Six jours

This point keeps getting made, and keeps getting rebutted with "Yeah, it's not about the doping, it's about being an A-hole who tried to destroy people". As in, nobody really cares if LeMond doped or not, but folks care quite a bit about Team Lance trying to blackmail him by threatening to release his history of being molested. There's doping, and then there's being a complete piece of ****.

Yeah, well, my old man can beat up your old man.

cruiserhead

The rebuttal is that Lance doped. He cheated almost his entire career in pro ranks. That's the legal fact.
He lied and duped millions of fans and sponsors. That's the sporting fraud fact.
He used his influence to destroy the careers and lives of people who simply told the truth. That is the ethical fact.

The fact he is a total piece of ****, and still trolls for publicity is a diversion to the truth.
His PR campaign to stay relevant and hope the court of public opinion lacks enough ethical fortitude, is diversion to the truth.

Armstrong is no different than Bernie Madoff, or a long list of ego-centric hucksters that ride high on lies until they crash and burn.
Luckily, the truth usually finds it's way to the surface.

He doesn't deserve **** from the public or from the sport that he sucked dry and completely damaged.

People think the sport has moved on from the damage? Look at how twisted a lot of cycling fans are and you can see the real damage to the sport.
The sport is so tainted, it's amazing that they get sponsors at all.
The disease isn't doping, it's this twisted mentality that Lance epitomizes. That disease is far from gone.

xuwol7

Lance Armstrong--->tainted cycling
Don King------------>tainted boxing

Its life and we can't look at sports like a little kid believing in santa claus,.

mprelaw

That was actually Landis, not Lance. And LeMond beat him to the punch by going public about his abuse and founding a charity called 1 in 6 to counsel and assist victims.

Six jours

You are completely mistaken. Doping has been a major part of pro bike racing right from the start, and was an accepted fact through the 1960s. Doping wasn't even against the rules in the TdF until 1965 or so. The rider's handbook in the thirties informed contestants that they would have to supply their own dope; the TdF organization would not do it for them. Six day riders in New York are said to have invented the "speedball" around the turn of the century, to help them with the demands of all-night riding. And of course, there are the widely-known stories of Pelissier ("we ride on dynamite"), Anquetil ("one cannot ride the Tour on mineral water alone"), and Coppi ("those who claim we don't [dope], they know nothing about cycling").

Yet we can hardly consider cycling "damaged" during all that time, can we? Six day racing was the biggest sport in America in the early part of the century. The "Golden Age" of the Tour encompasses the time before doping controls existed at all. The great battles between Bartali and Coppi, and later between Merckx, Ocana, Thevenet... and yet we're supposed to believe that drugs ruined the sport?

Nonsense. Whatever a person's view on doping and sport, even the most basic examination shows cycling and doping can coexist just fine. Whether cycling can survive the rabid anti-doping crusaders, OTOH, remains to be seen.

Six jours

Oops. You're right. I have a hard time keeping the scumbags straight. Must be all the dope.

Zinger

Lest I be misunderstood as a Don King apologist I'll say it anyway:
Lots of promoters and managers have tainted boxing.

xuwol7

So true Z-man, I still enjoy both sports (the only 2 sports I watch).
I used to box, and was barely a good enough cyclist to be a bottom tier amateur...lol

It is amusing to read all the posts about Lance from people who hate him (not a LA fan boy).
It is kind of like a train wreck, hard to look away..lol
Drugs are indeed a part of cycling like a chain is part of a bicycle.

Zinger

Still waitin' to see someone on top get in there with Gennady Golovkin after watchin' last night.....That was too easy.

Promoter feuds are a little maddening nowadays for those of us fans spoiled by the '80s.

And yeah Armstrong seems to catch it for the woes of the sport......goes with the territory of a champion cheater I guess.

xuwol7

31-0--28KO Golovkin is as exciting as Tyson was in the 80's, so precise and powerful, I still like watching Klitschko and wonder who will someday beat him.

Back to the LA show...lol
Still haven't seen the movie but I will catch it someday and everyone likes to watch a fallen star.
His fault, yes and his arrogance rubs me the wrong way.

Giacomo 1 

Excellent post.

Especially the last line I bold faced.

Many European fans don't seem to get the whole anti-drug crusade and want it to go away....

Leinster

Eh? Which European fans have told you that? I'm European and I wanted drugs out of cycling before it was cool.

roadwarrior

Like your Ray Lewis rant.

C'mon...

roadwarrior

Well said.

