Zinger

I wasn't let down because I was suspicious when he started climbing like a goat. As for myself, I liked him better when he struggled for stage wins. I stopped following cycling for awhile back then because it was so full of juicers. The only TDF podium guy not busted then was the Basque rider Beloki. The Operation Puerto judge refused to reveal the names of all the riders implicated so that one is a big maybe.

One thing that Greg never had to consider when his career started was whether to stay on and do what you had to to compete or quit a career that he spent his life preparing for until then. He could afford to quit after 3 TDF wins so I always take his comments in that context.

RJM

Have you ever read "A Dog in a Hat?"

Zinger

Are you serious? Everybody knows Pantani was a juicer and coke head and he has the positives and the autopsy to prove it. I'm not even arguing this anymore because your "logic" is waaay out there for reasonable people to see already.

roadandmountain

Being a cokehead and a doper is in no way equivalent to threatening people, smearing their reputations, destroying their livelihoods, bribing officials, and building a scam foundation supposedly built upon health when the money coming in was built upon doping.

Lance cheated without boundaries and actively sought out to destroy anyone who told the truth. Pantani destroyed himself which was tragic, whereas lance sought to crush anyone and everyone around him.

Enormous difference. Destroying yourself vs destroying other people are not in any way comparable, morally speaking.

You should stop using the term logic since it is clear you do not know what it means or how to apply it.

Zinger

A 160 lb bully? Big deal. I've worked for people worse than that.

txags92

I don't give a crap one way or the other if you "buy my argument". I have not and am not saying Pantani is good or bad. If it is Pantani's name that is hanging you up about this, fine, use Jan Ulrich or Ivan Basso or any of the other team leaders from the LA era in his place. My argument was not to try to point out that I felt any one specific guy (Pantani or other) was as bad as LA. What I was trying to point out was that the people using the fact that there are "mountains of evidence" against LA as the reason to say he was worse than anybody else are ignoring the actions that led to the availability of that evidence. I am not saying anybody was as bad as LA, just that we will never know if they were or were not. We have no basis for comparing Festina to Tmobile to Postal to Rabobank to (insert team name here) because only one of those teams underwent the level of investigation that Postal did. So lack of evidence on the others doesn't mean they were clean or that they weren't doping as hard as Postal...it just means that we don't know if they were. And with that as the basis, I am saying we can't say LA was untalented and only rode well because he was doping, because while we know the others he was riding against were doping, we have no idea to what level they were doped relative to LA. You keep throwing out what a bad nasty a-hole LA was and I have never countered that. I am not trying to be sympathetic to him or his actions. Yes, he was and still is a a-hole. What I am attempting to counter with my arguments is the intellectual leap from "Lance is a psychotic a-hole because we have all this evidence on him" to "Lance is less talented than all the other riders he beat because we don't have any evidence that they were psychotic a-holes". The second statement is a reason to like the other riders as people better than LA, but not a basis for determining that LA had less talent than somebody like Ulrich or Kloeden or Pantani or Vinokourov, etc. You of course will ignore everything I have said and continue to accuse me of saying Pantani is psychotic, so please don't let the aforementioned text dissuade you from erroneously continuing to assume that is what I believe. My point was and always has been that lack of evidence of doping is not evidence of lack of doping.

roadandmountain

^^LOL, you don't give a "crap" yet wrote a two page essay in reply.

txags92

You don't have to "buy my argument" re LA and his talent (or lack thereof) to understand that I was not trying to declare Pantani to be an a-hole. Two different topics...

roadandmountain

You've changed your argument so many times it's ridiculous.

Your firs step is to figure out what you're getting mad about, lol.

Oh, and paragraphs are your friend!

jfmckenna

I was a fan of his when he was winning stages in the Tour Du Pont right through my town so I followed his career, read the books, wore the arm band but gave up after the dirt started coming out. You are right it was well known before he got caught.

I'd given up watching pro cycling too but am starting to get back into it. Sadly a couple pro riders I know personally say that it's still widely and in some cases even openly used used in the pro pelaton. These guys are not big Euro pro's but compete in races around the world none the less. They fear that if they speak out then they will be crashed out.

Humbling isn't it

Yeah it was a good read.

Zinger

No it's on my to-do list. I realize that amphetamines were widely used in Lemond's day but they have their drawbacks in stage racing. The drugs they have now are just better.

And amphetamines were largely used in uncontrolled races such as in the European crit circuit which Lemond didn't partake in. I really don't think Hinault did either because his crit racing over here in the Coors Classics was pretty sissified stuff. He was glad to bring up the rear in those crits because he knew he could make the time up kicking everybodies butt over here out on the road when he chose to.

jfmckenna

IIRC Joe Parkin races with Lemond for a few races as Lemond was on his way up through the ranks. Parkin makes it clear that the amphetamines were useful in kermesse but they made you feel worthless the next day so they would be terrible for stage racing.

roadandmountain

Very interesting. I can't follow pro cycling any longer. It's just too dirty. Reading about pro sports in general, and even elite college sports and olympic competition is just depressing. Cheating is rampant, but corporate sponsors love to sell us on the idea that these people are superhuman.

Weird, weird stuff.

cthenn

But only nowadays right? Back when Greg Lemond won 3 Tours, there was no cheating of any kind, and if there was, Greg was STILL better than all the cheaters? LOL!!!

roadandmountain

Your reply is a complete mess. Extremely repetitive without any evidence.

