Walter

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that neither LeMond nor Armstrong care an awful lot about anonymous internet posts.

cruiserhead

Who says he has "no talent"?
That wasn't even the original post or my response.

What I'm saying about 09 is that Lance was not doped up as much as usual, until the chips were down and he definitely doped.
All that shows is how much doping can skew results.

My logic, while i'm assuming is clear to others, is simple. I'll just repeat it:

-LeMond is not being hypocritical for stating Pantani is talented (see above)
-LeMond is not a hypocrite for speaking the truth. When you speak the truth, it's called being honest.

-LeMond has never doped
-LeMond's god-given physiology has never changed. As that is naturally impossible, it makes sense.
-LeMond has only defended himself and spoken the truth, even when it was unpopular to do so.

-Lance is a liar, cheat, bully and fraud. All proven and admitted to.

I find it laughable to defend Lance and all the fanboy arguments are ones you would never accept from a 5 yr old child
"everyone did it", "Greg was a jerk too"

Sorry to be the bearer of reality, but Lance did far more and he did hurt a lot of other people.
If you were on the receiving end of a ruined career, or internationally character assasinated,
I doubt you would be so accepting of his inexcusable behavior.

Nikon Rep

Armstrong won 7 tours. Lemmond was never going to win 7 tours.

Armstrong raced against the best dopers in history and he beat them........7 times.

roadandmountain

Armstrong has ZERO tour victories. All of his pseudo-accomplishments have been excised from the record, and rightfully so.

Armstrong had access to the highest quality, and most advanced drugs in the peloton. It was still not a level playing field.

cruiserhead

Nikon Rep

How did he have access to drugs that weren't available to anyone else ? I haven't heard anyone say he was doing drugs that other people weren't doing.

Name the drugs he did that other people couldn't get.

roadandmountain

I'll have to dig up the links to get the specifics. It's been a while since I followed the lance doping scandal.

jfmckenna

The Lance Fan Boy club still going strong.

Keith99

Yup, and they truly hate anyone saying good things about Pantini. After all that puts the lie to the idea that Lance was competing in a totally different world where the Double was no longer possible and where multiple Jersies in a Single Tour or Giro was out of the question. (Pantini 98).

Zinger

At the risk of being labeled anything but a casual fan of Armstrong during his streak, do you guys suppose the field might've been juicing in '98? The OP has a point. If you're going to hate on juicers you might as well spread it around.

The hypocrisy is self evident in this one. If you wanted to be competitive in that era you juiced and you lied about it to protect your investment in your career. There is a certain degree of nationalism at work here to give a pass to Pantani when everybody was aware that he juiced and gave him a pass for it while scrutinizing Armstrong.

Personally I'm glad this went down if it means cleaning up the sport but I'm not going to be scapegoating one person for it and that's kind of what happens here whether people want to admit it or not.

roadandmountain

"The USPS Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices," Tygart said in a press release.

Read more: Lance Armstrong not only used performance-enhancing drugs, cyclist pushed banned substances on teammates: U.S. Anti-Doping Agency report - NY Daily News

I'm still looking for details on this, but if you think that the quality and efficacy of doping across teams and riders was equal, you are dead wrong.

Lance was experimenting for a very long time, and used EVERY drug possible to gain the largest advantage.

Zinger

^^^
Guy Armstrong did the same as everybody else and used the same substances. USPS might've had it down to a fine art but the doping was rampant and all of Armstrong's runners up were dopers.

Once again the hypocrisy is evident. Pantani's career was made on doping just like Armstrong's.

roadandmountain

There are different degrees of drug use and blood doping. Lance and USPS were the most extreme.

Gallo

really? So the other guys doping and using drugs were not using them for the same reasons? were not using the same drugs? how did these degrees differ so much as that it is ok that other doped?

So I know I am a fanboy as the term will come across again. But let the record be clear I am a fan of Lance, Greg and Marco and many others. Lance did much of his own damage by being a jerk. An example is how he claimed to have given Pantani the victory on Ventoux. His vendettas were vicious and well documented at this point.

Your argument of degrees is very weak. It is a black and white issue.

I prefer to let this pass over and am not interested in a witch hunt of past champions. I think the evidence is pretty clear of the rampant use of ped in cycling for many years by many cyclists from many countries.They all did them for the same reason to enhance performance.

roadandmountain

lol, yes there are degrees of doping and drug use. Tyler Hamilton discusses this very briefly in an interview you can find a link to on the article I shared. At first, he took one testosterone pill, and then was introduced to other drugs and forms of doping.

Lance was relentless, experimenting with everything: transfusion, epo, hgh, testosterone, and many other drugs and procedures. He had team doctors fired who tried to follow protocol, even superficially. He pushed for USPS to hire the most corrupt doctors who would green light anything and everything.

I'm still gathering the details but your notion that drugs and doping are all equivalent, all or nothing is completely false. There are different degrees of cheating and lance was the biggest cheater.

You can't compare a shoplifter who steals a pack of gum for 50 cents with enron which engaged in tens of billions of dollars worth of fraud.

