The Sports Illustrated case against Lance Armstrong

[JohnT]

Definitely. They all train like mad men. But doing that and orchestrating a long-term plan that silenced race organizers, drug testers, friends (excluding the few who manage to speak their mind before getting sent to Australia) competitors (excluding the few who spoke their minds and were then disgraced), girlfriends, cell phone companies, etc. would be amazing. You'd need an identical twin to pull it off!

[Josh.E]

You'd need an identical twin to pull it off!

good one. on many levels.

[Lister Farrar]

Maybe USPS and Lance have all the power the world seems to attribute to them (hence my joke about the fog), but that's one hell of a strong organization - I think we can all agree that he trains like a mad man - imagine doing that and being a dictator on the side.

JT

I can't see the same trend with other teams. Their riders have got nailed at pretty much the same rates as all teams, except Postal/Disco. (There is a different trend with Rock Racing- they've all been busted before during AND after! )

But Lance seems to escape the tests, raids, etc. that have implicated most of the other top 10 riders in the tours he won. Besides the mountain of testimony, he once mistakenly posted his blood values from one tour, then quickly took them down again, because they show the opposite of the trend you would expect in a clean rider. So we're pretty sure (well, for me, absolutely sure) he doped.

The question really is, how has he got away with it? So far anyway. I think Verbruggen is the key to that. That should really be the focus, because clean sport is doomed as long as the regulatory agencies can be bought.

[Lister Farrar]

You'd need an identical twin to pull it off!

Not really. You just need a criminally negligent or complicit UCI. Doping control was a farce in cycling for 30 years, long before Lance. (Another interesting coincidence, the same time period Verbruggen ran cycling.)

For 25 years after steroids were first discovered in sports, the penalty for steroids in the tour was 10 minutes . Yes, a premeditated drug, unlike too much caffiene or stimulants, 10 minutes! Zoetemelk once got busted, got 10 minutes, and it didn't even affect his overall place.

Read the reports from WADA on this years tour. The report notes the UCI gave the riders with the highest risk (from their passport data) of doping no tests at all.

The tour only got chaperones in 2007. That year riders were videoed riding across fields after the finish trying to dodge a guy in an orange vest with a clipboard running after them.

Armstrong just methodically drove through the open doors, and silenced people who noticed. We should be more worried about who was opening them.

[Alan]

JohnT wrote:
You'd need an identical twin to pull it off!

Guess there's still hope for Pete Lawless...

[Rolf]

I recently finished my first book on pro cycling: Tour de Lance by an editor of Bicycling magazine, Bill Strickland. Strickland followed Astana around for most of 2008/2009 and wrote about Lance's comeback. Though he attempts at times to revive his "journalist" credentials and dis Lance, he also wears his idolization on his sleeve. It comes across as kind of manipulative, but at least he appears to try to be honest. I think he's also co-written a book with Bruyneel, so there's no doubt he's (wittingly or unwittingly) part of Lance's PR machine.

Anyway, he runs through all the circumstantial evidence mentioned on our thread here, and leaves open the conclusion that things were pretty fishy during those 7 tour wins. But he also concludes emphatically that he believes Lance's comeback was clean. After running through the busts, accusations and controversy swirling around 7 of the 8 riders who shared the 21 available podium steps during his reign, he says, at page 211:

TdL 1.JPG (41.09 KiB) Viewed 11441 times

and then continues...

TdL 2.JPG (40.75 KiB) Viewed 11441 times

You can read more excerpts here. I keep thinking about the "faith" observation every time I read the next salvo on this thread.

Novitzky's efforts may well reveal something other than circumstantial evidence, and that would be nice, if only to bring some resolution and stop the "did he or didn't he?" arguments. But the real ongoing challenge is ensuring the macro focus remains on the sport and not the drugs; however much less fun it makes things for lawyer-cyclist fans.

p.s. Any recommendations for my next read? Something more balanced?

[Josh.E]

"rigorously objective conclusion"?
what does that even mean? you make a leap of faith to reach a conclusion about pretty much ANYTHING you decide is a fact.

What I've seen on cycling forums over the years is a slow but steady shift in opinion about whether he doped, to the point that probably less than 5% of people frequenting them seem to even question that fact any more. Seems like over the years, the people who felt compelled to spend the time to injest the majority of information that is out there in google-land seemed to come to a consensus. I'm basing this on nothing more than my own observations.

