Yeah right, LA is such an unbelivable human specimen that he can beat 100 other guys who ARE doping seven years in a row, without doping, after recovering from cancer. :rolleyes:
Do you have a cite that there are 100 guys doping in the peloton?
Didn’t think so. You need to wipe your mouth, the foam is showing.
Ahem, Rick, dear, I don’t think you follow doping news closely enough or remember what I wrote in post #149 of this thread:
That may not be a list of 100 riders that have doped and competed in the Armstrong era but I it is a star studded list. Don’t make me show you more names.
Let’s also note the monorchid Mr. Armstrong won zero tours pre-cancer, then after he’s ravaged by a disease, comes out of it not only as good as he was, but light years better? Guys he couldn’t beat before, who are doping, he’s now beating, often by huge margins? It would be like Andy Roddick getting cancer and next year wiping the floor with Federer at Wimbledon.
Even Boo Boo Foo admits that Lance was 8 kilos lighter when he raced in 1999 than he was in previous races.
At this level 8 kilos is huge, particularly if you were to lose it in your upper body as Lance did.
I have to go get some things done now, but I will leave you with a truism from auto racing that applies here.
Pounds=horsepower. Making a race car lighter is the same as putting a more powerful engine in it.
The same would apply in bike racing.
LA was definitively clean. 
How do I know, definitively? Because he passed every test you threw at him. Every test. Unless you can point to one LA failed… Didn’t think so. Don’t be haters, just because your flaccid athletes wilted before him – even when they cheated. Love the man, he was a pure, beautiful cycling god the likes of which your impotent countries will never produce. Robbie McEwen couldn’t carry LA’s jock. Bow down before him when he passes, and speak his name with reverence! 
USA! USA!
I don’t know the answer to this question- did the lost weight make him lighter than the other top riders?
How about we look at the facts here.
This is called a confession.
Again a confession.
You are correct about Michael Rasmussen not failing a drug test, but it should be noted that he was not tossed out of the tour for doping. He was fired by his team for lying and missing scheduled tests. Did he dope? If the reports of him in Italy are true, then probably. I can think of no other reason for him to be in Italy when his itinerary said he was in Mexico.
So bottom line here, you listed 5 guys that you said never failed a drug test. Two of them did, two of them admitted it, and one guy pretty much doesn’t count as that was a team firing.
Thanks for playing.
Lighter than the other riders is not the question. The question is Does making the rider lighter, without sacrificing power improve performance? The answer to that is yes without a doubt.
There is a reason these guys ride the lightest bikes they can find, and not some 50# piece of shit from Wally world. (beside the fact that Wally World bikes are but ugly.)
If you don’t believe me, let’s ask Boo Boo Foo. Boo think back to when you raced. If we had strapped an extra 8 kilos onto your bike would it have had a negative effect on your finish in that race?
No Rick, you’re simply wrong on that one. Pantani NEVER once failed a drug test. He was eliminated from the 99 Giro for having a hamatocrit level above 50% - which, while clearly indicating the extreme likelihood that he was using EPO, did not actually PROVE that he used it. I can’t stress how important it is to use consistency in your definitions in this debate. Likewise with Jan Ulrich in year 2002, when he was recovering from a knee operation and he admitted to using ecstasy while he was partying and getting fat bonking chikkie babes in nightclubs. There’s a reason he only served 6 months - he wasn’t racing, he wasn’t even training - he was partying like the party animal he is, and he fessed up to popping some pills - which is what MDMA is, a superset of methamphetamine.
You see, there’s a massive difference between admitting you engaged in blood doping and/or using EPO or whatever other myriad forms of cheating there are, and actually going positive for it. The fact that Basso and Millar later admitted to doing cheating indicates a desire to clear their name - but they never actually FAILED a doping control. Not one of the 5 guys I mentioned ever actually FAILED a doping control. Some of them later got busted for the presence of evidence that they cheated, some of them were implicated in that evidence and by extension were busted for cheating, but none of them, not once, FAILED a doping control while they were racing, or while they were in training to go racing.
To be fair, Pantani was kicked out of the 99 Giro for having a hematocrit blood ratio which was too high, but he never served a suspension.
This is why I mentioned their names, in the context of Lance Armstrong also never failing a doping control. Clearly the culture is changing, and some very notable riders (current and former) have fessed up this year, which is a good thing. But it’s extremely disingenuous to argue that a confession somehow miraculously retrespectively translated into an earlier failed drug test.