And that's the problem. You don't have an argument at all. You continue to try to insinuate that pantani or other teams and racers COULD HAVE BEEN just as dirty as lance, or dirty enough, whatever that might mean, to warrant comparison.

Your mind is so twisted right now that you can't understand and are in denial that you have no evidence. Yet you still insist that this total LACK of evidence is POTENTIAL EVIDENCE that pantani and others were REALLY REALLY DIRTY. The fact of the matter is, was and likely always shall be, that you have NO EVIDENCE of ANY KIND.

NO EVIDENCE means NO EVIDENCE.

The reasons why lance was targeted are quite obvious:

1. he was an also ran middle of the pack/peloton nobody in stage racing prior to doping, and suddenly became superhuman after.

2. he terrorized everyone who he suspected might rat him out. Which was everyone, since everyone knew.

Lance the psychopath made his bed. And now he's going to lie in it.

Nice attempt at deflection. Actually, it wasn't a nice attempt at all, I'm just being polite. But it doesn't work. Lance will be judged on the basis of his own actions. Which are criminal and psychopathic.

No amount of 'well, the OTHER guys COULD HAVE been really naughty' is no substitute for hard proof.

roadandmountain

Passive aggressive. Try again.

bikemig 

Are you enjoying yourself? We are all grateful no doubt that you are "just being polite."

roadandmountain

I love the lance fanboys. In the absence of any evidence, they love to try to insinuate that

a) greg must have cheated because he won 3X.

b) pantani must have been as much of a dirtbag as lance because, well, lance was a dirtbag and if pantani was almost as much of a dirtbag, they'd be equal, or almost equally bad. And when two people are equally bad, or almost as equally bad, then lance must not be bad. Or all that bad.

It's quite entertaining to watch the fanboys squirm with guilt and engage in delusion and denial when faced with the undeniable truth.

Zinger

I really doubt Lemond had to juice back in his day. Even juicers like Alexi Grewal admitted doing it just to try to keep up with him. And most of the EPO juicers were either keeping quite about Armstrong or actually defending him. Guys like Lemond and Hampsten quit rather than join the EPO train in the '90s.

Interesting that Grewal (who I admit to liking as a favorite back in the day) admitted to doing street speed for uncontrolled races such as the Bob Cook Memorial and his win there still stands. He also said that everybody on the Panasonic team back then was given their dose (probably steroids) by the team doc and that everybody on that team partook.

And sorry but Armstrong just ain't the antichrist to me. He's an athlete who chose to race in the EPO era just like Pantani.....Nothing more. Nothing less. Doesn't bother me that he lost his TDF wins either.

RJM

Self congratulatory ego boost post.

The book was really good about showing the culture of doping in pro cycling and what the rider's attitudes to it were. The code of silence, bullying, rampant drug use, and even throwing races for money were all part of the culture before Armstrong stepped on the stage.

roadandmountain

Nope, it's fact. It was a lame passive aggressive pseudo criticism of lemond without any evidence to back it up. Weak hand. Folded.

Zinger

Oh yeah I figured as much. I'm really going to have to get that book and read it anyway though.....as in so many other new years resolutions

txags92

You really have a problem with reading comprehension don't you. Lets look at this another way. Lets say there are two farmers with identical fields 1 acre in size that are adjacent to each other. Because of their location geologically, both fields may have diamonds in them. In one field we go out and run every bit of dirt from the surface down to 10 feet through a series of sieves and find 1 diamond for every cubic yard of dirt. In the other field, we stand at the fenceline along the road and look really hard at the field and don't see any diamonds. Do we have equally weighted evidence that one field is loaded with diamonds and the other is devoid of diamonds? Or course not. The lack of apparent diamonds in one field is only because we simply didn't look very hard, while in the other field we exhaustively screened every cubic yard of soil. In that case, the "no evidence" of diamonds relative to the "mountains of evidence" of diamonds in the field next door doesn't mean very much, because we didn't try to find diamonds in the one field.

The pro peleton teams of the LA era are much the same. The teams are adjacent fields in a doping rich area. We know doping was rampant during that time, we know most of the major GC contenders at the time and many of the team doctors and directors were complicit in their activities. But we only ever looked at one team with a microscope backed up by the threat of jail time. Sure, you are absolutely correct that part of the reason Lance was targeted was because he was a psychotic a-hole who made a lot of enemies. But the fact that there is "no evidence" of systematic doping that you keep spouting is not the same as "evidence of no systematic doping" the way you keep trying to use it. If you don't ever look for something, you look really silly if you puff out your chest and crow over the fact that you didn't find it.

And I will say it one last time and maybe you can understand a nice clear unambiguous statement. I am not trying to say that Pantani or any other rider is as dirty or as big of an a-hole as LA was. There. See? Nice clear statement with no caveats. Can you get yourself past that issue now to regard the rest of the argument instead of getting hung up on that issue now? My point in posting on this thread was and always has been not to try to figure out who was the bigger a-hole, but to dispute the claim that we could somehow tell that LA had no talent, and Pantani was a cycling god with or without dope. You can't take LA's results from age 18 and say oh, he was never going to make it. Look at Chris Froome or Bradley Wiggins' early careers. Nothing in their results stands out and makes you think they would be excellent GC stage racers. They both went through substantial transitions as riders from their early years to where they are now. I still have my doubts about Sky's cleanliness, but the point remains, you can't assume that while LA doped and Pantani doped, that one got where he was only because he doped, while the other would have been there either way. It simply doesn't work that way. We could just as easily go back and look at all the teen prodigies from the under 23 ranks who have never panned out to make the same point.