Is it true Lance Armstrong was cheating?



I really hope that Lance didn't dope, perhaps he did, but what of all the stages he's won and the surprise doping tests since then? Are we really to believe he needed dope in '99 but not since? Or that he has somehow gotten away with it every time since then, he's won 18 stages and a prologue since then and has been tested all those times, and that's just the TDF. Not to mention other races and surprise visits by UCI WADA or whomever.

As to a much earlier point about his 20 kilo weight loss, whether true or not the story is that he lost the weight while he was undergoing treatment for his cancer. Much of the muscle mass he had built as a triathlete was lost and when he recovered and rebuilt his physique, it was built purely to ride a bike. No development of the swimming or running muscles he'd had before... I don't think Lance has ever reached 200 lbs... but imagine if you could re-do puberty with a singular goal of riding faster, having already been a successful pro cyclist and learned what the limits of human suffering are, not Ventoux, but really having your body ripped apart by medicine and a disease both that may or may not kill you.

Jamba, he's won one more Olympic medal than you have, bronze in the TT in Sydney. He's not related to Neil Armstrong so that's a funny 'blood' connection you've got there, at first I thought you were making a genius pun, but then I kept reading and I ended up very sad... for you. As for your real hero LeMond, sour grapes and bad whine and all of that, he dropped out of a couple of TDFs, and picked up his 8 second margin of victory by using aero bars because while they gave him an unfair advantage they weren't expressly forbidden, like low tech mechanical doping.

I'm sorry to be the voice of hope here but I don't believe that those positive samples were his any more than I believe he has somehow out foxed everyone of the tests since.
 
quenya said:
I really hope that Lance didn't dope, perhaps he did, but what of all the stages he's won and the surprise doping tests since then? Are we really to believe he needed dope in '99 but not since? Or that he has somehow gotten away with it every time since then, he's won 18 stages and a prologue since then and has been tested all those times, and that's just the TDF. Not to mention other races and surprise visits by UCI WADA or whomever.

As to a much earlier point about his 20 kilo weight loss, whether true or not the story is that he lost the weight while he was undergoing treatment for his cancer. Much of the muscle mass he had built as a triathlete was lost and when he recovered and rebuilt his physique, it was built purely to ride a bike. No development of the swimming or running muscles he'd had before... I don't think Lance has ever reached 200 lbs... but imagine if you could re-do puberty with a singular goal of riding faster, having already been a successful pro cyclist and learned what the limits of human suffering are, not Ventoux, but really having your body ripped apart by medicine and a disease both that may or may not kill you.

Jamba, he's won one more Olympic medal than you have, bronze in the TT in Sydney. He's not related to Neil Armstrong so that's a funny 'blood' connection you've got there, at first I thought you were making a genius pun, but then I kept reading and I ended up very sad... for you. As for your real hero LeMond, sour grapes and bad whine and all of that, he dropped out of a couple of TDFs, and picked up his 8 second margin of victory by using aero bars because while they gave him an unfair advantage they weren't expressly forbidden, like low tech mechanical doping.

I'm sorry to be the voice of hope here but I don't believe that those positive samples were his any more than I believe he has somehow out foxed everyone of the tests since.


Awesome reply and i have one thing to add, Lance was training with a (junior?) pro cycling team as a very young triathlete so he was already heading in that direction. he dominated the likes of World triathlete pros because of his cycling abilities then at the age of 18-19.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw1BCixQk8g]YouTube - FamilyFitnessWeekend.com - Lance Armstrong Triathlon Champion[/ame]
 
