Lance Armstrong to lose Titles, Banned - Page 18

On August 24 2012 22:33 Lockitupv2 wrote:
I dont see how the accusers have any ground to stand on. He has passed 23242543423 drug tests his career.

On August 24 2012 22:37 Crushinator wrote:


All dopers pass most drug tests.

On August 24 2012 22:45 IPSVarekk wrote:
even if its harsh,if you clearly get caught cuz of doping,you should be banned for lifetime.

Tour de France nowadays is just Tour de Doping,its annoying..

On August 24 2012 21:59 Hanakurena wrote:


The goal os the USADA is to catch US dopers. Also, it is a fair trial. Why do you postulate it is no fair. If the USADA had insufficient evidence Armstrong would just win the case and be one of the few people ever making USADA lose a doping case.
There are apparently 10 witnesses. Some people say his most loyal collegues and friends are among them. Why did Armstrong choose to give up all his titled, which he worked so hard for, to prevent this evidence from coming out if it doesn't amount to anything?

Yes, he is a slippery eel. That's why he dodged the evidence from being presented. This was his only escape. He would have been humiliated in trial. His friend and reculant witness Hincapie would have spilled the beans with 9 others. There is now no way to make Hincapie repeat under oath what he said in paper. It would have been a confrontation of the two long time friends and then Hincapie saying the same thing as Hamilton and Landis. Then also blood values come in and some doping or blood expert testifies that can only happen from doping. And who knows what other unknown evidence the USADA also has?

On August 24 2012 22:45 IPSVarekk wrote:
even if its harsh,if you clearly get caught cuz of doping,you should be banned for lifetime.

Tour de France nowadays is just Tour de Doping,its annoying..

On August 24 2012 20:44 Grumbels wrote:

1. positive tests
2. blood data consistent with blood doping and nothing else
3. accusations and witness reports of former team mates
4. his inhuman riding times
5. him beating a field of people that all doped
6. his sudden improvement only consistent with doping
7. his association with doping doctor Ferrari, or with other people involved in doping
8. apparently he is willing to part with 7 tour titles because he's tired of fighting back?
9. he was never caught before, to be sure, but there were enough loopholes to make the testing regime a joke and very easy to fool (as detailed by multiple experts and former team mates) absence of positive tests does not mean you are innocent
10. a riding and preparation style (everything for the tour) is associated with doping use
11. he had highly elevated testosterone values early in his career, only consistent with steroid use



but sure, it's a witch hunt...

On August 24 2012 22:56 jdsowa wrote:
The "who gives a shit everyone was doing it" attitude doesn't work.

You have a person who defrauded his competitors, spectators, his sponsors and rivals' sponsors, and made millions of dollars in the process. Regardless of whether everyone else was doing it or not, the man deserves to suffer a lot more than he has.

On August 24 2012 22:55 CursedRich wrote:


Great post, and to add to it a court in the US let OJ simpson off of a murder charge so please people dont argue about what went before this, the corruption surrounding Armstong all the doctors, lawyers and others who lied and cheated to protect him should also be gone after IMO.

On August 24 2012 22:58 cari-kira wrote:
"The USADA also said it had 10 former Armstrong teammates ready to testify against him."

Who the fuck would really believe that he has not doped???
every TDF winner that doped lost his title, so he has to lose it, too.
only because he had better doctors and better meds that are harder to find does not mean he is allowed to cheat.
i am happy the cycling associations are taking charge and try to clean up this sport.
i love cycling but i stopped watching over the years, because _everyone_ there was doping and thats not what sport should be.
people that say "he had only negative doping tests, so he has to be clean" dont know shit about cycling.
in cycling even 10 years old are getting asthma sprays from their fathers to get more air in their first tournaments.
this has to stop.

On August 24 2012 23:13 StarStruck wrote:


You are basically asking for a witch hunt on practically every participant.

I'm telling you right now. I'm going to bring this point home: it's next to impossible to regulate.

On August 24 2012 23:18 cari-kira wrote:


fuck this. nobody asks for a witch hunt. dont try to discredit me. i made my point, im just asking for better doping tests and for trainers acting responsible. if this can be archieved through harder punishment, than thats the way to go.
you are saying: let everyone dope and the team/country with the better science abilities wins all sport titles.
i dont need this sort of "sport".

On August 24 2012 16:16 Hanakurena wrote:


It doesn't work that way in cycling. He plateaued before he got his cancer. Whe know his results in mountain stages and time trails before he got ill. He was already 25 at that time. His time train was strong, but not elite. His climbing on long mountain stages wasn't great at all. He was a classics rider, not even close to a grand tour contender. Yeah he was a rider that could win races, which is a feat in itself, but even at that point he was probably already doped, as many riders were.

We know his personal doctor, the infamous doping doctor Ferrari, said according to people like Landis that he was worried the doping caused the cancer.

