Armstrong has been tinkered with!!

tas1978

Trick question: Ritalin is a stimulant. But since you think it would help the drivers, they all take it.

Yeah, Robbie's intake tested positive for corticosteroids and Dale Jr.'s pit chief got caught mixing donkey growth hormone in with the transmission fluid.

mjolnir2k

God, you just keep making yourself look increasingly desperate. What the HELL does Clara Hughes know about LA? When did she join US postal/ Discovery? So as far as Clara is concerned NO rider can ever go from a one day style rider to a Tour style rider? That's not only idiotic, it's downright untrue.

Perhaps Ms. Hughes was not able to make such a switch. Perhaps she is only capable of winning one day races...but that has NO bearing on everyone else.
Gee, I guess because Clara couldn't do it Lance MUST be doping. Yessiree, that's the truth of it. If she couldn't NO-One CAN!

More of Your desperate attempts to paint LA a user. It's very sad.

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micron

mjolnir - your increasingly specious arguments cf 'was she ever on USPS/Discovery?' are beginning to sound ever more desperate. Ms Hughes does not make any inference about Armstrong, as you imply she does, that inference is Flyer's. Yet she must be discredited because in your paranoia, you assume that her revelations must make Armstrong culpable.

What she is saying is that she has witnessed rapid improvements due to drugs and that she felt compelled to specialise because she didn't want to dope and felt she could only win one day races without it. If your fervid imagination makes her an accuser of your hero Armstrong, then I suggest that you have the problem not anyone else.

mjolnir2k

No, you miss the point of my post. I am not arguing with Mrs. Hughes I am simply stating that her experience does not neccessarily mean that it is acroos the board and an indictment of LA as is suggested by Flyer (not Mrs. Hughes). He CLEARLY intended that post to insuinuate that it is proof that LA could not have made the jump from day racer to stage racer without dope.

No paranoia on my part b/c I have nothing to be paranoid about. I am simply refuting Flyer's inceasant attempts to connect every dope issue in the press to LA.

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johnny2012

Have been reading on all of this, Hamilton, etc. for 2 days.
What occur to me are a few things:
1. Armstrong chose not to race in '04 Olympics, where Hamilton was caught for homologous transfusion(s).
2. Armstrong's script (we all have scripts) seems to center on "I've never tested positive/I don't use performance enhancing DRUGS."
3. Human blood is not a drug, yours nor someone else's.
4. Only in '04 have the agencies begun testing for homologous transfusions. It seems there isn't a way to look for autologous transfusions. (Except crit levels, etc.?)
5. Armstrong is contractually obligated to race TdF in '05, but not after. He is already downplaying the importance of #7. (but to be fair, that's always a part of his psy-ops campaign.)
6. If Armstrong has to receive homologous and/or autologous transfusions to maintain his performance level, will he not have to stop now if these tests will be performed at TdF05?

I don't know. With all this worry over Tyler Hamilton, the injustice of it all, etc., I'm a little ill. It's sports. These are rich white guys. I just can't feature all the clinging.

I think our culture is equally to blame. We NEED these heroes. I'm amazed at LA's cancer recovery. Does anyone think that was faked? Aren't the pictures of him wasted away with drill holes in his head public domain?

Evolution of physiology is a violent and dangerous process. As far as keeping secrets, our gov't keeps enormous secrets from us daily. The peleton is just acting as gov'ts do. We mere mortals don't have a 'need to know.' We can't possibly understand the stakes.

I was wounded nearly fatally in Iraq last year. I used to be a fitness freak. I relate to LA's struggle to get back on the bike. Nearly dying takes such a chunk out of your will. It can really take the fight out of you. But, in time, it's restored.

We want to watch acts of superhumanity from the couch. But we want these athletes to use the same garbage fuel that we do. Isn't it interesting that Texas is the home of Lance Armstrong and also the home of the most obese population on the face of the Earth? The obesity rate of schoolkids in Texas is approaching 50%? What is happening here?

If you want to watch racers who don't 'cheat,' I guess, go watch racers who don't do it for a living.

Erik
ex-Army
Texas

JohnO

Hamilton was warned in the spring 04 that his blood tests looked funny, and that he was very close to the 50% hematocrit level. Armstrong was not, because his tests did not look funny. Lance uses altitude training to condition his blood, so he really wouldn't benefit from transfusions without crossing the 50% threshold.

I remember many principles I learned when serving in the military, the idea being that if you were going to get killed for them, you should know what they are. One was the concept of innocent until proven guilty. If you follow the 'lance is doping' discussions around here, and see some of the absurd linkages that are brought up (he knew Tyler, so he must be blood doping, because we all know blood dopers hang out with each other), you can see the value of that principle.

The irony is, as ridiculous as some of the ideas floated around are, the thought that ridersl ike Lance, Jan, Ivan, Joseba, and Alex are just dedicated, hard training cyclists is considered the most absurd of all. Perhaps we should replace professional cycling with professional nihilism.

Catabolic Jones

If you are familiar with the history of Le Tour (Wheatcroft's book is an excellent start) and you make some simple inferences, you will discover that the tour was always doped. It was conceived originally as a circus show, a freak act of endurance, in order to raise publicity for a newspaper. It is simply an INHUMAN act of endurance. This fact is then compounded in today's age of high demand for super-spectacle; if human physiology cannot evolve over a century or so, then what can we deduce?

