Originally Posted by sprince

But then there is reality. Who is going to stop him from claiming the titles? You're left with only with the record book to point to as it exists today. Maybe not tomorrow, and certainly not as it existed 5 years ago. Everything else remains. Fortunately for us all the universe doesn't revolve around the UCI. If it did, planes would fall out of the sky, loved ones would disappear before our eyes and the sun would no longer rise in the east.

This kind of alternate reality thinking seems to be peculiar to cycling. Pete Rose broke the rules of baseball, he is banned from baseball for life and will likely never be in the hall of fame, yet the records remain. All over the world politicians lie and cheat to get elected. Some get caught and are forced to resign, others are simply executed. But the history remains because most people recognize that you can't change a past sequence of events. What is it about cycling? How can you learn from the past if you bury your head in the sand and pretend it never happened.