This is a far cry from 4-5 years ago, when the forum arguments were frequent and very heated, and the "for" and "against" were always more like 50-50%.

It's fascinating for me how much passion the Lance argument generates. For me, most of what I know of his (should that be capitalized? ) story has been a by-product of following cycling closely for the last several years. I've watched this debate happen hundreds of time on cycling forums, and I admit I've been playing devil's advocate for the "Lance is evil" side in this thread. I suppose you can go on a Van Halen forum, and watch people arguing just as passionately about Roth and Hagar.

[sylvan]

You can read more excerpts here...

Thanks, no thanks, barfed already.

p.s. Any recommendations for my next read? Something more balanced?

Kimmage, Rough Ride. Kimmage, coming this Sunday, story on Floyd Landis. Willy Voet, Breaking the Chain.

[sylvan]

I suppose you can go on a Van Halen forum, and watch people arguing just as passionately about Roth and Hagar.

Not so much. Everybody agrees that Van Hagar sucked.

[Josh.E]

As for balanced reading, since you read Strickland, you should now probably spend some time in "the clinic" on cyclingnews.com 's forum.

Click on any Lance related thread, they're all the same, and they no likey lance one bit. Lot's of pro-tour insiders, riders, trainers, etc that post on that forum.


OR

we could all go out and ride our bikes

[Brian S]

and then there is the whole issue of equal application of rules (at least under WADA and CCES) between sports:
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/story/2 ... oping.html

Methylhexanemamine is probably a far more potent stimulant than clenbuterol

http://www.cces.ca/en/advisories-34-sup ... exaneamine

8 games?????

we could all go out and ride our bikes

I agree

[Rolf]

OR

we could all go out and ride our bikes

I could, if I had a desk like this:

Thanks for the references, guys. I've been a pro cycling fan for less than a year -- so I do appreciate the guidance. The book was a thoughtful gift from my mother-in-law, who possibly picked the most prominently displayed cycling book at Chapters.

[Lister Farrar]

But he also concludes emphatically that he believes Lance's comeback was clean.

Clean? Maybe cleaner. He did suck on the stage to Morzine. But the WADA independant observer report on the pre-Tour and Tour passport related testing was still scathing.

The most glaring observation was that despite collecting 540 samples during the race, only 15% of the controls were unannounced, and some of the most suspicious riders and those with "significantly improved performances" were hardly tested at all.

Even the unannounced controls were preceded by doping control officers marching into team hotels, clearly identified as doping control officers, allowing riders and team staff to be aware of their presence.

While the UCI employed its Biological Passport programme to target riders for testing, the report states that there were a number of athletes classified as having suspicious profiles who were tested "on surprisingly few occasions".

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/wada-is ... g-controls

The actual report is even plainer:

For a rider identified as having a priority index of ten (out of ten), no blood samples were collected following the Laboratory recommendations after interpretation of blood passport data from the first week of the Tour, with only urine being collected and no blood as recommended by the Laboratory. Further, a recommendation to target test the rider for EPO took seven days to be executed.

http://www.wada-ama.org/Documents/World ... 010_EN.pdf

[sylvan]

Kimmage, Rough Ride. Kimmage, coming this Sunday, story on Floyd Landis.

And if you're wondering why I recommend Kimmage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiwfV9i-yco - man's on a mission.

[Josh.E]

If were gonna follow pro racing, here's the guys we should be putting our energy into cheering for instead of arguing about Lance:

http://bikepure.org/what-is-bike-pure/c ... proposals/

[sylvan]

Breaking the Chain: http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/features/chain.shtml

[Josh.E]

Now CBS claims Hincapie has testified to a grand jury that he and Lance did EPO together on USPS.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/852767 ... trong.html

[Lister Farrar]

LA won't be able to say he was 'a liar', 'convicted doper', or other slam. GH rode with him on all 7 tour wins and was his preferred room mate, never tested positive, and not 'selling a book'. "Like a brother" LA called him.

Sinking ship comes to mind...

[4827north]

GH's lawyer said that GH had never spoken to 60minutes and doesn't know where they are getting the information from. Witch hunt?

[Josh.E]

http://velonews.competitor.com/2011/05/ ... rue_174876

another ex team member