Don't know how to say this but...does anyone else..

tailwindhome

KentPhil wrote:

To the OP yes. He gave over 500 blood/urine tests over 10years which didn't show up anything. If he was doping then the testing process counts for nothing.

Not really the point of my post.

He's guilty as charged. Still feel a bit sorry for him though.

rdt

KentPhil wrote:

To the OP yes. He gave over 500 blood/urine tests over 10years which didn't show up anything. If he was doping then the testing process counts for nothing.

Bearing in mind your comments (and the old-ish bikes mentioned in your sig) I'm assuming you've been in some sort of "time capsule" for the past 8 years or so; 8 years during which the rest of us learned that circumventing the doping controls was a routine activity for the better organised cyclists, such that only the sloppy and the lesser organised got busted.

If you're not up to speed on those developments, I suggest you've some reading to catch up on, with perhaps the "Internet" acting as a useful starting point.

andy_wrx

KentPhil wrote:

To the OP yes. He gave over 500 blood/urine tests over 10years which didn't show up anything. If he was doping then the testing process counts for nothing.

Get some perspective on these blood tests...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/lance- ... tty,20612/

Why is it that Armstrong doesn't say 'I didn't dope' ?
- instead he keeps saying he never failed a test...

mm1

Do I feel sorry for him? Yes, isnt that what makes us human? Introduced to the gear that may well have caused his cancer (plus a nice little viral infection, which may also have played its part) as a teenager by adults who have continued to profit from him. Yes he appears to be a bully and not very nice, but he also appears to be a victim of long-term abuse. American sporting culture seems full of this, high school sports stars juacked up on roids (and worse), some go on to prosper, while most are discarded. The big question is, why are we surprised?

Monty Dog

KentPhil wrote:

He gave over 500 blood/urine tests over 10years which didn't show up anything.

This would be barely acceptable on the Beginners Forum, so don't try and bring up that cr@p on here - the '500 tests' is purely conjecture produced by his PR-fluff-puppets. He's not even the most-test American cyclist called Armstrong - that honour belongs to Kristin.

ReesA

many might know this interview already but I am finding it great in terms of seeing what the culture was like.

Kimmage interviewing Landis
http://nyvelocity.com/content/interviews/2011/landiskimmage

rdt

Mail on Sunday in "excellent article" shock:-

Arise, Travis Tygart, in Armstrong you finally nailed the biggest cheat in sport

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/others ... ailed.html

luckao

"Nobody needs to cry for me. I'm going to be great," Armstrong told reporters.

A martyr for idiots.

IanTrcp

MrT's post above contains some thoughtful points.

Going back to the original question, I really don't know how I feel. I was spectating at most of the Tours that LA won. I loved the 2003 battle in the Pyrenees etc. Was I a fan? Yes. Did I think he was clean? No. He was great at making you want to believe, but having been in and around cycling for 30+ years I'm not that naive. For so long doping and cycling, along with its many heroes/greats/record breakers etc, have been intertwined. The fact that most of the top 10 (some would go further back) in those tours were implicated in or allegedly juicing one way or the other didn't lessen the entertainment, a word that crops up frequently on here. Personally I think it's great that we are in cleaner times and I am happy that we are perhaps sacrificing some of the "entertainment" because of it.

What disappoints is the inevitability of human fragility. LA creates the brand, makes the money, markets the dream, bullies the opposition etc and puts himself in a position where he can't say "yes I doped". It's the lie he has to live with. Do I hate him for what he's done? No, I enjoyed watching the racing of the nougties. Do I feel sorry for him as an individual? Yes, because he either has no conscience, which is pretty grim, or he is perpetually battling his own demons. As it is, it's great to move on to a new era.

DeadCalm

rdt wrote:

Mail on Sunday in "excellent article" shock:-

Arise, Travis Tygart, in Armstrong you finally nailed the biggest cheat in sport

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/others ... ailed.html

I am not a fan of the Mail to say the least but that is indeed an excellent article. Particularly agreed with this point:

'Somewhere in the peloton in the Nineties was a man who was clean, who finished perhaps 30th in the Tour de France. Who knows now if he would have been Armstrong’s equal? Who knows if he might have been an even more charismatic champion? Maybe he grew depressed and quit as numerous team-mates eventually surrendered to the curse of the needle, because they saw a sport in which so many colluded with cheats that it had become the norm.
That man was suffocated by cynicism and we never got to know his name. It is for him that Travis Tygart pursued this fight, and his ultimate victory was as important as anything celebrated in the Olympic Stadium this month.'