Quenya, oh that's very dear of you guarding the soon to be proven greatest cheater of all time. Not only does he cheat in his sport he also cheats on women. He runaway from one bceause she had cancer, the very foundation he was supporting. Huh? It will be proven that he cheated but he will never admit it. why would he. If it's too good to be true, forget about the chances it's exactly that. Did Marion Jones ever had a positive test. Zero. So many US athletes cameaway clean like Marion & if she had said no she didn't then she could have gotten away but was honest in the end. So forget about testing. Besides as Landis said it was not drugs, it was blood transfusion - but still cheating. We already kow that as Lance puts it he will always say no. Quenya, i'm the one who feels sorry for you. You see the fact is even if you see Lance personally doing blood transfusion in front of you, you still won't believe your eyes because Lance said he never did. This is why many Europeans want the Americans to stick to Football & stay away from cycling agendas. That's exactly why Eropeans stick with cycling & & not Football . Try to rationalize this: let's just say 5 cars had same engine size, manufacturer, parts, etc. & 200 hp on them. It turned out that 4 had an electronic gizmo that will boost their hp to 300. So the 4 got tested positive but the one that beat them all in straightaway 0 to 60 only had 200 hp because no gizmo was detected. Try to get the point & don't be a wiseguy. Be honest to yourself.

Lance Armstrong's rotten Tour de France could just be the start of his troubles. - By Bill Gifford - Slate Magazine
here's from the above site & it does makes sense:
" you have to believe that Armstrong crushed all his opponents, many of whom turned out to be heavy dopers, while staying completely clean. It would be a remarkable feat if it turns out that Armstrong resisted the temptation to cheat. As one of the Freakonomics guys pointed out the other day, cycling is not like baseball, where the benefits of steroids are hard to pinpoint; it's more like weightlifting, where drugs equal power, and power means victory. For Armstrong, victory has brought enormous wealth and power, placing him among the most influential athletes in the world.
If he did race clean, then his athletic performances are nothing short of miraculous. He was competing against athletes who engaged in highly orchestrated doping campaigns, with secret labs and rigorous schedules of transfusions and injections, most notably revealed in the Operation Puerto doping scandal in Spain. (Those methods, it bears pointing out, are similar to what Landis describes.) Few of the athletes implicated in Puerto tested positive. All of them got creamed by Armstrong.
Here's the most amazing thing about Lance Armstrong: In a difficult, fickle, inconsistent sport, he was perfect, or close to it. He dominated the Tour, in overwhelming fashion, for seven years. During that time, he suffered fewer than half a dozen visibly bad days. He looked like he was working hard, but he very rarely experienced the jour sans, the "day without."
Cycling isn't supposed to work that way. Some days you feel great, and the next you can feel like ****. That's how the human body works. And it's what should make a race like the Tour exciting. The ups and downs. With Armstrong, there were only ups. This, I believe, is what has inspired his fans and followers so much: Lance would never let them down. Lance would always win. And he was doing it [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEEpn115eQE"]for them[/ame]."
 
Greatest cheater of all time???? huh?? What about Eddie Merckx? Eddie was actually a better racer then Lance and Eddie admitted to doping, soooooooo wouldn't that make Eddie the greatest cheater of all time?

We all cry about this cheating **** but it's all for nothing because I bet you all the pro cyclists cheat, or at the very least 99%; and some of the Cat 2 and a lot of the Cat 1 racers dope. I know back in the mid 70's to mid 80's there were a very few Cat 3 racers doping because I raced in that Cat and knew a person who did! I also knew from racing in Cat 3 level knowing others in Cat 2 and 1 that doping became more common.

And why are we so concerned about cheating by doping when most other sports cheat but no one cares. No one cares that football players dope, no one cares that boxers dope, no one cares when body builders dope, there's been doping reports in the Olympics, they kind of cared when some baseball players did but not the extent like in Cycling; it's of my opinion all sports cheat including golf! It's been claimed by a close friend of Tiger that he doped so he could put some muscle mass on.

Personally I think all sports should be checking their players, and doping of any kind be banned from all sports; but until that happens then it's kind of prejudice of one sport to ban it and another not. All humans in any sport should have their talent based on natural ability not what some drug can do, if they can't compete then they don't do the sport...at least at a pro level. I understand at the amateur level checking for doping may be prohibitive and trust will have to be the rule, but in pro sports where players are getting paid then testing should be regular and frequent, and when one is found to be cheating their banned for life.
 
