So it would seem that Alberto isn’t terribly fond of Lance. Can’t say as I blame him. When was the last time a repeat Tour winner had to put up with constant sniping from within his own team?
Yeah, I became pretty disgusted by Lance by the end of the tour. Here’s hoping Contador finds his way to Garmin or Caisse next year and stomps Lance into dust.
Absolutely. I was neither here nor there on the Armstrong debate before, but this tour has made it clear he’s an utter penis. Now he’s coming over all holier-than-thou on his Twitter feed:
Right, Lance, the team you did your level best to turn against him.
so, are the teams really not on drugs or are the drugs harder to find now?
Armstrong needs to learn how to lose.
There is no reason whatever to believe there is no drug use. The users have always lied, so assurances mean nothing. Essentially all who are caught admit they have been using and passing tests without getting detected for very considerable periods, so testing is no real indication.
Leaving aside drugs there is no reliable means of detecting autologous blood transfusions other than catching people red handed.
The guys who got caught last year were using CERA, which was an EPO that there was no acknowledged public test for before the Tour started. So this year’s clean doping record was either the result of the guys being paranoid about what could be tested for and actually riding clean, or this year’s EPO doesn’t have a detection test (yet). If you ask Bernhard Kohl it is “impossible to win without doping”, but maybe that’s just his opinion. 
There’s a good wee piece in today’s Guardian on Dave Brailsford talking about putting the Sky team together here. The team is being assembled and marketed as a ‘clean’ team, and he’s saying how he needs to see each prospective rider’s biological passport before signing them up, and how some of them look well dodgy.
I love the Tour, and cycling in general, but I don’t let myself become too emotionally involved as a fan of particular riders. We’ve been let down too many times - Floyd Landis was probably the biggest downer in recent years. Rides a legendary, and I mean legendary, mountain stage to claim the yellow then promptly shoves in a positive for testosterone.
It would still be surprised if a guy like Wiggins gave a positive. Aside from breaking the English sense of fair play ;), he’s constantly spoken out in forthright terms about doping and comes from a succesful track team with a very structured and transparent coaching set up. You don’t normally hear cheats put pressure on themselves by freely speaking out against doping. Of course he could still test positive tomorrow.
Lance is probably the only guy in the peleton who has everything to lose and nearly nothing to gain by cheating at this stage in his career, in relative terms. You’d be talking about the death of a legend overnight. He’d have to go into hiding.
Pretty much my feelings as well. Despite the many negative things I’d read about him in the past (overbearing arrogance, selfishness, ruthless, control freak etc. etc.) I didn’t place much value in them as those are characteristics to be found in many of the greats in not just cycling but almost any sport – though perhaps not all at once. See Eddy Merckx and Hinault for good examples of the Lance Alpha Dog personality. OTOH, guys like Anquetil – who was actually criticized for his low key ways – Gimondi and Indurain were all classy champions.
However what kept getting me angrier and angrier by almost the minute wasn’t simply the utter lack of respect shown to Alberto by LA but the fact that once he [Lance] saw that there was no way he could beat Alberto on the road, he used his considerable weight and experience in the sport and more specifically his alliance with Johan Bruyneel, to openly attempt to sabotage Contador’s chances with any and all means at his disposal…for instance, having the DS, JB pace him in the TT as opposed to the MJ (who, incidentally, lost all radio contact with his car14kms into his TT, thus had to rely on the road timers for tempo/references during his ride :dubious:) is literally something unheard of in any of the three GTs or any lesser races, never mind le Grand Boucle the grandest of them all.
Add that to the open help he got from within the team – Kloden, Zubeldia, Levi and Popov all openly worked as his domestiques at various crucial points in the race, while Contador’s closest friend, best helper and the only rider he asked to be included in the Tour squad, Benjamín Noval was left out for reasons “unknown” – his despicable twitting and peacock-like grandstanding both on and off the bike and well, I have nothing left but scorn for the guy.
That Alberto confirmed in his first interview after getting off the bike in Paris (to French TV5) that the “hardest part of the race had been in the hotel room” should only come as a surprise to the blindest of Armstrong fanboy supporters – I’d be hard pressed to call them “cycling fans.”
Enjoy the podium Lance. You are the very definition of “class”.