LangerDan

DeadCalm wrote:

rdt wrote:

Mail on Sunday in "excellent article" shock:-

Arise, Travis Tygart, in Armstrong you finally nailed the biggest cheat in sport

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/others ... ailed.html

I am not a fan of the Mail to say the least but that is indeed an excellent article. Particularly agreed with this point:

'Somewhere in the peloton in the Nineties was a man who was clean, who finished perhaps 30th in the Tour de France. Who knows now if he would have been Armstrong’s equal? Who knows if he might have been an even more charismatic champion? Maybe he grew depressed and quit as numerous team-mates eventually surrendered to the curse of the needle, because they saw a sport in which so many colluded with cheats that it had become the norm.
That man was suffocated by cynicism and we never got to know his name. It is for him that Travis Tygart pursued this fight, and his ultimate victory was as important as anything celebrated in the Olympic Stadium this month.'

I'd place a little more credence in the Mail's stance if they didn't spend the other 51 weeks of the year extolling the virtues of what Bill Bailey used to call "a bunch of vain, illiterate, millionaire borderline rapists whose job it is to shepherd a bit of leather into an outdoor cupboard.”" and their talentless WAGs as some form of role models.

If WADA were to put the boot into the Premier League, for instance, would the Mail be praising them from the rooftops?

A bandwagon fluff-piece

andy_wrx

Dunno, very impressed with the Mail article, certainly compared to what the BBC website says about Armstrong affair.

Only a man with a monstrous ego, with a peculiar charismatic gift for constructing a Messianic personality cult, could believe all those witnesses were just racked with jealousy and spite. ‘It’s all about Lance,’ seems to be the summary of the defence.

Isn't that exactly Lance ?
- he rose from the dead, beat cancer and won 7 Tours



Here's an entertaining one from the Telegraph a year ago, from David Millar when his book 'Racing Through The Darkness' came out
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/others ... sport.html

“In fact cycling has always been ‘saved’ by judicial investigations and not by the anti-doping controls we put in place. That’s the harsh truth. We have relied on them to clean the sport up.
“Look at the facts. My own doping was uncovered by a French police investigation into my team, Cofidis. Operation Puerto was a massive undercover operation by the Spanish Police.
“The Festina Drug ring was unmasked in 1998 by vigilant customs officers making a drug bust and now the investigation into US Postal and Lance is being headed up by the FDA.”

Of course, Lance has 'never failed a test' (well, apart from those he did fail...)

“I can’t say definitively if Lance doped or not,” he added. “Yes, there are all the stories and rumours but I certainly never saw him dope with my own eyes.
“If he did dope, after all he has said and done, it would be unforgivable. His performances on the Tour were extraordinary but he is unlike anybody you will ever meet. He is a force of nature.
“But I have always thought that he could have done more against doping. He was in a position to make a difference and to help his sport but I never saw any evidence of that.

read between the lines

Millar believes totally in Philippe Gilbert, Mark Cavendish, and Bradley Wiggins and many other conspicuously successful riders.

- Gilbert :?:

He also still has the highest regard for Alberto Contador, whose own doping case will now be heard by the Court of Arbitration in Sport after this year’s Tour de France. Contador tested positive for clenbuterol during the 2010 Tour but argued that the result was caused by eating contaminated meat.
“Alberto is untouchable as a rider, a physical freak, and we in the peloton have known that for a long time,” he said.
“I would be very surprised if he didn’t end up as the greatest Grand Tour rider ever. It’s a tragedy that he has got mixed up in this clenbuterol thing but I am keeping an open mind on his case.”

well, it was a year ago...

disgruntledgoat

Riders usually shy away from openly criticising their contemporaries though don't they? In a sport where you can always lose somebody a race even if you can't win it's somewhat career limiting to start talking trash about your co workers I would think.

As to the author of that piece on Millar's book... I think i linked to Brendan Gallgher's piece about LA from saturdays Telegraph that was an utter disgrace.

Richmond Racer

disgruntledgoat wrote:

Riders usually shy away from openly criticising their contemporaries though don't they? In a sport where you can always lose somebody a race even if you can't win it's somewhat career limiting to start talking trash about your co workers I would think.

As to the author of that piece on Millar's book... I think i linked to Brendan Gallgher's piece about LA from saturdays Telegraph that was an utter disgrace.

Brendan Gallagher's postion and writing from the outset on this issue, has been a disgrace. All of his tweets for example are centred on undermining and questioning the USADA's process and nothing about the importance of cleaning up the sport. Only this morning he was trading tweets with that bastion of impartiality re Lance, Graham Watson, on the iniquities of the USADA and Tygart. In a radio interview last Thu with David Walsh, Walsh referred to 'idiotic English journalists who were at this year's Tour' who still dont believe that Lance doped - and clearly Gallagher is one of those idiots.

andy_wrx

They know which side their bread is buttered (like Watson !)

If you toed the line, come July you got interviews with The Great Man, you write potboiler articles for some cycling/sports/weekend magazine with a big picture of His Holiness gurning from the cover, the plebeian masses bought it in droves. Everybody happy, but not exactly the truth told.

If you rocked the boat on the other hand, mentioned the unmentionable truth which everyone inside cycling was aware of, you got put on the blacklist, never got an interview again, this was made obvious to the editors of your paper, they need these articles to sell their magazines, you weren't going to be providing them...

