Evidence overwhelmingly indicates Greg LeMond Doped....
- Thread starter Chapeau!
- Start date
No one was held down and forced to take drugs. They're all adults - big boys that can make their own decisions.parkansas said:
I hate it when people say stuff like this. Don't paint all the cyclists with the same brush, as until ridden a century in their cleats you have no freaking idea how hard that decision can be.
Everyone isn't Lance or Jan or Greg or Wiggo or Cavs. And most of those guys don't command the salary those guys command.
How do you think these guys earning low 5-figure salaries, barely enough to support their little family at home in their little house, now faces the reality that he has to dope or he's going to be replaced by someone else who will, which leaves him having spent 20 years chasing a dream that now will never come true, flat broke, having to go home and tell his wife and child that all of their sacrifices were for nothing, that he has to get a job at JCPenny so that they can eat and that they have to sell their little house and move into a little apartment that costs less per year then his bikes used to cost because that is all that they can afford.
Or make it simpler; eliminate the family altogether and imagine being 22 years old having worked all your life to get there, pretty much not having a life so you can maintain your inhuman training schedule all for the dream of riding in the pros, only to find out that the dream comes in an IV. Because 90% of them are doing it and you just can't run with them if you're not, so it's either the dream you've had from childhood and worked towards to the exclusion of everything else, or tossing all of your work of a lifetime over something that everyone else on your team takes as just another part of the job. When you were 22 could YOU have made that decision? When I was 22, I knew everything and was freaking indestructable in my own mind, and I wasn't even an athlete. These guys are 150 pound gods and they know it.
I guess you can say morals are morals. Im sure there are some riders that end up with a pro career in cycling that are dumber than box of rocks but not "knowing" about such shennanigans before hand is almost impossible. You get to form an opinion beforehand. If you take the arguement "how are they gonna pay for their houses etc" you might as well excuse folk who rob banks and commit a whole assortment of financial crimes in order to support their lifestyles... When I was 22 (which was back in the day when Indurain morphed from being able to complete only 3 stages of the Tour to winning the damned thing beating guys like LeMond by minutes in a TT) I was a 142lb 1st Cat road guy that made that very decision. At 22 I'd just finished University and had a backup plan should my hopes and dreams fail - which, they did on the two wheeled front. Getting used to hearing about other guys "taking something" was the norm just as getting used to being shelled out the back in races with the really fast lads. I knew that not everyone was taking stuff but it certainly wasn't unheard of either. There had already been lots of controversy about the deaths of a good number of amateur cyclists in Belgium and Holland and it wasn't a risk that I was willing to take, even if I had known where to get the stuff. Chucking my self down hill at 60+ - that's another story.jpwkeeper said:
Reasonable points.
I've known and raced with several riders who went professional.
I'm talking about the early 1980's here.
Over the years I have caught up with many of them and we discussed how they fared in the professional ranks.
The one lesson that has come through each conversation was how malleable they were.
They were young guys who were ambitious but at the same time naive to the point of being innocent.
In them days you literally went to France or Belgium with not a word of the local language.
You had no support of family/friends around you.
Communication to your native country would consist of a phone call or more usually by letter.
You had to clothe, feed and look after yourself.
You were put in to a situation where you would sink or swim and that would determine your fate.
You followed to the letter what the DS said because you wanted to get a contract and if that meant doing to the letter what he said, you did so.
You were not to know at that point that he didn't give a **** about you. You assumed that what he told you was for your benefit.
His focus was on the team, not you. His focus would only change if you became important to the team.
In that context, I can understand how a young lad can be malleable to the extent that if your told that taking this will ensure your survival, you'll take it.
Everybody in that Time Trial set speed records. Fignon actually rode a stronger ride with a higher power output, but lost time because he had no aero equipment or helmets, which wind-tunnel tests show cost him over three minutes in that ride alone. His ponytail without an aero helmet was proven to have cost him almost a minute (he gets a haircut, he wins). That TT was not "1 hr, 38 minutes". It was the only downhill TT and one of the shortest ever. Lemond looked like he could barely breathe after. Try not to get to carried away with your act.
There was no EPO in racing in '89.
Did you check the average speed increase in the Tours following '90? By pointing out how badly he got dropped in a year that he was in better shape than the one before after a more productive off-season, you just defeated your own argument if you are saying that Lemond was using at that time. The guys riding past him were nobodies, and he wasn't old. So how did guys with habitually lesser results and much lower endurance capacity (VO2 max) end up flying by him all the time? He wasn't ever really dominant even when he WAS winning with the exception of 3-4 stages in '86, only one of which he won the Pau-Superbagneres leg. He just pedalled and let other riders attack and fall apart.
Anemia can be relative. Guess it never occurred to you to think that all the other riders were in the same boat; that anemia for a guy who has a VO2 max of 88 is different for the typical endurance athlete with one of around 70-something. Sort of happens over the course of a three week endurance event in a brutal season.