Zinger

So what, lol ?

So providing, for the sake of argument, if they had breaking the rules down better than the competition than that doesn't mean the other team's doping programs were any more legit than were US Postal's. I'm not arguing who had the most talent here because the whole era was tainted and there's no way to really pin it down.

How would Tygart even know what the other team's doping programs were anyway since USADA didn't actually have a decent track record of busting much of anybody in their testing procedures at the time......as Tyler Hamilton points out.

Travis Tygart, btw, gets huge amounts government grant money based on the publicity generated by going after Armstrong so there's a certain amount of justification he has to do for focusing on Armstrong and pretty much ignoring the violations of everyone else.

And USADA is quickly gaining a lack of credibility in the sport of boxing, btw, for allowing fights to take place whereas one of the combatants, on more than one occasion, has tested positive for PEDs. So there are accusations of corruption being leveled against USADA in what is already a poorly and often corruptly regulated sport. Fighters are either asking why they weren't notified that their opponents tested positive or why the decision is left to them to have to cancel lucrative fights when that's a career killer for them to have to make the decision instead of USADA.

Really, Tygart is the last person that gets a clue as to wtf goes on in cycling.

roadandmountain

LOL, it's impossible to have a rational discussion with lanceophiles.

Common sense: the degree makes a difference.

Slapping someone is less harmful than shanking them.

Stealing a nickel from someone is less harmful than stealing their life's savings.

Drinking one cocktail a month is less harmful than drinking a bottle of vodka every night.

It's easy to figure out. Unless you worship lance.

Zinger

BS

I've been a fan of the sport before I even knew who Lemond was. I watched him go by in Manitou Springs in '79 and didn't yet know who he was. I stopped following Armstrong's career when his TDF "winning" got too boringly predictable and I knew he was juicing back then. Hell anybody following the sport knew what was going on back then since several people were outing him at the time.

But if you insist on blaming him for the sins of the sport people are simply going to call you on it.

roadandmountain

^^Meandering and incoherent.

Strawman and changing the topic. I stated that lance was a far more extreme cheater than the other cheaters. Just like enron stole more money than a neighborhood thug who grabs the tip jar at a delicatessen.

Learn to stay on topic, brah.

cruiserhead

There will always be an excuse to cheat. There always is, and the cheaters always have one.

These arguments go round and round.
The only difference is the defense of LeMond has never changed because the truth doesn't change.
Why character assassinate and parrot lies against LeMond? Because that's easier than dealing with the truth of what he's saying.

Lance has gone from "clean, everyone is a liar" to the "everyone was doing it" and whatever it will be next month, year or whenever he has another round of press tours to thwart a pending case.

It's that slippery slope of tactics and semantics to justify cheating. It's a disease.
You want to see the aftermath of what cheating in sport does? Just look at this thread.

He's not a victim.
He's a cheat being punished for his actions.

Back to the OP. It's not hypocritical what LeMond said.
When you listen to the things LeMond has said, and he is very knowledgeable about physiology and training,
it's clear he does not endorse doping.

Zinger

The comparisons are hypocritical because both built their careers on doping.

And arguing who was better is one of the fun things about the history of sports. I do it myself when comparing fighters of different eras. Joe Gans vs Roberto Duran or Duran vs Mayweather Jr. Fun alright but at the end of the day it's speculation at the top levels of any sport.

So if you're going to compare the accomplishments of Armstrong & Pantani you're going to have to do it in the context of two drug cheaters during the EPO era because those are the undeniable facts.

cruiserhead

no one compared accomplishments.
and loosing 7 titles is quite an accomplishment.

Gallo

ye of little syllogism if you are going to refer to logic "strawman argument" please provide validity to your above statements. Explain your proofs.

here let me help you

Given
Pantani doped to improve performance when illegal to do so
Lance doped doped to improve performance when illegal to do so

therefore we conclude they both Armstrong and Pantani cheated.

with the above given information being valid the conclusion is valid.

To paint either cyclist in a different light without proof is not logical.

To support one and not the other is hypocritical which was the OP point

So support your argument with simple logic that it was not hypocritical of Greg Le Mond to support Pantani and not Armstrong

While I am sure you will have many fallacies including the red herring, appeal to probability, circular reasoning.

I want to thank you for your answer in advance as I reason that there is no point in my further participation.

roadandmountain

Nope. Wrong again, bucko.

Lance cheated to a greater degree than anyone else in the peloton.

Also, greg simply said pantani was talented. He didn't say that pantani never cheated.

Additionally, greg or anyone can criticize armstrong all he or anyone else wants. Lance gave them tons of ammunition and will continue to do so simply as a result of his being a grade A doushebag.

We've only seen the tip of the iceberg revealed as of yet.

Zinger

I'm not understanding the logic here. EPO is the drug of choice and the one that makes the difference as Tyler Hamilton, for one, has stated.

Report: Pantani, Ullrich, among 1998 Tour positives - VeloNews.com

And EPO is what Armstrong and his main competitors all used.