HE NEVER FINISHED HIS FIRST TOUR DE FRANCE. He went back in the US & gotten cured & trained in a way nobody else did. He trained harder, high altitude training to gain more blood, oxygen tent blah blah blah. Nobody else was doing that. The rest never heard of that kind of training. All the rest knew was be a couch potato & drink lots of bear. That's why when Lance came back from the most gruelling sport, obviously way more gruelling than ironman because he could not finish the race, he came out first.
What an amazing athlete. But this athlete is way greedier than Marion Jones who never flank a test but admitted cheating in the end. Lance will never do that because he wants all the money, the business & "asses he can get" and by not admitting he also gets or preserves his legacy.
The Feds now are after Lance, so don't be surprise people if this guy does something unthinkable in the next few months. Please search for somebody to chair his foundation soon.
 
Froze, I agree with you that just about all cyclists in the top level of cylcing competetion cheat. It should be mandatory to test blood instead of urine in all sports because urine test for the last 3 decades is nothing more than a joke. I'm a bit frustrated that so many people believe this winning ****. In the tour de france level, the real winner could be the last place finisher because their a chance that he was the only one who did not cheat. People with experience know that.
To me Lance is a better cheat than Eddie M. because Eddie did it all himself with no help from team mates. Lance cheats on women, his team mates who did not get their fair share of money but under their contracts to shut their mouths. So Lance is way better & a more versatile of a cheater than Eddie M.
 
Jamba said:
Froze, I agree with you that just about all cyclists in the top level of cylcing competetion cheat. It should be mandatory to test blood instead of urine in all sports because urine test for the last 3 decades is nothing more than a joke. I'm a bit frustrated that so many people believe this winning ****. In the tour de france level, the real winner could be the last place finisher because their a chance that he was the only one who did not cheat. People with experience know that.
To me Lance is a better cheat than Eddie M. because Eddie did it all himself with no help from team mates. Lance cheats on women, his team mates who did not get their fair share of money but under their contracts to shut their mouths. So Lance is way better & a more versatile of a cheater than Eddie M.


way to put the cart before the horse on so many levels. you a professional bike racer? tour rider? do you know Lance Armstrong personally or have you only come to your conclusions as that is just how you want to see things. Lance has yet to be proven a cheat and in Every Second Counts it is stated that after winning a Tour he had a party for the team ( Discovery) where he gave each and every team mate an unheard of bonus, adding an extra zero to the end of those bonus check amounts and out of his own account/earnings/winnings. now in hindsight one such as yourself could say that that is a kind of bribe, a payoff so to speak and i guess it could be looked at as such, i don't know as i wasn't there and i depend on these uci testings and now this federal investigation to uncover all truths behind doping but i see that as a man with some kind of serious class showing his utmost gratifiction and appreciation for those helping him helping them helping him.

and getting laid is a personal thing, however you do it. the more the merrier. :)
 
And how do you know that Eddie didn't cheat with women and against his team mates? Don't forget too that the money and endorsements were not as big as they are now so the temptation to take all you can get was not as big of an issue as it is today. But according to people that live near Lance in Austin say he's a great guy, so I thing...though I could be wrong because I don't know the man, is that most of this about Lance being this way or that way is to make him look bad. As far as Lance and women are concerned...who cares? HE'S SINGLE!!!
 
quenya said:
As to a much earlier point about his 20 kilo weight loss, whether true or not the story is that he lost the weight while he was undergoing treatment for his cancer. Much of the muscle mass he had built as a triathlete was lost and when he recovered and rebuilt his physique, it was built purely to ride a bike. No development of the swimming or running muscles he'd had before... I don't think Lance has ever reached 200 lbs... but imagine if you could re-do puberty with a singular goal of riding faster, having already been a successful pro cyclist and learned what the limits of human suffering are, not Ventoux, but really having your body ripped apart by medicine and a disease both that may or may not kill you.

Weight loss during cancer?

