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Lance Armstrong and the Science of Drug Testing
Hugh Pickens writes "As the media reports that seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong says he will no longer fight doping charges from the US Anti-Doping Agency, which will strip him of his titles and ban him from competitive cycling for life, Tracee Hamilton writes that the Lance Armstrong vs. USADA fight is a tough one in which to take a side, because to believe USADA means suspending belief in the science of drug testing. 'If you take personalities out of the equation, you're left with pee in a cup and blood in a syringe,' writes Hamilton. 'Armstrong never failed a drug test. He was tested in competition, out of competition. He was tested at the Olympics, at the Tour de France, at dozens if not hundreds of other events. And he never failed a test.' Instead Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of the USADA, gathered a group of people who swear they saw Armstrong doping. 'If the results can be discarded in favor of testimony, then let's go right to the testimony phase and quit horsing around with blood and urine.' There has been no trial, no due process, but in the minds of many, that testimony outweighs the results of hundreds of drug tests. 'I don't know if Armstrong did the things he's accused of doing, and neither do you,' concludes Hamilton adding that it can't work both ways. 'Either a drug test is the standard, or it isn't.'"
are awesome
I don't think anyone has ever believed that passing a drug test mean the person was clean for sure. Why do they store samples for X number of years in order to re-test them in the future, with better technology? It's because if it's found out later that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
If we find out some other way besides a drug test that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
Except for the alleged positives from 99 tour de france, 01 tour de suiss, and the BBC reporting that the USADA is claiming Lance's blood looked to have EPO/blood transfusions in 2009 & 2010?
The sworn statements of people caught doping is of virtually no value at all. Once caught they'll swear to any thing you want them to. They are allready proven liars so why even bother with them?
For fuck's sake. You're the Washington Post. Can we not talk like we're five years old? Surely there's some other phrase -- if you think super hard -- than "pee in a cup" that a professional journalist for a big-time publication can use?
I thought this was the result of re-analysis of old samples, and that that was (?) allowed by the rules. Apparently not.
Welcome to the advanced science of the witch trial.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They claim they have found blood samples which are '"fully consistent" with doping'. Now, if you have a doping technique which doesn't produce a detectable signature, ANY blood sample will be consistent with doping (it will also be consistent with not doping). They're being cagey, and that makes me mistrustful.
(I think Armstrong's guilty, but I think USADA ought to have to prove it)
From what I've read, this has all the hallmarks of a witch hunt from a bunch of out-of-control bureaucrats. I can't blame Armstrong for giving up. He's been through the grinder.
If somebody passes the test, having taken no substances banned by the testing body, they pass. If the standards are changed, they should have no claim over previously tested samples, as those samples were from competitors who were in compliance with what the standards had been prior to the change. In my mind, he's 100% safe. Best of luck Lance.
As there is ample legal president to support it, law trumps in the face of science every time.
/The tomato is a vegetable.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Ever since Lance won race after race, instead of just considering the victories a success and moving on, the TdF has turned into an international pissing contest, where agencies keep stepping up to challenge Lance Armstrong again and again, they leave empty handed, and another agency steps up to continue it. This verges on just plain malicious persecution. In civil law, this would be vexatious litigation pure and simple.
So, I guess because these "agencies" which have as little to do with the TdF as a high school coach does with the Superbowl can wear someone down until they get tired of it and surrender.
Oh well, the TdF has lost any real relevance in bicycling because a victory by anybody who isn't French can be taken away by volleys of lawsuits and challenges which have nothing to do with hammering up the Alps.
Suppose after you have been to the bar you are pulled over and pass a breathalyser test and the cop sends you on your way. A week later one of your friends gets busted for dui and testifies that you drank too much the previous week causing the loss of your license.
love is just extroverted narcissism
"A 15-page USADA charging letter first obtained by the Washington Post made new allegations against Armstrong, contending the agency collected 2009 and 2010 blood samples from Armstrong identified as “fully consistent with blood manipulation including EPO use and/or bloodtransfusions.”"
How is that not scientific? Unless you want to dispute their methods, but that doesn't seem to be what everyone is doing.
The USADA has no jurisdiction to strip Lance of TdF titles. That is the province of the ICU, which has backed Lance in the face of the USADA issues. I'm not a fan, supporter or anything like that, but the USADA has exceeded their own governing rules by even re-testing beyond the 8-year statute of limitations. So it's questionable at best, regardless of testimony or anything like that, if Lance is stripped of anything. This is a step to force the USADA to present their case to the ICU for such an action.
