Eldrack said:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2009/may09/may13news3
Ouch. Looks like T-Mobile was dirty all the way up to 2006. Didn't people round here claim they where clean for a while?
It is good. However the subsequent complexities of successfully prosecuting any of these recent cases is an indictment on both the UCI and the morality of each individual rider.
It is right to go after the German connection as it is right to remove all Spanish riders from pro tour licenses until Spain cooperates. I would offer Spain only tough love right now. They are still working feverishly to prop up Valervde.
However I still firmly believe the only answer is to destroy Lance Armstrong.
Completely and utterly.
His complete network both present and past. Not because I hate him but because his destruction offers the greatest potential to act as a catalyst for structural and philosophical change in pro cycling.
Its not personal its just war. Just like I would walk into any room and pick out the strongest and chop his head off first. So too must we do this to Armstrong. No racing, no pro tour team ownership, no management, no Cancer foundation associated with pro cycling.
We gave him a chance to leave. Now he wants to entrench his perception of reality on the sport. He needs to be banished to the corner of the room like an insubordinate 5yo child at an adults dinner party. If he needs perpetual attention then someone put on a wiggles DVD for him to repeatedly watch.
He has nothing to add of real worth for the sport long term.
I am not saying dont remember these men or to ignore their feats from a different era. By all means write books, interview them and let them speak and tell their stories with a sense of (albeit misguided) pride to their mind-numbingly loyal fans. Cycling is a big tent.
However we have to keep the pro tour separate from these characters.
It needs to be the financial driver for the sport - its success affects everything we do right down to the club scene. We have to find a sustainable base. We have to give these 16/17/18yo kids something they can genuinely build off. Lets just aim for 5 years of boring, clean, competition. Scale back salaries, pro team budgets, UCI fees and event organisers fees. Make potential licence holders jump through ridiculous hoops to ply their trade. Lets make it impossible for anyone to enter the pro tour scene without good intentions.
This is not a sport that can operate in the free market/ private licence 'purely for profit' realm right now.
Lets offer sponsors a compelling communication medium for their message in a consistent, clean and positive way. Sure there will be drug positives but lets end this reign of coordinated doping ******** from Armstrong, Bruyneel, Ullrich, Kloden, Vino, Schumaker, Valverde, Rico and Rasmussen et al.
These are all men of tremendous insignificance. So weak they couldn't stand to be the person they were born to be. All men who lacked the courage to accept their own average reality. Mitigating here is the very real sense they are all, to some extent at least, a victim of the sport they set out to love. The sport certainly provided them the immoral road upon which they dirty danced on their pedals to the absolute summit.
I am almost tempted to put the sport on suicide watch which amounts to fixed wages for all riders and fixed pro tour team budgets for all teams.
In conclusion I welcome a more collective downfall of the former Team Mobile group precisely because it further ostracises Armstrong and the absurdities of his own performances during that era.
It inches us closer to his head on a plate.