Internet website ( The TCRC Lance Armstrong Page ) is a bad thing for liar like Lance who answered:
What were the treatments you had?
One 3 week cycle of BEP here in Austin...outpatient...then I went to MD Anderson and then to Indiana University...I had the brain operation there the Thursday prior to my next chemo cycle and then started that the following Monday with 3 more cycles of VIP. The last VIP (chemos) were inpatient...cycles 3 and 4 I was sick as a dog, but I didn't lose any weight. One thing I don't understand--you're in this place where they're trying to make people better, trying to heal people--and they serve this food, it has to kill people! (laughs)
 
Okay so he didn't lose weight during those cycles at that facility. That paragraph does not entail his whole battle with cancer anymore than 'my career straddled two great cyclists so my mediocrity was never enough to win the Tour de France' sums up your cycling career.

Poo-Poo, you either have a very poor grasp of English comprehension(I hope) or used a quote out of context to imply someone else was lying, which obviously casts doubt on your own integrity (I suspect).
 
Froze,
I had no idea he was adding an extra zero to his team mates cheques. These are not exact numbers but what if you were in his team. Let's just say the whole team gets pay 2 million & Lance takes 1.5 million million. Proportionally i believe that's near the truth. And that's just not fair. So giving his mates an extra thousand is not worth mentioning. That's not a kind heart. That's more like cheating.
What if the US Postal official anouncement states that Lance gets paid 1.5 million & half million is divided to the rest of his team mate and then Lance gives half a million each to his team mates out of his pocket after the tour. Then the Feds should go after him.
It's impossible for Lance not to see Floyd taking dope. After all, these guys sleep in same motels & sometimes 2 or more or the whole team in one big room.
Greg LeMond is a great man, much greater than your greatest cheater & greedy idol Lance. It's true that Lance was my idol at once but when he whoop the king of the mountain's rear end, Pantani, going up a steep slope, that's when i said this guy went too far with his bs. I went back to the real king of TdF - Greg.

Did you guys see Lance in the New York marathon? I had no idea he was that built & muscular. Must be from drinking too much bear like Ulrich who is also overweight & muscular, before each tour. They must hang out a lot.

Froze, do you file a hundred grand income tax, but can pay cash to ten automobiles, half a million each, all in a year? Was one of your ex woman a ball breaker & broke one of your testicles because she found out you cheated?
So you got caught in the act & had to tell your woman: what do you believe my words or your own eyes. Of course she'd reply, i believe your words honey. Hmm, if that's true then you have more things in common with your woman than you think.
 
Jamba said:
Froze,
I had no idea he was adding an extra zero to his team mates cheques. These are not exact numbers but what if you were in his team. Let's just say the whole team gets pay 2 million & Lance takes 1.5 million million. Proportionally i believe that's near the truth. And that's just not fair. So giving his mates an extra thousand is not worth mentioning. That's not a kind heart. That's more like cheating.
What if the US Postal official anouncement states that Lance gets paid 1.5 million & half million is divided to the rest of his team mate and then Lance gives half a million each to his team mates out of his pocket after the tour. Then the Feds should go after him.
It's impossible for Lance not to see Floyd taking dope. After all, these guys sleep in same motels & sometimes 2 or more or the whole team in one big room.
Greg LeMond is a great man, much greater than your greatest cheater & greedy idol Lance. It's true that Lance was my idol at once but when he whoop the king of the mountain's rear end, Pantani, going up a steep slope, that's when i said this guy went too far with his bs. I went back to the real king of TdF - Greg.

Did you guys see Lance in the New York marathon? I had no idea he was that built & muscular. Must be from drinking too much bear like Ulrich who is also overweight & muscular, before each tour. They must hang out a lot.


i'm the one who broke the news via Every Second Counts on the extra zeros in the checks and we're not talking one thousand each, we're talking tens of thousands. his earnings , IF i remember correctly, for winning the Tour was something like just over $400,000, that of which he dispersed amongst his team.

and i saw him (news and links) at the new york marathon and yes, he was overweight but how else , if you are Lance, do you get back on the saddle other than to go all out and he is getting into tri's so that to him is the beginning of his training for them. we'll see how his full marathon time after a 2.4 mile swim and 112 mile tt bike will be this next year at Ironman France. I'm betting he can come close to his only marathon time, around a 3 hour run in the Ironman.
 