Let any sponsors of any future TdF that you will not be buying any of their products and exactly why. That should have been apparent shortly after the start of the original witch hunt.
Lance has claimed consistently that he has not doped. Every drug test he's ever taken has come back clean.
Beyond that the people who are testifying against him, were caught doping and were given the deal of "If rat out Lance, you get 6 months, otherwise it's a lifetime suspension."
I agree with the last sentiment of the article. If we're just going to ignore the science and go with what people have said, why even drug test.
I say he's innocent until proven guilty in a court of clear cut science. When one of his many numerous samples finally tests positive for a banned substance, then hang him by his own petard.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Only allowed in a given time frame. If you found out too late that there was doping, it is supposed to be too late to matter.
The USADA doesn't actually have the authority to strip Lance Armstrong of anything. The UCI is the only organization which can strip his titles from him and according to them the USADA hasn't even come close to meeting the burden of proof they require. So this is all just a giant smoke and mirrors act by the USADA. Armstrong has stopped fighting them because their accusations are irrelevant to him.
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The question in criminal law is usually "beyond a reasonable doubt" in light of all the evidence. That includes drug tests AND testimony. If you have a drug test that showed a BAC of 0.0 and fifteen priests lined up to say they smelled alcohol on a driver's breath after he killed dear old Mrs. Compton, a guilty verdict is not an impossibility.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I think this is an analogy of modern society (and capitalism-blah blah)
These times, you have to be the best in order to survive. Everyone wants to do the same. In order to win, you have to cheat. But it's only cheating if you get cought.
So winners are (mostly) cheaters that don't get caught.
Wait a minute. So, let's say for a moment that he did some stuff like his own blood transfusion and such.
1) If everyone does this, and when done professionally it is not dangerous, and it's not detectable by any real means, then why is that exactly wrong?
2) If something as natural as your own blood is considered doping, why isn't eating, sleeping, and breathing considered doping exactly? You could say that this nice breakfast you had before a ride gave you unfair advantage over the guy that didn't get to eat. Or perhaps we should ban titanium forks and carbon fiber frames, too, since that's too technologically advanced for someone from USADA?
This is complete nonsense. This is just one idiot trying to make (a rather stupid) name for himself at the cost of a guy who sacrificed his life to get to the pinnacle of his beloved sport, and at the cost of everyone who admires him.
I don't care what USADA thinks about this. This guy hasn't used any crazy substances. He used available medicine and technology as well as lots and lots of training to achieve amazing things. This is a walking proof what humans can do if they actually set their mind to it.
There has been no trial, no due process,
By giving up, Lance Armstron has ensured we will never get a trial and never be presented with the facts, evidence and witness testimonies - and the myth(?) of Lance Armstrong as a clean cyclist will live on.
Why the hell did he do that ?! (To keep the myth alive?)
Most of the people at the top are cheating in some way, and all the is left is to find out how they are cheating. It's the unfortunate nature of sports.
'Either a drug test is the standard, or it isn't.'"
Passing the test is a good thing, but of course it's not the only thing. If you fail it, you've got a problem. If you pass it, you are still vulnerable to charges (and non-drug test evidence) that you have used and masked your usage of illegal drugs,
You have an athlete at the top of his game. Since he's #1, he must be using drugs. It seriously can't be because he an excellent athlete?
Champions are champions because they're all drug users? If this is the case then why bother having competition at all? Or better yet, automatically disqualify anyone who comes as the first in any event and ban them for life. #2 is the new #1.
Perhaps there is a rumor that Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of the
USADA, gathered a group of people to swear they saw Armstrong doping.
If not there should be.
Anyone that could live under the microscope that winning the Tour
that many times would have a vanishing small likelihood of doping.
Lance is in the impossible position of proving a negative.
The rules of the game... pee in a cup, submit to drug test.... sure
but not the presence of a handful of people willing to testify.
That simply proves that a handful of folk can convince themselves
of anything. We see it in conspiracy theory all the time...
example the collapse of the twin towers was:
A: a Bush conspiracy
B: the act of extra terrestrials
C: the act of terrorists fully planning to bring the towers down
D: the act of terrorists totally astounded by the success, expecting
to see an aircraft tail sticking out of the building for months not
unlike the old DC3 or what ever that crashed into the Empire State building.
E: a CIA conspiracy
F: an FBI conspiracy
G: a KGB conspiracy
H: an act of God.. striking the heathens down..
I: a fraternity prank run amok.
J: big Oil asserting their power
K: big Pharm asserting their power.
