it off for his own ends - its part of a power game that these pathological liars play, we know all about it in the prison system, believe me.
I this case the body I refer to is the body of evidence he has regarding others who were part of all this, we all know he knows much more, he knows we know - he still has that power, he knows what we want, and he intends to trade it.
The way it was explained to me by a cyclist is that they knew he was doping because, while his blood came back clean; is was abnormally, normal. If that makes sense. In other words there were plenty of smoking guns that indicated what the truth was.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how on one hand I’m glad that Sosa, Bonds, et al didn’t get into the HOF; yet it wouldn’t bother me a bit if they just left Lance Armstrong alone. Oddly enough I was listening to one of Adam Carolla’s podcasts with Dr Drew that put it all in perspective for me. Paraphrasing; but in life everyone has a scale. For example Paul Newman is at the end of the ‘good’ side. He made billions of dollars for charity, married to the same woman, etc. etc. If he had an affair or said something stupid and was vilified by the media for it, he’s still going to be close to the end of the scale. In other words, I’m not interested in the last 15 minutes of a persons life; I want to judge them on their overall life. Lance doped, when there is evidence that most of the other cyclists doped too. Lance also created a charity that is doing a lot of good. A lot less people cared about the Tour de France before Lance doped his way through 7 victories. In other words, IMHO Lance Armstrong has a lot of credits in his favor. OTOH, Bonds has always been a legendary dick to everyone around him. He’s fairly well known as a poon hound, had a mistress Kimberly Bell, possibly through two wives. To top it all off, he made the Cracked.com list of Baseball Legends Who Were Legendary Assholes.