Jamba said:
Froze,
I had no idea he was adding an extra zero to his team mates cheques. These are not exact numbers but what if you were in his team. Let's just say the whole team gets pay 2 million & Lance takes 1.5 million million. Proportionally i believe that's near the truth. And that's just not fair. So giving his mates an extra thousand is not worth mentioning. That's not a kind heart. That's more like cheating.
What if the US Postal official anouncement states that Lance gets paid 1.5 million & half million is divided to the rest of his team mate and then Lance gives half a million each to his team mates out of his pocket after the tour. Then the Feds should go after him.
It's impossible for Lance not to see Floyd taking dope. After all, these guys sleep in same motels & sometimes 2 or more or the whole team in one big room.
Greg LeMond is a great man, much greater than your greatest cheater & greedy idol Lance. It's true that Lance was my idol at once but when he whoop the king of the mountain's rear end, Pantani, going up a steep slope, that's when i said this guy went too far with his bs. I went back to the real king of TdF - Greg.

Did you guys see Lance in the New York marathon? I had no idea he was that built & muscular. Must be from drinking too much bear like Ulrich who is also overweight & muscular, before each tour. They must hang out a lot.

Froze, do you file a hundred grand income tax, but can pay cash to ten automobiles, half a million each, all in a year? Was one of your ex woman a ball breaker & broke one of your testicles because she found out you cheated?
So you got caught in the act & had to tell your woman: what do you believe my words or your own eyes. Of course she'd reply, i believe your words honey. Hmm, if that's true then you have more things in common with your woman than you think.

Jamba what is your native language?
I only ask because I would feel bad for making fun of you if you're not a native English speaker. On the other hand you've been quite disrespectful of several people on this thread so I won't feel bad long.

That said, what is this 'bear' you speak of? Will drinking it allow me to run sub 3 hour marathons and be more muscular? I really need to find some bear, I live in California so I could get some brown, black, or maybe some Grizzly bear. There are Polar bears in the San Diego Zoo!

So you decided that Lance Armstrong wasn't a hero because he almost beat Marco Pantini, on what Mont Ventoux, dude great time trialists can sometimes climb well, was Miguel Indurain cheating because he was a big guy who could climb? Hell I climbed Tollhouse our local 'Alpe d'Huez' 6 minutes faster than my buddies and fast enough to have been in the top 5 of most of the TTs up Tollhouse but I weighed 167 at the time, does that mean I'm doping.

Look I can't say Lance hasn't doped, but your reasoning that he did is fallacious. Say something factual or at least comprehensible in the language used on this forum or STFU.
 
Jamba; first off if I was on his team and I got a cut of $500,000 I would be happy! Why you scream, because I doubt that any other support racer on any other team got anywhere near that amount!

Second, if Lance then gives another $500,000 after the race out of his own pocket, I'm even happier. All Lance is doing is taking endorsement money he earned, which neither I or the other support riders earned, and is generously giving it to us. So why would the Feds go after him assuming the money is from endorsements he earned?

I've never said Lance didn't see Floyd or know that Floyd was doping, I'm saying Lance "probably" did not dope. How could Lance be doping using the same methods of cheating that Floyd claimed Lance taught him? If Lance taught him how to cheat and Floyd gets caught, then it only stands to reason that the same methods used to catch Floyd were used to attempt to catch Lance, and would have if Lance had been doping, he didn't get caught because he wasn't doping. It also doesn't mean that I think 100% that Lance is innocent, it just means that I can't see how he covered it up when others weren't able to.

