BrianNystrom said:Yeah, nobody who was a contender was clean and it's had been that way all through the history of the Tour. Every time I see Greg Lemond bloviating about Armstrong I can't help but think "he doth protest too much" and the he's really trying to hide his own guilty feelings without admitting he ever did anything wrong.
Was what Lance did wrong? Absolutely! Did it give him an advantage over his competition? Not a chance. The fact that he never got busted in a drug test indicates how careful they were. A reasonable argument could be made that it's possible that some of his less careful competitors may have gained more of an advantage from doping than he did. Heck, the year he was diagnosed with cancer was the year that Bjarne Riis, know as "Mr. 60%" for his insanely high hematocrit level, won the Tour. WADA would later set the maximum allowable 'crit level for riders at 50%.
I don't think that Phil and Paul sold out to anyone. It was obvious that they genuinely liked Armstrong and the aggressive way he raced. I loved watching him, too. There was a lot of drama and excitement in the Tours he won.
Regardless of the doping, he trained hard and more scientifically than anyone before him. In that way, he changed professional cycling forever. He was an incredibly gifted athlete who unfortunately competed at a time when doping was rampant and necessary to be competitive at the highest level. He simply made the same bad decision that his competitors did and because he was so successful, everyone wanted to take him down. His demise was pretty much inevitable.
I was the designer and programmer of the machine that Dr. Kary Mullis used his Polymerase Chain Reaction chemistry on so that we could detect that HIV was the cause of AIDS and get that [censored] out of the blood banking system. Dr. Mullis won a Nobel Prize for his work. Lemond got his hunting injury during this time and so he could not get any blood transfusions since the entire world blood banking system was closed down.
After that accident he had a very low hematocrit and his performance showed it. He had a hard time finishing last. He told everyone that his doctor told him he had low blood iron and gave him iron shots. Lemond's performance jumped from just ho-hum to winning the Tour de France.
Just about that time is when they developed EPO. I was always suspicious that Lemond used EPO and not iron shots which operate very slowly even in people with iron deficiency.
On the other hand - the medical treatment for his condition would have been prescribed EPO so I'm of a mixed mind about it. I would not have considered it cheating.
And because of the side effects of EPO - they would have caused as much harm to Armstrong as help. As your hematocrit gets above 50% your blood becomes dehydrated and this isn't the sort of thing you can cure by drinking more water. This is why Armstrong eventually went to using transfusions of his own blood.
To my way of thinking Armstrong was no worse than most of the other great champions. They would have destroyed everyone around them in a second to retain their titles. Hell, the winner of the first Tour de France was disqualified the following year for breaking his closest competitors bike if memory serves.