L: 19 hijackers acting in isolation with no guidance
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won
Seems like if you win at something 7 times across 7 years and later they come along and say you didn't win 7 times, shouldn't they have figured out you were cheating after game 2 or maybe even 3?? Seems like people decided they wanted to change the rules for Lance Armstrong after he won. If you can't agree who won, what good is your game?
There exists no urine test that could detect transfusions. Why take witnesses over tests? Because the tests don't detect all, and the goal is to find cheats. Why lock your doors if you have an alarm? You use both and the most strict wins. Same with tests. I don't know whether he did anything. He's smart enough to know what can and can't be detected. And he may have cheated in an undetectable manner. Or maybe he is so good because he has naturally high platelet counts (most uber athletes got there because of "natural gifts" that the rest of us don't have).
Who cares, it's all about a sport anyway. If it's such an issue, they should shut down all cycling events until they can detect whatever doping he is accused of.
Learn to love Alaska
Of all the cyclists and team mates Lance Armstrong has had on all those teams covered by the USADA's letter and "testimony" that it was rampant on each of those cycling teams surely there must dozen several, or even dozens, of other riders similarly being sanctioned?
Nope, just Armstrong.
The author/whiner of the article needs to study blood doping.
Armstrong is a cheat and he figured out exactly how to cheat without getting caught for many years.
Once he is finally stripped of his medals, the second place participants need to sue the shit out of him for PROFIT he made from all those endorsements he was doing, because his cheating prevented them from landing those endorsements.
Says Wikipedia: USADA is "is taxpayer-funded non-profit organization."
So, just like Congress spending time on baseball persecutions, this is tax money being spent on enforcing the rules in non-essential, voluntary, recreational activities -- even it's not an official government bureaucracy, funding means control, so this is essentially a gov't body.
Personally, I have no problem with any given organization (for Scrabble, for competitive waiting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op39GUkQhmc, for concrete canoes -- http://concretecanoe.org/, for particular religious beliefs http://www.lds.org/?lang=eng ...) setting whatever rules they want, so long as the people involved choose to accept it, or choose to challenge it, etc, so long as there's no coercion. If you don't like the big chili competition in Terlingua (as some didn't), you can break off and start *another* big chili competition in Terlingua (and some people did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terlingua,_Texas). If the govt's going to get involved, it should be a matter of public safety, preventing fraud, etc. .
By contrast, I'm offended that so much as a single penny of taxpayer money went toward this.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This entire process is just silly. They do not want to catch offenders. At least not offenders that are currently competing and making them money. Notice they always go after the retired athletes? The fact is that they could test, and prevent steroid use. But they don't. They give warnings before the tests, if you fail you get second chances, they only test for certain things, it's just stupid. If they wanted to catch them, they would randomly show up at their door step, take Blood, hair and urine samples, and that would be it. Because of the lax system in place, I doubt there is a single professional athlete in this country that isn't using steroids. I personally am not opposed to their use... why not have "stock" and "modified" classes in sports? But to pretend that Men lifting weights the size of cars, or running at speeds that rival most wild animals is due to improved training techniques it ridiculous.
For anyone interested in a documentary on the subject I recommend "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" it's a great movie.
No no no, hang on a second. We can't get anywhere without compromise. Society would collapse under the weight of absolutes. That's what I've been told recently. I mean, so what if there's a little collateral damage. It's for the greater good. We have to allow a little hearsay. We couldn't have convicted OBL without it. Public opinion and possibly false testimony trumps facts. We must accept that :-\
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
USADA is a pain in the ass! For the past 6 years I have been competing in sailing trying to qualify for the Paralympics. For the past 6 years, I had to tell USADA where I was going to be every day. They would randomly show up an any time of any day and if you were not where they could find you within an hour, you got a missed test. They won't try to locate you via phone. A couple missed tests equals a doping violation.
When they show up, it doesn't what you are doing, you have to stop everything and they supervise you giving your urine sample into a pair of specially designed tamper proof and labeled jars. They have also started taking blood, but I have not had that experience yet.
When an athlete you have to be paranoid about everything you eat. Many juices and energy drinks contain stimulants that are prohibited. That means no red bull, monster, some of the vitamin waters, some mixed juices, etc. If you have a cold you can't take pseudoephed. Vitamins and dietary supplements are extremely risky because something as trivial as vitamin c could be contaminated with a prohibited substance if it was made in the same factory.
Anyone that has put up with USADA/WADA for years, not missed tests, and passed all tests is clean and that should be the final word. Fuck these witnesses, USADA, WADA, and leave the man alone.
