rossiny

you can not have respect for them , that is fine. However the reality is that to keep up and win the human body needs the performance enhancing drugs. I later wondered what were the clean times run in say an 800 meter dash, or say a 200, 400 etc. If we say from this day forward we all ride clean, run clean, or no steroids in foot ball etc. Then we will all be on the same playing field. Till then there is this factor. So can either acknowledge it or not.

Manny66 

Knowing of Lance Armstrong's past behavior as a Master conniving manipulator, Im sure he did this Interview to attempt to save his ass from an impending Lawsuit or another indiscretion soon to pop up.

Typical Lance.

Doge

I didn't know many who thought he was an angle. Before confessing he was known as a jerk.
Thing is the sport never caught him in those races he was DQ'd for.
I was a sports official for over a decade. When the game was over, it was over. Folks have done things in sports that were missed and drastically affected outcomes, still over.
Going back retroactively only confirms how UCI, USADA, WADA are. A (not sole) reason for the sport's demise.

Doge

And while very much against going back 7 years and penalizing the guy, I don' really think Lance was that good (like top 20 that good).
He was the best under the way they played the game at the time which included doping, but this is a guy that wrote (I assume true) how he just got flat dropped racing in Europe.
I saw him pre-cancer and he was a great USA rider, but not a Lemond (IMO) and not like half a dozen USA juniors now at that same age.

It has been interesting to me how USA can dominate at a world junior level and then 5 years later, not so much. I wonder if that is dedication or the other things it takes to succeed.

Maelochs

I respect you for the stuff you know ... but wow ...
First, "demise"? Cycling is on TV more often than it ever was. Cyclocross, downhill, XC, ... even track racing is televised now. More riders are making more money riding than every before. Not NFL money, but the sport is nto in its "demise."

Further, what hurt the sport most in the U.S. wasn't lance getting retroactively penalized ... as Many cyclists were ... Are you blaming USADA for all the Euro riders who went down for Operacion Porto--several years later? Or for Contador getting his Tour victory taken ... retroactively?

What hurt cycling in the U.S. was people realizing--because of Lance Armstrong, and everyone he poisoned, like Floyd Landis. Once people realized that their heroes were cranked up on PEDs, people lost interest in watching. Kind of hard to get all "U.S.A! U.S.A.! We're Number One!" when your "star riders" are humiliated for cheating. And while no one Knew lance doped ... anyone who cared enough to know he was ever accused, assumed he had ... except cyclists like we see posting here, who live in fantasy worlds. People who were just sports fans, caught on right away.

People realized cycling was unfair when they found out that all the winners were heavy dopers. No one stuck around to see who got penalized or how.

Except fanatics on sites like this.

EdwinHeadwind

I dunno. I think the doping itself is hurting cycling, not rule enforcement. I stopped caring/watching/supporting after Pantani died.

Maelochs

Yup. Ask people in line at the grocery store ... or even better, a sports bar. Few will have heard of Floyd Landis, no one will know what UCI is ("urinary tract .... ??") and few will know what USADA stands for ... but people will know Lance doped.

Doge

Road racing, is down quite a bit in the USA.

Yes, I blame USADA for setting the trend. Before that it was "acceptable" to look the other way for the good of the sport. As is done in other sports where we just don't speak of the doping.
Contador lost his jersey within a year (or close) of testing positive. They went retroactive on Lance with no positive tests. Just the prior steroid cream subscription comes up which was many years before.

indyfabz

In that case, we all know NFS is the best.

OBoile

This is silly. Drug testing, by its very nature, is retroactive. Penalties like this happen after the fact for every Olympic style sport.

It's amazing that some people get angry at officials for doing their jobs rather than at the athlete for breaking the rules.

OBoile

So basically you're upset that USADA wasn't corrupt enough.

BonkonFleet

It's not that he doped. Literally everyone was back then. It's the way he treated people and ruined some people lives to keep it a secret.

EdwinHeadwind

So why stop with doping? By this logic, it would be "better for the sport" if everyone was allowed to cut the course, skitch on the team car up the mountains, use electro-assist bikes, and put a stick through their opponents' wheels.