Greg Lemond never won ANYTHING by "such a margin". He was famous for never riding to any devastating victories. He treated every thing other than the TDF and World's as "training rides", including every Giro he ever participated in. "- And for someone who rides as hard as Greg, I don’t buy it for one second he rode it as training, look at his resume pre ’89, riding hard in every event." Just to repeat; Greg never dedicated himself to winning anything but the Tour and the worlds because, according to everybody in racing who ever mentioned it publicly, there isn't enough time to recover from one minor event to the major and do it clean. Greg was famous for getting criticized because of this, and "not doing what it took to win, not being dedicated enough." That and treating rides like the Giro as training, as I stated already and which you can always read about.
@ Gibson, who said: "..A performance in a one day race the likes he had never done before or would never repeat again. Those are facts, not rumors, insinuations or gossip."
He won the Junior World's once at 17, the pro world's twice, finished second twice, and 4th another time. "Those are facts, not rumors, insinuations or gossip.." You, sir, need a fact check. That ride up that hill at Chambery he didn't do alone, and he sat on everyones' wheels all the way to the last few hundred yards towards the close. His win in '83 was much more impressive. In '89 he just took advantage of several other riders trying to tear each other up, most especially Fignon, who described Lemond afterwards as "my bete-noire".
There was no EPO in racing in '89.
Did you check the average speed increase in the Tours following '90? By pointing out how badly he got dropped in a year that he was in better shape than the one before after a more productive off-season, you just defeated your own argument if you are saying that Lemond was using at that time. The guys riding past him were nobodies, and he wasn't old. So how did guys with habitually lesser results and much lower endurance capacity (VO2 max) end up flying by him all the time? He wasn't ever really dominant even when he WAS winning with the exception of 3-4 stages in '86, only one of which he won the Pau-Superbagneres leg. He just pedalled and let other riders attack and fall apart.
Anemia can be relative. Guess it never occurred to you to think that all the other riders were in the same boat; that anemia for a guy who has a VO2 max of 88 is different for the typical endurance athlete with one of around 70-something. Sort of happens over the course of a three week endurance event in a brutal season.
Greg Lemond never won ANYTHING by "such a margin". He was famous for never riding to any devastating victories. He treated every thing other than the TDF and World's as "training rides", including every Giro he ever participated in. "- And for someone who rides as hard as Greg, I don’t buy it for one second he rode it as training, look at his resume pre ’89, riding hard in every event." Just to repeat; Greg never dedicated himself to winning anything but the Tour and the worlds because, according to everybody in racing who ever mentioned it publicly, there isn't enough time to recover from one minor event to the major and do it clean. Greg was famous for getting criticized because of this, and "not doing what it took to win, not being dedicated enough." That and treating rides like the Giro as training, as I stated already and which you can always read about.
@ Gibson, who said: "..A performance in a one day race the likes he had never done before or would never repeat again. Those are facts, not rumors, insinuations or gossip."
He won the Junior World's once at 17, the pro world's twice, finished second twice, and 4th another time. "Those are facts, not rumors, insinuations or gossip.." You, sir, need a fact check. That ride up that hill at Chambery he didn't do alone, and he sat on everyones' wheels all the way to the last few hundred yards towards the close. His win in '83 was much more impressive. In '89 he just took advantage of several other riders trying to tear each other up, most especially Fignon, who described Lemond afterwards as "my bete-noire".
Zoetemelke admitted to blood doping (as he put it - for maintenance) in the late 70s and claims he didn't do it when Raleigh Ti's team dominated the 1980 Tour and ground Hinault into the dirt. Honestly, he really didn't dope.. Really.. Merckx said he turned down a tranfusions prior to his hour record in Mexico. Marathon runners blood doped in 72 in the Olympics. But it's not like scientific research wasn't done back in the 40's by the military and by sport scientists in the 60s...oldbobcat said:
Wasn't it in '90 or '91 that the first field trials were killing riders? I can't think that it took much longer than a season or two to get it up and running, and every quote I've picked out from that sport indicates emergence in the "early '90s". So by "no epo in '89", I'm speaking of sports applications.
Merckx and many others won important events throughout the complete season, and more recently Wiggins and Froome have won big stage races from march until july Lemond actually started a trend in that era, a conservative way of approaching the season and focusing only or mainly in the Tour,LMT42 said:
There's upto 20 riders that mysteriously died in Belgium and Holland between 87/88 and 91. It definitely didn't start as late as 91 - it was well established by then. Word has it the first rider had been banned for EPO use in 88LMT42 said:
If you read Fignon's autobiography or Robert Millar's biography they both cite 1991 as the turning point in terms of EPO usage and the increase in the peloton's speed.