He came back for his first tour after the tour of 1998, where police busted a whole team for using EPO. You need to understand EPO allows you to just cycle away from non-EPO users on the flat road. EPO boosts performance by an incredible amount for an elite sport. The result was that the peleton was split in half in the 90's where you had the epo users and the super talented freaks of nature that might be clean (but why would they?) just ride away from the clean part of the peleton. Average cycling speeds just went up and clean riders were just dropped on the flat roads. Not even talking about HC climbs here.

We know all these tour winners doped EPO. And not just a tiny bit, which should be safe. No, they doped up to dangerous levels, making the blood stacked with red blood cells, leaving it extremely thick.

So in 1999 riders were scared and many stopped using EPO. In fact, many riders don't want to cheat. Few want to put their health on the risk to cheat a win. No, most just wanted to stay a pro cyclist. They wanted to just keep their job. Riding clean made that impossible. So with the Festina EPO bust they hoped for a cleaner sport.
Then comes Armstrong...
Go watch the footage of how he drops people. Then go read what Bassons wrote about that.

People like Bassons who wanted a clean sport were bullied by the peleton. In the end Bassons was forced to quit cycling because you can't be saying you want cycling to be clean. You need to understand this omerta culture. This is why Schleck wasn;t mad at Contador when Contador lost his title because of getting caught blood doping. It's like thieves honour. That's also why Nadal stupidly defended Contador. They all dope themselves so they go out in the media and defend a caught doper.

Armstrong's performance in 1999 made many people start doping again. There was a point where cycling could have developed into a clean sport. But thanks to Armstrong, it didn't.

Armstrong didn't cheat any more than Ullrich or Pantani. But he did win and that's why he got famous and that's why doping remained after 1999 until today. In the mean time quite a few people died because of doping.

Also, Armstrong may never have tested positive, ignoring possible cover up postives, we know his 1999 urine did test positive for EPO.
They happened to use his anomynous urine sample to test the EPO test when they finally did develop an epo test in 2004.
They got some positives from the unnamed urine samples. Then someone at the lab leaked some ID numbers to a journalist. So the journalist just called up the UCI, who can match the name to the ID and requested some documents from Armstrong's negative doping tests that tour. When he got them in the mail the documents had the same id and he could match the ID to the name.

Looking at performances on HC climbs and seeing the watts/kg you can also see Armstrong probably cheated. It is possible for there to be one rider that can do near superhuman things. But when suddenly many riders pump out 6.4 watt/kg or more, you know they are doped. You just can't be sure Armstrong isn't that one super rare freak of nature. But of course we have a lot of evidence now that it was the doping, not extreme freak genes.


When an athlete suddenly gets a huge increase in performance after seemuingly have plateaued out, an explenation is needed. Armstrong has always accepted that. His explanations were that he lost quite a bit of weight and dropped to 72 kg and that he improved his pedalling efficieny by a large amount. Both are lies. He lied about his weight. He never dropped those 6 kg, which would help him climb a lot better. At most it was 4 but probably closer to 2. He never rode at 72 kg. And the pedalling efficiency is a myth. Dr. Ed Coyle did some research on it and indeed publiced those numbers, but exercise physiology researchers all want this paper retracted because his methodology is flawed at many essential points.
The old consensus was that you can't improve pedalling efficiency even by a very small margin. In other tests elite riders and normal people have the exact same efficiency. Yet Dr. Ed Coyle and Armstrong claimed to have gained 8% improvement in efficiency. That's absolutely huge. A whole generation of cyclists has tried to somehow also improve their pedalling efficiency and gain that 8%.
But never again has an improvement of efficiency ever measured. Not even half a percent.



So yeah, he cheated and all not in denial at this point are willing to accept that if they didn't already knew those years he was winning. But that's still an amazing feat and he should get a lot of respect for that.
The big problem is his attitude. He has always been so brash about being clean while all his competitors, who initially had more talent as grand tour riders, admitted to doping.
He build up this whole empire around himself, making it impossible for him to admit. So he had to keep lying. Not good when you say you want a career in politics.

If Armstrong never won he would have admitted long ago and this story wouldn't be so sad. Being a 7 times toyur winner, it is hard to keep clean. There's a lot of pressure to keep up the deception. Many riders today are doping but want the sport to keep a clean image.

But if we want a clean cycling we can't do with this huge elephant in the room. This 7 times winner who obviously doped but gets the keep his titles. So yes finally finally please strip these titles. Strip all of them in the EPO and Armstrong era. And don't give them to the second place, third place, fourth place, fifth place spots, because they were just as doped.

Then we can try again and try to make cycling a cleaner sport. So hopefully not another superior doping doctor (like Ferrari was) will come along with an outlier responder to doping (which is why Armstrong won) and start a whole new generation of doping.

That's why it is also so sad Contador wasn't made to admit to blood doping before he could ride again. Because we know he did and he kinda got away with it.