Walsh and Kimmage took the second path, most took the first one


What will be interesting in the coming few weeks is if this has been broken, if like the article in the Mail, the truth will now start to out

No_Ta_Doctor

Worse still, if you questioned lance then you couldn't even get a ride in a tour following car with other journos as they were also threatened with having their access to the great man cut off just for driving with you.

rick_chasey

The more you hear stories like that, the Contador thing when he was at Astana, etc etc, you seriously wonder who on earth this guy actually is.

It gets more and more crazy.

Amongst all this he must be a nice bloke to be with when you're on side. He'd have to be.

disgruntledgoat

Whilst i can understand the non-specialist press and the Only-In-July corps being cowed by such antics, it always just seemed bizarre that the cycling press of nearly every nation, who must have been aware what was afoot were not prepared to call it as they saw it. If the majority of them were on the same page then USDiscoStana's Press Management techniques just wouldn't hold water...

I can only go on the British cycling magazines I read regularly at the time, but they were supine and spineless and the only guy who wrote for any of them who remotely hinted at what he knew was Jeremy Whittle in a book he published when he was out of cycling journalism. Every British cycling publication put him on the cover every month for about 5 years, even if they had zero new content... Guess the newly converted Mamils and associated advertising revenue were too good to disappoint

ratsbeyfus

disgruntledgoat wrote:

Whilst i can understand the non-specialist press and the Only-In-July corps being cowed by such antics, it always just seemed bizarre that the cycling press of nearly every nation, who must have been aware what was afoot were not prepared to call it as they saw it. If the majority of them were on the same page then USDiscoStana's Press Management techniques just wouldn't hold water...

I can only go on the British cycling magazines I read regularly at the time, but they were supine and spineless and the only guy who wrote for any of them who remotely hinted at what he knew was Jeremy Whittle in a book he published when he was out of cycling journalism. Every British cycling publication put him on the cover every month for about 5 years, even if they had zero new content... Guess the newly converted Mamils and associated advertising revenue were too good to disappoint

i get the feeling that many that write about cycling (and sport in general) come to the job with a fans hat on rather than as 'serious' journalists. That and the need to get 'pally' with people in the sport to get access etc. Ironic that it needed a cyclist turned journalist in Kimmage to show how badly the sport was being served by it's writers.

dylanfernley

Paul kimmage has at last been vindicated, he been banging the drum on his own for years, ostracised, but he knew the truth was with him, now the spotlight should go in the UCI, if they get away without investigation then nothing changes, but i think this time there are no easy exits for them

Richmond Racer

Although there was a huge amount of buying the kool-aid, you cant overlook that most magazine publishers - and their laywers - were running scared. Libel laws in the UK are amongst the most severe in the world. Isn't LA Confidential still only published in French with a English translation only available on the t'internet?

BTW good article by Matt Dickinson in the Times today: 'Wave of truth will wash cheat's rants away'

TMR

dylanfernley wrote:

Paul kimmage has at last been vindicated, he been banging the drum on his own for years, ostracised, but he knew the truth was with him, now the spotlight should go in the UCI, if they get away without investigation then nothing changes, but i think this time there are no easy exits for them

Indeed. People can't help shooting the messenger though. Cycling's dirty and it needs to change.

tailwindhome

No tA Doctor wrote:

Worse still, if you questioned lance then you couldn't even get a ride in a tour following car with other journos as they were also threatened with having their access to the great man cut off just for driving with you.

Whose book did I read which decribed the elation in the press room when Simeoni attacked on the final stage in 2004?

RichN95.

ratsbeyfus wrote:

disgruntledgoat wrote:

Whilst i can understand the non-specialist press and the Only-In-July corps being cowed by such antics, it always just seemed bizarre that the cycling press of nearly every nation, who must have been aware what was afoot were not prepared to call it as they saw it. If the majority of them were on the same page then USDiscoStana's Press Management techniques just wouldn't hold water...

I can only go on the British cycling magazines I read regularly at the time, but they were supine and spineless and the only guy who wrote for any of them who remotely hinted at what he knew was Jeremy Whittle in a book he published when he was out of cycling journalism. Every British cycling publication put him on the cover every month for about 5 years, even if they had zero new content... Guess the newly converted Mamils and associated advertising revenue were too good to disappoint

i get the feeling that many that write about cycling (and sport in general) come to the job with a fans hat on rather than as 'serious' journalists. That and the need to get 'pally' with people in the sport to get access etc. Ironic that it needed a cyclist turned journalist in Kimmage to show how badly the sport was being served by it's writers.

All journalists in all fields are compromised to a certain extent as they are only as good as their access and sources. Kimmage and Walsh can write what they do about cycling because they are not cycling journalists and road cycling is not important to their newspaper. On the other hand they both write extensively about rugby which is important to their paper. And you'll never see them questioning how the players got so big and how sixteen stone wingers can run sub 11 100 metres.