There are a lot of "99ers" on this thread. That and a lot of folks that apparently believe that people don't or should not use "help" to put on a good show.

Good post.

asgelle

You need to check your attributions. I never claimed to know anything about Ray Lewis, nor commented on him directly.

Gerryattrick

Rabid ???


I'm another European against PEDs in cycling, or any sport.

If the riders of the past had not taken drugs the battles between great cyclists would have been just as fierce, only very marginally slower in all probability.

canam73

I think the world has moved past those times. It used to be the press and people in general were more willing to look past the scandals and indiscretions of athletes, politicians and celebrities and take happy stories at face value.

Now the average person is more interested in the what the tabloids have to say about the behind the scenes stuff than watching the actual sport (or movie, etc.). It wouldn't matter that much to pro cycling except the sponsorship money has gotten bigger and the companies involved want their name on a product that appears clean.

Giacomo 1 

Pro Cycling had an article about fans in Spain mainly, but Italy was also included, that they were somewhat tired of the anti-drug crusade and wished it were gone. They didn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation.

I'm not sure which month it was written, but I'll go through my mags to see if I can find it.

Anyway, record and overflowing crowds in GB for the Tour of Britain, along with the 3 stages of the TDF from GB, and big crowds for all the GT's point to a "ho hum, lets race" attitude in Europe. And by-the-way, I'm good with that!

Six jours

Well, I don't know anything about whether the world has moved on or what European cycling fans want. All I really know is that the focus on doping has significantly detracted from the sport.

I'm not interested in who's doping. I'm interested in watching top athletes race bikes. That apparently makes me a minority these days.

Leinster

Without reading the article itself, I'd hope you're not confusing the "let them race" attitude with the "let them take what they want" attitude. The former is much more common than the latter; it's not so much that people don't care if they're doping, it's just that a lot of cycling fans wish that doping wasn't the first aspect of cycling brought up whenever it makes the sports pages.

There's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't side to that, in that any report of anti-drug measures in cycling is taken as evidence that doping is rife in cycling, but if nobody's reporting on the measures cycling is taking to prevent doping, everyone assumes cyclists are all doping.

Obviously we'd all be much better off with the head-in-the-sand attitude of the Spanish judge who wouldn't allow Dr Fuentes to name the footballers and tennis players he treated.

Six jours

I figure that's sarcasm but it's actually a debatable point. I really enjoyed pro road racing in the early-to-mid 1980s, when doping was illegal but dope testing was pretty much a sham, designed mostly for appearances. Even when folks did get caught, they usually got a slap on the wrist and went right back to racing. By the late eighties, testing got a lot more serious, and so did the penalties. And less than a decade later, U.S. bike racing coverage was more about drugs than sport. I don't see how that's an improvement.

Leinster

You did very well to spot the sarcasm.

I can't agree on the rest. The attitude in the 80s (and 70s, and 60s, etc) to drugs is what led to Festina and Lance, and Tom Simpson getting a statue on the Ventoux. If you just let them have at it, you get bad things happening. At least in the 70s and 80s though you could get the likes of Van Impe and Mottet who were, apparently, known even within the Peloton for being clean. You couldn't have that in the EPO era.

Six jours

The argument is that it wasn't the dope that led to Festina and Lance, but the focus on dope. IOW, riders and teams doped for decades without spectacles like Festina and Lance. The obvious difference is the anti-doping crusade.

As for poor Tommy Simpson, yes, doping killed him. But it's quite possible that anti-doping rules led to the search for new drugs to replace the easily detectable amphetamines and steroids. Perhaps it would have been better to tolerate the very rare amphetamine death, as opposed to the page-long list of EPO deaths.

Cafe

Lance did get what he deserved. Not debating that...I think he should be in jail myself. He got off easy in my book.

Strongest doper? Who knows. All the top cycling teams and pros during lances era was a client of a well known doctor who designed them cheat regimens actually. Its hard to say who had the better cheat system unless you personally saw how all the top teams cheated. But I'm sure the ones that cheated...cheated the best they possibly could because they wanted maximum reward for the risk they were taking.

seypat

All are good points. You could take the top 20% competitors out of any sport and the competition would not change at all. Just the performances would be below what you would be expecting. There seems to be 2 distinct sides out there. On one side is the fan that wants to see records broken and unbelievable performances and doesn't care how they are accomplished. The other side is all about clean competitions and doesn't care if the performance suffers a bit because of it. Both sides want to see a fair and true competition. Is there any middle ground?