McBTC

My guess is, supposed friends who turn on you like a cancer to make a deal with a guv'ment out to selectively destroy only you probably would tend to ruin some relationships. From what's been discussed above I think it's fair to say all pro cyclists cheated to the extent they all broke the written rule about doping but none of them broke the unwritten rules and none of them cheated one-another... LA made a lot of people a lot of money and they were all his good buddies you can bet... until, of course, the prosecutors stepped in flashing badges with guns on their hips saying-- sing or compose if you want to get out of trouble-- we don't want you, we just want to nail Lance Armstrong.

124Spider

It is astonishing how so many people here seem to feel Lance Armstrong got a raw deal.

He's a cheater. He's a nasty, vindictive human being. He got caught. He got punished. Saying that he wasn't alone is utterly irrelevant--they all knew that if they got caught, they'd be disqualified.

There is nothing about Armstrong that should evoke sympathy in any rational human being. It's fine to feel sad for lost innocence, but it's silly to feel sorry for cheaters who got caught.

Doge

Yes, it is better for the sport when participants get away with *some* stuff. Hanging onto cars, drafting cars, getting spare bikes and wheels from spectators. The dopers should be punished when caught in a reasonable amount of time. After the next event starts again, close the books on it. The issue is the roll-back after such a long time (over a year).

A popular sport, soccer I think gets it right. FIFA has stated as such with the offside calls by humans that error.
(No meaning behind the larger font. I don't know how to switch it).Maradona 'Hand of God' Goal was later admitted he handled the ball. Should we roll back the 1986 World Cup? If the officials on the next play had an admission of handling the ball, or they saw it on video, it would not have been rolled back. The controversy made the interest bigger and better.

livedarklions

Oh, come on! You're now comparing a bad non-penalty call to a failure to catch someone prior to the race engaging in systematic pre-meditated cheating?
Really terrible analogy.

avole

@Doge, So you are equating someone touching a ball during one game with someone using performance enhancing drugs on a daily basis at the behest of his team and doctors?? You have a bizarre set of values, my friend.You can't compare an isolated incident witn a culture of entrenched cheating involving banned substances. There's no parallel.

@124Spider, it'sactually only two or three people here. The vast majority have wisely given up in disgust.

@livedarklions, didn't see your post when I made my comments. You make the same point rather more elegantly than I do.

Doge

I have a good hunch other sports dope heavily. We all watch and clap because we don't know. It is cheating, but I'm fairly convinced that cleaning it up will take away from what folks want to watch. Body building has 2 divisions, one is watched more than the other. Heavyweight rowers, boxers, wrestlers as a whole get more attention than the weight limited.
We want to know our QB is clean and does not cheat. We don't really ask about those on the line. Head injury from contact was known inside the sports of football and soccer before the public knew. Soccer had several 20 somethings dropping dead in the last few years. We don't really know why - but I have a hunch. That was my sausage making reference posts ago.

So my statement is not about what is moral, or should be done etc., but on my belief that making sports squeaky clean will reduce viewers. Knowing that rides that came after "The Look" or Pantani's attacks were doped makes them less interesting. Seeing riders ride like they are not doped also makes them less interesting.

That could be them looking at their power meters or listening to their radios - but those are other topics.

EdwinHeadwind

..

In other words, doing anything to win as long as you can get away with it somehow "betters" the sport. Yours is a logic I'm glad I don't share or understand.

livedarklions

That literally has nothing to do with my comment.

You compared taking away a win from a doped racer retroactively to changing the outcome of a soccer match because of a bad non-call on the field. It isn't the same thing.

If you really want to analogize relevantly, should Barry Bonds really have the all-time home run record?

Maelochs

Wow. Those are what good debate responses look like.

This too: At what point does cheating become “too much”? If doping is fine, why not nudge an opponent off the road? Why not put a motor in the bike, or motor-pace?

Why not ride an underweight bike and have a guy drop some lead shot down a special hole in the frame as they wheel the winner away from the finish line? Why not poison opponents? If winning is everything, nothing else matters.

Why not kick a guy when he is descending on the very edge? Why not have your soigneurs “accidentally” clothesline the other squad’s star GC contender at a feed zone. Sure the soigneur would get fired … but the GC contender would be crippled. A little cash under the table and everything is fine, right? So long as you win.

If someone has an ‘acceptable” level of breaking the rules, the next guy can too … using exactly the same lame justifications.

Let’s just go back to the days when TdF riders hopped in cars between feed zones. Let’s have teams hire gangs of thugs to wait by the roadside to attack opposing riders.Who needs rules anyway?

