Here is a link to the Greg Lemond interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqlfI-szTh8

I like Greg LeMond but he has been beating this one to death and he sounds more than a little old and bitter.

He really was above all of them. In ******baggery department.

As I see it, he was just answering a question.

[QUOTE=mprelaw;16346529] The TdF is only one, and in most years, the Giro and Vuelta are more difficult.

First I've heard of that.

But, but , but .... The world is totally different now. It is no longer possible to win 2 Grand Tours in one year.

Just look back and see how long it had been since the last 2 tour winner before Lance it had been... One whole year!

Go Marco!

For my money Eddy was a level above everyone else, and everyone else was just Hinault and Coppi who were a level above the best of the rest.

EDIT: I think you missed the point of the post you were responding to. It was that Lance was a level or 2 above the rest in the being a tool department, not in the performance department.

I'm not sure of that one. At least in the sexual escapades department Anquetil and Coppi make lance look like a hermit.

Wait, that's a thing?

[QUOTE=whitemax;16356166]As far as the course goes the Giro and Veulta have been harder than the Tour for quite a while. meaning that if you plopped you or me on a bike and asked us to finish the course or just a handful of stages those would eat us alive faster.

Now by that standard swimming in your local parks and rec pool is harder than swimming in the Olympics. Trust me a real Olympic pool is a dream to swim in. Now swimming fast enough to even have a decent dream of making the Olympics is a different story.

[QUOTE=Keith99;16408341]Yeah, agreed. "More difficult" needs context. The climbs in the Vuelta are steeper and more numerous than on the Tour. But if the context is regarding mrprelaw's comments, then I think the question wouldn't be which had a more difficult course, but rather which was more difficult to win. And on account of the quality and depth of the competition, that would generally be the Tour.

Saw it last night, it was great! But I am pretty sure he was continuing to lie in 2013 about how clean he was pre-cancer (his May '13 statements about where/when he was clean not lining up too well, taking his outlandish ability at lying to himself and others into account, with the stories of other witnesses from before his cancer treatment, at least as quoted in the Wheelmen book which is also excellent).

No doubt and sadly I am sure that ability to lie to himself is part of a survival mechanism from that background.

I don't think so, it's not deterministic that number 17 always beats 19, or even that 26 always loses to 12.

But that's beside the point that Lance went above and beyond his fellow dopers in covering up, and that may be because he was using his doping to take more (TdF championships) than they were. If he'd slacked off like they did (in the movie Ferrari kept talking about the need to avoid pushing it, don't go unrealistically fast), he could have drawn less attention and wouldn't have needed to smear as many honest (or more honest than him) people. If Jan Ulrich had doped up enough to win 7 straight he would have drawn the scrutiny that Lance did, but maybe around title #3 or 4 he wouldn't have been able to perjure himself as much as Lance was able to and the whole house of cards would have come down sooner.