Now I'm not an expert in doping because I never doped, but I knew guys in cycling and other sports who did, but that doesn't mean I did. However I will go on a limb here with this statement, I think that in pro sports anything, including cycling, that most in sports dope. From football players wanting to be the biggest player, to baseball players wanting to hit the ball the furthest, to golf when Tiger Woods wanted to add muscle, a lot of sports stars dope. And I think doping should be banned in all sports, and if a person gets caught they should banned from that particular sport for LIFE.

Lance is not my idol, you have that mixed up with some other poster.

Are you 100% sure Greg Lemond never doped? Personally I believe he did, that's why he knows about who doped and who didn't! And why would pristine Lemond throw the 85 TDF so Badger could win? Was he involved in illegal gambling? And is it possible that Lemonds mitochondrial myopathy condition that causes mutations, or changes, in genes were perhaps somehow cause by doping? This disease he got didn't run anywhere in his family history. It's a known fact that some people get that disease due to illegal drug use!

Delgado, on the other hand, during the last week of his 1988 victory, tested positive for probenecid, a steroid masking agent. But Tour organizers let him off the hook on a technicality. The ban on probenecid was conveniently not scheduled to take effect until a week after the Tour was over; so as far the bylaws were concerned Delgado was clean. The modern doping age—in which no one inside cycling would acknowledge what everyone outside it could see—had begun. Here we have the tour organizers themselves looking the other way when it came to doping, why? because of a technicality? give me a break! The tour itself is dirty. Even in 86 Lemond and his team saw the Europeans with syringes everywhere, and the doped up Europeans where ridiculing them for their lack of work ethic!

And don't forget that it was Merckx, whom personally introduced Armstrong to the infamous trainer and doping apologist, Dr. Michele Ferrari; but this was prior to Lance's cancer.

To sum it up in a paragraph. For half a century now pro cycling has had a drug problem, and since the mid 1990s that problem has accelerated exponentially—much like the average speeds of the peloton—largely due to the widespread use of r-EPO, a synthetic hormone purchasable without a prescription in Switzerland. The conspiracy—there is no other word—to deny the vast extent of r-EPO’s abuse, together with a host of other laboratory concoctions, will continue unabated so long as cycling’s culture of silence also endures.

And that last sentence says it all.
 
quenya said:
Okay so he didn't lose weight during those cycles at that facility. That paragraph does not entail his whole battle with cancer anymore than 'my career straddled two great cyclists so my mediocrity was never enough to win the Tour de France' sums up your cycling career.

Poo-Poo, you either have a very poor grasp of English comprehension(I hope) or used a quote out of context to imply someone else was lying, which obviously casts doubt on your own integrity (I suspect).

Lance never denied the rumours of weight lose because it was good to explain his doping transformation.
If I can have difficulty to understand english, I can easily see on pictures that Lance from 93-96 and Lance after 1998 are not so much different.
During his SCA deposition, he acknoledged that his weight was the same. now if you believe that his 10kg chest muted in his leg, please prove it by pictures of big legs.
Only weight he lost was weight of a nut. :D
 
I bet you Lance lied about the cancer too! I mean think about it...he had a very aggressive form of cancer that went from the testicles to the brain and then suddenly, and I mean suddenly, he was healed. I don't believe it, there's something fishy going on about all of that. Maybe by using a cancer story he was actually trying to cover up his doping? Yeah, I bet that was it.
 
Poo-poo, how about you find a picture of lance when he was sick, not before he lost it or after he regained it.

Froze, you're kidding, right?
 
Froze said:
I bet you Lance lied about the cancer too! I mean think about it...he had a very aggressive form of cancer that went from the testicles to the brain and then suddenly, and I mean suddenly, he was healed. I don't believe it, there's something fishy going on about all of that. Maybe by using a cancer story he was actually trying to cover up his doping? Yeah, I bet that was it.


testicles, brain and lungs. they opened up his head and chest and removed the traitor nut. you people should read the book where it talks about his red and white blood cells during this time. i can't remember the exact count of how low they got but by all means he should have died, just shocking.