Was Lance A a cheater or liar or both?

You made a very specific statement that if it's not on Strava, it didn't happen. Seems you don't have a grasp of what you say at all.

Are you sure I don't use any of the myriad data recording computers or services? Or are you just trying to be personal to dig your way out the hole you've dug.

And you state that Strava doping, if it is possible and happens? Really? You don't know as much as you think you do.

That kind of weak and defensive response is only to be expected when your silly claims are challenged by folks with more experience than you have. Challenges that expose your utter lack of experience (seriously - you recommend a Thudbuster suspension seatpost?).

Please, for the sake of all of the newbies that post here looking for valid feedback, stop posting your nonsense until you have just a little bit of relevant experience.

Thudbuster? You should be ashamed of yourself.

It's funny how you seem so happy to throw around ageist insults. But on your own admission, you are a young punk, so not much else can be expected.

You forgot bully.

He was a sock puppet of a sock puppet, so I won't be surprised if a "new" guy appears to carry on the argument.

Don't be coy. We've been here before, and if you had any serious contribution to make, you would have done so rather than bait a fight, but you don't, and you did.

With that, our pointless, silly, conversation is over (by which I mean, for clarity, I will not be responding to you).

<shrug> You overstepped the mark with your ageism, and now you want out. Probably just as well.

Getting back to the subject, I've said this before, but Strava is as much about ego as anything else. Ego is a valuable commodity, and people will do whatever they do with tangible wealth -- either cautiously cultivate it, or flaunt it while they have it, then try to build a false image it when they run out of flaunt.

Strava is the avenue for many riders want to demonstrate their ego on Strava. Others use Strava as a means to build their personal value by keeping the data for comparison.

Despite our ageist poster's assertion, I have been using Strava for quite a while, but it's for my personal use, and my own data is locked. By the same token, I am not a slave to the data, but it sure enables me to compare where I am this, for example, randonneuring season compared with the last one.

I've done enough in my life -- personal and cycling -- to know that my ego doesn't need stroking with kudos acclaim. And because I am secure in my own being, I don't care whether people like chaadster believe what I do in cycling -- because when it's important, the events are pretty carefully controled and the results are published outside Strava anyway.

He was a professional racer that was involved in performance enhancement that an estimated 78% of the other TDF riders were doing, so he was leveling the playing field.

Sorry, the "everybody was doing it, so I had to do it also just stay even" argument doesn't hold water. It's an explanation or justification, but doesn't make it as an excuse.

I disagree! I know how you feel about it and don't blame you for feeling that way but it is what it is. There has been cheating going on for years in ALL sports. I was told to cheat and all I was was a Cat 3 racer, and this was back in the late 70's when I was first told, but I chose not to do it but mostly due to fear of long term health effects. At that time period I was dating a very nice girl who had a cousin that was the number 1 ranked female tennis player, she cheated with doping as well as a slew of others she told me about, it was her that tried to get me to cheat and gave me a name of a doctor to see, and her reasoning was if I wanted to go pro I had to compete with others who were cheating and I would never get there if I didn't. Money is a huge influencer for most people, they want to win to make the big bucks and will do anything to do so, it's highly prevalent in pro and college sports like football, basketball, etc., even at the high school level there have been cases discovered that the star athletes (the golden ones) were told and given drugs by coaches so they would have a better shot at colleges, then at the college they would be offered drugs to excel so they could go on to pro sports. This stuff has documented cases but there hasn't been any real policing of this stuff, we know it's happening but we turn our backs to it, and then every once in a rare while someone gets busted.

If people can find an edge that isn't legal they will for the sake of trying to win to make the big bucks and lucrative endorsement contracts, which for cycling is only where the real money is. Until there is real enforcement, meaning drug checking before and after every race there will be the vast majority using the stuff, and I don't think UCI wants that because in order to draw viewers to the sport records have to be broken and speeds have to increase.

You were "told to cheat" by a cousin of a friend, that was the #1 ranked tennis player that cheated...she knew the dark-side world of professional bicycle racing and attempted to lead you into it. Interesting.

Interesting? That's what I thought at the time too! And she gave me names of other pro tennis players, male and female, from various countries including the good ol USA, that were cheating to prove her point. And I can only assume that if this was happening back then there's a very good chance that it's happening today across the board. Even golf, yes golf, has had cheaters, Tiger Woods when on a muscle building program some years back and was taking stuff to make it happen quicker with the thought that it would improve his long game; which again one can only assume if he did that then so are others in something like the game of golf. I think in regards to Woods is that the PGA did nothing about it because it was their darling boy, their golden boy, the man that was bringing in millions of viewers which means lots of money; which is basically what UCI does with cyclists, they don't want to tarnish the reputation of cycling but in the case of Lance Armstrong he was an American winning THEIR race 7 times, once or twice would have been fine but not 7, that could not go on and allow some American to embarrass the Europeans, so damn it let's nail him to a fence and strip his titles away. Think that's odd about Tiger Woods? then read this: Tiger Woods and Steroids or HGH: Could It Be True? | Bleacher Report I've known about this thing with Woods for a very long time due to certain associations I have, or had, back in the day.

This is getting astray from the OP, but no he wasn't "leveling" the playing field. He was using dope to DOMINATE the playing field. Leveling it would have put him in the middle of all the other dopers.

Ok, I'm going to stay on topic... Millstone NJ to Princeton and back, relatively flat, 21 miles round trip 13.7 average in 1 1/2 hours.
Far from any record but a nice ride/workout though the NJ country side.

Somebody has to report it. Many people seem to think we monitor every thread on the forum. That's beyond ridiculous, we'd need a staff of about 100 people to monitor every thread in real time.

13 of his insults went unreported.

Just like a bunch of insults on this page are unreported. But I just happened to be cruising by . . . .

Hmmm.. maybe we should just hang out here more often.

I might as well. I'm on vacation anyway.

I've been known to pad my speed, but not distance.

If most of them were doping and Armstrong was THAT much better, doesn't it stand to reason that if NONE had been doping (including Armstrong) he would STILL have been that much better?

How about we leave the rest of the doping talk to the "professionals" part of the forum?

True it would be easy to fudge the gpx files, and not leaving the tell-tale fingerprints of the public sites that provided that "service" if a competent programmer undertook it. Young people these days are so naive about online services :roflmao2:

Let's look at this differently, if there were no such thing as performance enhancement drugs, and all the TDF were 100% clean including Lance of course, then he, and his team of course, would still dominate the field. Now lets assume that all the TDF players doped and Lance didn't, then Lance would have been just a middle of the pack rider and maybe even in the tail end of all the riders bringing up last place. So yes, he did level the playing field if you think about a bit.

Most people here would dope if they knew everyone else was doing it and knew it could give them a chance to earn millions and millions of dollars, just like most professional cyclists did. To this day Armstrong's net worth is 125 million dollars, even after his name was struck from the record books. You think he really regrets what he did when he checks his bank account balance?