Also, it’s extremely disingenuous to assert that Lance Armstrong lost 8 kilos off his all time pre cancer lowest body weight, and then argue that it was NOT a functin of his cancer treatment procedures. We’ll never know the full list of exempted medications he was allowed to use because, like all pro cyclists, those exemptions are kept private to protect those riders privacy - and rightfully so. But you simply can’t cherry pick your definitions of what constitues a positive drug test the way you are and expect not to be called on it.
Same ball game with Landis. The fact that his B sample was possibly faulty does NOT, by extension cast any doubt whatsoever over his A sample. The presence of a positive A sample is good enough, in my book, to cast a HUGE QUESTION over the guy, and the B samply issue is merely an effort to cast doubt over his guilt. If his A sample had never gone positive, I wouldn’t be including him in this debate.
I sure as hell never said that. In fact if memory serves I have said that the cancer treatment was the cause of his weight loss (Not this thread, but in a previous thread on the subject)[Takes an hour and goes over every Lance thread that search found]
Ah, here it is
How you got the idea that I thought his weight loss was from anything except cancer & its treatment is beyond me.
As far as Floyd goes, I sure as hell don’t understand your position. I would think that as a competitor you would want assurances that everyone rides clean. As a fan I want the same thing. As a competitor I would think that you would want faith in the process that it is fair and the rules are followed. and the athletes rights are respected. As I fan this is what I want. Lastly, I would think that you would want to have faith that the lab does all of the tests correctly, and that any lab anywhere would be able to repeat the results. As a fan this is my expectation.
However LNDD and the WADA and Dick Pound are not keeping up their part of the bargin.
Here is one Chemists take on LNDD
Hell the French Open doesn’t even trust LNDD
Snerk. :dubious:
Another little tidbit from the same link
:dubious: Don’t forget LNDD does maybe half the tests that UCLA does (UCLA is also a WADA lab, the largest)
So just how is it that the sports magazine that happens to be owned by the same company that runs the TDF get the bad news about positive tests long before anyone else? A leak obviously. Such leaks are against the WADA rules. Since LNDD is blatantly breaking the rules, why doesn’t WADA sanction them? Beats the fuck out of me. But it has brought forth calls for LNDD’s suspension
Finally, we have agreed on a standard of proof. Now give me a few days…
LA=pure, clean greatest-ever cycling natural athlete. Never a doper, hgher. Suck it euros.
By the time I got to this, Operation Ripper was already suspended; however, that doesn’t mean his behavior should go without warning. Telling people to “suck it” and otherwise being an ass isn’t appropriate for MPSIMS. If taking part of a thread means coming in simply to be a headache for others, then staying out is the wiser choice.
I humbly suggest two separate Le Tour threads next year: one to discuss the race, and one to debate doping.
The doping is the race.
Fine.
3 months later…
Well Landis just lost his appeal. Finally found “officially” guilty as he should have been, all along. Rick, the problem you’ve got now is the question of magnanimity. After clutching at every imaginable, far fetched scientific preposterous arguement that “Landis the American” was jipped, now you have to ask yourself… “Am I prepared to accept the Umpire’s decision on this and admit Landis too was a drug cheat, or do I blindly cling to the myth in the face of evidence?”
At the end of the day, it largely doesn’t matter to people like me. The sheer number of pro cyclists who have fallen into trouble this past decade, (in some form or another) says there was an insitutional problem at hand. The only people I hear defending the fact that Armstrong was able to beat all THOSE guys and still be clean, are Americans. The same sort of Americans who defended Landis - probably even now, after he’s lost his final appeal and has finally been stripped of his '06 Tour win. There’s no sin in admitting it Rick… there’s a HUGE question mark over Armstrong’s wins… just like there will always be a huge question mark over Florence Griffith Joyner’s records in 1988.
Rick I’m very conscious of the fact I’ve never got back to you after reviewing the link to Landis’ case. I’m a bit short of time at the moment.
Before I start though, do you have a link to the case against Landis? Not some blog entry or edited snippets, but the case? Or at least a neutral summary? I assume you must know of one because you wouldn’t argue so authoritatively having reviewed only one side of the argument.
I thought it better to post here where we’ve already started the debate rather than start a new thread or go off on a complete tangent in the GQ thread.
Princhester The blog Trust but verify is to this case what Durham in wonderland was to the Nifong rape case, a superb one stop shop for all the issues, both bad and good.
You can actually download the entire French lab report from Floyd Landis’ website in PDF format, so you can see for yourself. It is of course in French. For the Reader’s Digest condensed version of some of the errors, you watch the video of Dr. Arne Becker’s PowerPoint slide presentation. Dr. Becker is one of Floyd’s team, but when he put a slide up showing the lab report, it is hard to disagree with his points.