Obviously they are doped. The question is what and how much? Flyer is continuously after the riders and their doctors and DS's; what of the public? What of the very nature of the spectacle itself? I think expectation and appetite first have to change. The very nature of Le Tour would have to change. The public, the cycling fans, have to change just as much as the doped-up riders.

The question then, to me, is how to bring the change? The uber-vigilance of a Dick Pound? Draconian measures? I don't feel this is the best way. This will merely lead to more furtive measures, and, hence, more guilt, which will lead to more use. Simple addictive cycle. I don't have the answers, but I have to reject current measures.

tomUK

Not sure if this has been noted, however, I would suggest Mr Armstrong is much more likely to be comfortable with EPO post cancer as this very drug, no doubt, had an enormous effect on his ability to recover.

Why become scared of something that saved your life? Lance is smart at what he does and he gets away with it. Oh, wouldn't it be joyous to see pro cycling return to what it should be? Chance of that happening. Zero.

VeloFlash

This is part of a longer article by Irish journalist Feargal McKay, Angels with Dirty Faces, referred to by Flyer for those posters who naively believe a long stage race can be won without resorting to illegal chemistry.

"In the eyes of many cycling fans the biggest crime is not doping. It is the claims of many that there is no doping in cycling, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Cycling has never been a clean sport, and it will probably never be a clean sport. Everyone who has followed cycling, even at a distance, knows the role drugs play in the sport.

"Jacques Anquetil (Tour winner 1957, 1961-64) admitted that "you don't win the Tour de France on mineral water." He had led a riders' revolt in the 1966 Tour when drug tests were introduced: "We find these tests degrading. Why do cyclists have to be suspected and controlled while any other free man can do what he likes and take what he likes?"

"Questioned about the role of amphetamines in cycling and whether he had used amphetamines, Fausto Coppi (Tour winner 1949 and 1953) replied "Only when necessary." Asked how often that was, Coppi replied "Almost all the time." Go back to the 1924 Tour and remember the words of Henri Pelissier: "Do you want to see how we keep going? That's cocaine to go in our eyes. Chloroform for our gums. This is ointment to warm the knees. And pills, do you want to see the pills?" His brother, Francis, added: "We keep going on dynamite. In the evenings we dance around our rooms instead of sleeping."

"No one forgets the death of the English rider Tom Simpson on Mount Ventoux in the 1967 Tour. Simpson, dosed up with a mix of alcohol and amphetamines, collapsed on the side of the sun-scorched volcano and died. Ten years earlier the French philosopher Roland Barthes described the Ventoux thus: "The Ventoux, thrusting abundantly skywards, is a god of Evil to whom sacrifice must be paid. A true Moloch, a despot of cyclists, it never pardons the weak and exacts an unjust tribute of suffering." In those pre-Ben Johnson days, Simpson's death elevated him to the status of hero. His death was seen as a sacrifice to the gods of cycling, it didn't condemn him to the status of villain.

"No one cannot but be aware of Paul Kimmage's 1990 book, 'A Rough Ride', in which he told the story of drugs in sport as he had witnessed it in his own professional career during the Roche-Kelly years. Other riders have come out with similar books, including Freddy Maertens' 1988 book 'Niet van Horen Zeggen' (translated in 1993 as 'Fall From Grace') and Erwann Mentheour's 2000 book, 'Secret Defonce: Ma Verite sur le Dopage'. But many choose to be blind to the blindingly obvious. Stephen Roche's condemnation of Kimmage for spitting in the soup - taken with Roche's own links to Ferrari and doubts over his own miraculous return from a career-crippling knee injury - demonstrates the attitude of most cyclists. Denial.

"We have long since passed the point of the naive young baseball fan who faced down Shoeless Joe Jackson with his "say it isn't so, Joe" at the height of the Black Sox scandal in baseball. It's time everyone stopped treating fans as if they were naive kids and admitted the truth. It would be nice if, the next time a rider was asked the simple question of whether he has ever used drugs in his cycling career, he told the truth and listed all the drugs - the legal and the illegal - he has used and left the fans to decide for themselves how clean that makes him, instead of persisting with the myth of a clean sport.

"The time has come for the riders to stop hiding behind masking agents and Clintonesque semantic games over the meaning of the word drugs. To stop pretending that if it hasn't been detected by the dope controls, then it isn't a drug. Or that if it isn't currently on the UCI's banned list then it isn't a drug (Pedro Delgado's defence in 1988 when he tested positive for probenecid, then commonly used as a masking agent to hide steroid use). Or that if it has been found by a dope control, that it doesn't count if it can be excused by the use of a back-dated prescription for a saddle-sore cream (Armstrong) or an asthma inhaler (Miguel Indurain). Or that the drugs found in their possession were for their wife, their grandmother or their mother-in-law (Ferrari). Or that, all other excuses failing, there was an error in the test (Marco Pantani). The sport may never be clean but it's high time that the riders came clean and admitted what's really going on. They may be able to convince themselves that they are innocent victims but they cannot convince the sport's fans."

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