Di Luca now, Armstrong next?

The guy confessed that he has no regret and if he was to compete again, he would cheat again, as much as he didn't mind cheating on his wife.

Now, would you trust the bicycles he sells.....? I wouldn't.

Lemond had a great deal of success until Trek tanked the brand during the Armstrong era, because Greg Lemond kept speaking out against LA.

Coppi

Hoy, Wiggins, Pendleton, Carlton (Kirby) and not forgetting track cyclist Katy Marchant (KTM).

I had forgotten about Hoy. Didn't realise Halfords also have lines under Wiggins and Pendleton.

Interesting, I had always assumed Fondriest was more heavily involved as he featured quite a lot in the marketing and they definitely liked to give the impression they were 'his' bikes, so to speak.

Moser and Battaglin are good shouts, used to see a few of those frames knocking about.

Would agree with regards Merckx, particularly around the mid 2000's when they seemed to be pretty popular. A mate of mine still has his his old Merckx, think it might be an em5.

Awesome shout. There was a great TCP episode about this.

Look guys, when Armstrong raced the entire peloton was doping, this was commonly known even among race officials. There were team vans parked along strategic areas of the race route where the riders would ride to their team van, jump inside, get a shot of EPO and get on their bikes, and go like crazy. The officials knew this was happening and turned their backs to it all.

That is the reason why those 7 years of the Tour de France did not put the second-place person in the championship category, they left the first-place winner blank, no one won, and no sport has ever done that, whenever a first-place person was found cheating and disqualified the second-place person won first place. But race officials knew they couldn't do that because it would have opened up a huge can of worms.

There have even been some riders who leaked out that the entire peloton was cheating, one of the riders described the effect of EPO as if it was like they were never even on the bike, and they were completely refreshed.

This really boils down to the fact that Armstrong, who was an American, had no right to win 7 TDF's, it was an embarrassment to the European racers and to the European fans, he had to be stopped. Had Armstrong only won 2 or 3 nothing would have been said, and doping would have continued to this day.

In fact, there is a very high possibility that doping has indeed continued. This was written in 2022: "A stem cell researcher and antidoping advocate, Parisotto helped to develop the early EPO tests and was one of the founding members of the UCI’s biological passport programme. He played a key part in the 2015 Sunday Times investigation against the IAAF concluding that hundreds of athletes had recorded suspicious results which were not followed up between 2001 and 2012. 

“I’m not optimistic that much has changed regarding doping in sport. At best, the status quo has been maintained since the blood passport was introduced in 2008-9. My view on sport is quite jaundiced, and I make no apologies for that. I also fear that there has been a complete drop-off in all anti-doping programmes since the Covid outbreak. 

“The resources that anti-doping programmes have are tiny in comparison to [the budgets behind] athletes and teams, so they will always face an uphill battle. I think most athletes who are blood doping are still using the old tried-andtested methods."

In NASCAR there is an old saying, "if you're not cheating, you're not trying!" With all its very strict rules and checks, even NASCAR still occasionally finds cheaters, and the rest of the racers don't get caught. So there is a lot of cheating in NASCAR, and there is a lot of cheating in cycling, and we all know about cheating in the Olympics, there is even cheating at the high school level sports.

Pinarello was last in the 1951 Giro and used his severance payment from the team to open his shop and found the brand