I know I'm going to modded to oblivion for this, but whatever.
...and then, magically, rush to 120% for the last 40 or 50 Kms for the sprint.
Cyclist runners are doped. Those who win the events are doped more.
And if you've ever seen even a single race stage you know that's the truth.
Run for *hours* at ludicrous speeds that would otherwise grant you a pile of speeding tickets if in a car and out of a competition, during the hottest hours of summer days, probably climbing up some hills...
What? Are you kidding me?
Yeah, yeah, training and whatnot. I've already heard that.
I'll never believe that BS.
That's doping at work, and that's what I do believe.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
The problem with drugging in sport is that the teams with the most money hire the pharmacists and doctors (like Fuentes and Ferrari) who develop cutting edge drug regimes which are beyond the current limits of drug testing. Drug testing inevitably develops behind the science of doping - testing for some new substance can only be initiated once it becomes known that that substance is being used for doping, and inevitably there is a lag time during which a reliable and safe test is developed.
Consequently the drug tests cannot be the 'gold standard' for evaluating whether or not someone has doped. Witness testimony is what we rely on in far more serious cases, like murder for example, and it seems perfectly reasonable to assert that if enough credible people are prepared to testify on oath that they personally witnessed Armstrong doping, then he was doping, whatever the drug tests say.
There's circumstantial evidence, too. One thing which had me convinced Armstrong was doping back as early as 2004 were his rages - he was aggressive and prone to anger far outside the normal range of human behaviour. But since then we've seen so many of his team mates and ex-team mates implicated - Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis and several others have been convicted, while George Hincapie agreed to give evidence against Armstrong in return for not being prosecuted. It simply isn't credible that everyone on the team was doping except the strongest, fastest man in the team.
There's some good news in all this. This years leading riders were about 4% down on power output - Lance Armstrong in 2005 was outputting 6.8 watts per kilogram, whereas Bradley Wiggins, this year's winner, was capable of just 6.57. Of course, the fact that power is down - across the whole peloton, not just the leaders - doesn't prove that today's riders are not doping, but clearly something has changed, and dope is one thing that may have changed.
Of course you can argue, and some people have, that if you can't reliably test for dope then the sensible thing to do is to allow all athletes to take whatever drugs they want, because if they're all doping then that's fair. But many of these drugs are dangerous - there were a rash of deaths from heart attacks of very young cyclists in Holland and Belgium in the early 2000s associated with apparent use of EPO, for example - and many athletes are young and under great pressure to succeed. We do have to clean up cycling (and other sports, too, of course, but I'm no expert on other sports) or else we will see a lot more kids with great potential killed to no purpose. I believe that we are succeeding.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
On television tonight, they showed a picture about the 2000 Tour de France (IIRC) with the first ten cyclists.
All of them (if we count Armstong) had been tested positive to one thing or another, so the title would go to the eleventh guy. He's not positive because he probably hasn't been tested as much.
Add to that that if I were to take the same drugs they did, I'd still not be able to compete with them (without doping) by a huge margin.
So regardless of whether he took drugs or not, he still arguably was the best at that time.
begin quote from page 11: ... Representatives of USADA have interviewed Dr. Martial Saugy, Director of the Lausanne Anti-Doping Laboratory which analyzed the urine samples from the 2001 Tour of Switzerland.
Dr. Saugy stated that Lance urine sample results from the 2001 Tour of Switzerland were indicative of EPO use.
Multiple Witnesses have also told USADA that Lance told them he had tested positive in 2001 and that the test result had been covered up.
Lance doping is further evidenced by the data from blood collections obtained by the UCI from Lance in 2009 and 2010. This data is fully consistent with blood manipulation including EPO use and/or blood transfusions. ...
end quote
The Lance rats that we know of were all caught by failing drug tests.
They then claimed they saw Lance cheat (which benefits them by selling their stories, getting lighter sentences) or even that he told them how to do it and encouraged them.
Now the confusing part is if they were so intimate with details of Lances cheating, how come he was so much better at it, that despite being tested more than any of them, he was never caught by a drug test like they were.
Either way this is sad story. Either Lance cheated, or a bunch of known cheaters were pulled together by a power tripping bureaucrat on a witch hunt.
Sucks either way.
What next, are they having a similar witch hunt for Indurain and his 5 wins. Similar allegations swirled around him.
In the end, it's you and your pillow at night. Nobody can be as important as your conscience and whatever you happen to believe in.