And since people will have to have gangs of thugs to win … pretty soon everyone will be doing it, so it will be alright, right? Gerraint Thomas gets pulled off his bike and beaten to death-—he should have hired better thugs to defend himself, right?

Hey, everyone is doing it.

BlazingPedals

I was surprised that the UCI came down as hard as they did on Lance. I always believed he would be banned from future competition and an asterisk placed after his name. The TdF "Lance" years officially have no winner, because everyone else in the top 10 was found to be dirty, too; but here's the thing: the other places were retained. If they were all guilty of doping, shouldn't all of the places be officially vacated? Why should a doper be allowed to keep his 2nd or 3rd place when the winner was thrown out because of doping?

indyfabz

What evidence specific evidence is there that the second and third place guys were doping? You can't rightly strip someone based on the unsubstantiated assertion that "everyone was doing it," especially when that assertion is put forward to justify the actions of someone who was ultimately shown the have been doping and then admitted it.

Maelochs

The UCI is massively corrupt? They would basically have to shut down the sport and erase every winner going back ... who knows how far?

I don't know how many of the 1---180 riders got tested and failed, also.

I don;t think UCI came down hard on Lance. Lance PO'd a lot of people, including the guy at USADA, who decided that scofflaws needed to be taken down for the good of the sport--and because his ego was bruised. The only reason Lance got hit so hard is because he basically told all the officials who weren't helping him cheat (looking at You, UCI) that they were powerless because he had friends in high places.

But ... taking away his titles for cheating isn't a "hard hit." It is minimal. He admitted he cheated to win---no way to let his victories stand. And a lifetime ban? his pro career was basically over anyway ... and someone who confessed to cheating throughout the vast majority of his career Should be banned. He never even tried to play by the rules throughout most of his career. Why assume he had changed?

Basically Lance could have been a decent person and gotten away with a lot of what he did. Or he could have been a normal guy doing what normal guys in the peloton did, and gotten a couple years suspension, which was and is normal (ask the current World Champion.)

Lance took it to an extreme. His need to always bee the alpha male meant that he had to crush anyone who stood in his way, and not just beat them, but humiliate them and deliberately antagonize them, to prove he was The Man. He took it to an extreme, so the people whose Jobs are to enforce the rules, decided to meet him there.

Basically Lance singled himself out. He said, "I am a blatant cheat, and none of you can do squat, and I squat on all of you." So, he was treated about the way he treated everyone else.

Basically, Lance got Lanced by the people he said couldn't do it. He got treated sort of the way he treated others. He has no room to cry about it. He should be glad he is not in jail somewhere.

As for the UCI---they know, like we know, that drug use is still rampant in the peloton. And, I have to admit, ti sucks some of the fun out of the sport for me.

Also--I have to admit that I Know the NFL is full of chemical freaks beating each other bloody while being held together with more chemicals. And I cannot tell you exactly why that bothers me less. I cannot explain why I get upset when one steroid-driven lineman gets away with holding some equally chemically mutated freak---but don't care that both are shot full of steroids, stimulants, and painkillers.

Maybe it is because I don't and never really did aspire to play football?

Part of it, I know, is that I liked cycling because ti was simple and primal---men on nearly identical machines, competing on will and muscle and wind, where most of the external differentiators were removed--- like college or Olympic wrestling, it is a raw, basic, direct form of interpersonal and team competition----except it isn't, so it loses its appeal.

The only reason i ever cared about bike racing was because I rode ... but I never aspired to race. Possibly part of the appeal was that I knew from experience sort of what they were going through---a tough hill that tests a rider to his/her limits is the same, whether it is ten K at ten percent or a tenth of a K at one percent---if it takes the rider deep into his/her red zone, it is the same experience.

Now, however, i cannot help wondering if one person is simply responding to the drugs better---it sort of spoils the sport for me.

None of that has anything to do with the twin pernicious effects aof encouraging doping in sports---I know I have heard too many stories of people doping to win amateur races, and I am pretty sure most high-school athletes who are getting scouted by the big colleges are being "advised" to try a "special raining regimen"---because at some point they are going to have to beat out others who are doping---at the HIGH-SCHOOL level. Football itself is unhealthy, but feeding kids dope ... whatever.

Also, the moral decay which afflict most modern nations' cultures is exacerbated by as well as illustrated by the acceptance of cheating. We want to watch our teams win ... and when our grandchildren inherit a world even more depraved , diseased, and devolutionized than this one ... if we are still around, we will blame anyone but ourselves.