And you know what? This should be about playing and having fun. Isn't it the way this bike thing started?
Isn't it the way we start in life?
Have a good life, from someone who's not from the US and neither France...
PS) DISCLAIMER: Everything my personal opinion, unrelated to anyone.
USADA, FUCK YEAH! Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah. Hmm... corporate justice rules again.
The statute of limitations on sport should be the season. If you cannot determine by the end of the season who is the legitimate champion of the season, then don't give an award. If you cannot determine, by the end of a game, if all the rules of the game were followed, then declare the competition null and void. You cannot have a referee that has infinite time to make a judgment, this is the very opposite of what qualifies a competent judge.
I am convinced that Armstrong is being unfairly persecuted, and furthermore that every sport that has doping rules should ensure that they are immediately enforceable. If Armstrong or anyone else outsmarted the USADA, then too bad. My bias is that this agency is doing to its sport what boxing governing bodies did to theirs which is to draw into profound relief its inability to hold the respect and admiration of its chartered participants. Any certification that is not consistently and immediately verifiable loses its credibility.
My guess is that there is some squirrelly language in the contract that allows what is essentially no statute of limitations on allegations and does other stuff that wouldn't stand in a court of law.
fault-tolerant
See http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/08/lance-armstrong-doping-allegations
> Seven years ago, Don Catlin, then head of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory and the man who, for all practical purposes, created sports drug testing in the United States, told me “you can get away with stuff with everybody looking right at you.”
"If the results of professional regulating bodies and the years of inquiries are going to be discarded, then why have them in the first place?"
See, works like that too.
Listen: I know you (/the OP) love a nice feel-good hero story, and Armstrong was a made-for-TV one. But just a few things:
1) Armstrong gave up his rights to challenge the accusations of the USADA and lost all his legal challenges to their jurisdiction over the matter: he is guilty, end of story.
It does not matter whether you are "tired" of fighting accusations or whatever other excuses he could find: if you waive your right to present your case and challenge the accusations, you are implicitly admitting guilt. The USADA is not some Soviets-era corrupt body out to get him (as backed by a couple court decisions against Armstrong claims).
2) For a laugh, have a look at the many articles (have only seen some in French and German, but I'm sure English versions will pop up) that go over what the "revised" winners would be for all the Tour de France titles he might be stripped of: if you eliminate all the other riders who have since been convicted of doping, the actual winner is on average fourth or fifth in the ranking at the time (in one case, all up to the *9th* have been eliminated since).
While the fact that doping is widespread is nothing new, and does not prove in itself that Armstrong did it, think about it for a second: this means that he consistently beat between 3 and 7 people who *were* using doping products. Yea... I guess he was that good.
3) As shown above, doping is rarely detected during the races, but sometimes takes years to come up: sometimes by applying newer scientific methods to older samples, most often by uncovering doping networks (crooked doctors providing the products etc) and identifying the people tied to them. Many of the techniques Armstrong is accused of using (such as transfusions) are extremely difficult to detect, if at all. In such cases, it is perfectly valid to use testimonies.
4) Within the case built by the USADA against him, is a mention of his close relationship with the UCI (as one of their most generous donator) and personal friendship with its president. All things concurring to explain why he may have benefitted from some warnings ahead of tests, as well as unusual leniency when he failed to submit to testing.
5) Despite all that, there *were* two cases where Armstrong did test positive for doping substances. While he successfully (and not very convincingly) fought the first instance (1999), the second one (2005) is still very much outstanding and has not been disproven nor confirmed (due to the "unfortunate" lack of a duplicate sample).
So, yea, Science(tm)
This is already the standard for criminal law in many cases. It's common for police to catch a criminal and do a deal in exchange for him selling out co-conspirators. That seems to be exactly what's happened with Lance Armstrong. All the witnesses have been accused of doping themselves or have other quasi legal entanglements that they are getting help with in exchange for their testimony. It's true that contradictory physical evidence will override witness testimony, how many of us can really physically prove we haven't committed a crime? All these people have to say is that Lance cheated on the blood/urine tests, and that's exactly what they've said.
First, most cyclists ride in several races during the year. By the time they get to the Tour de France, they've already ridden in the Giro and have had only a few weeks to rest ahead of the Tour. And, they may have ridden in some events in between.
Lance rides the Tour de France. That's it. So he's fresh in a way the rest of the field isn't, and probably financially can't afford to be.
Second, Lance Armstrong is a notorious trainer. You don't have to look far to find stories of how Lance pushed his teammates to train when they thought they didn't have to, or to find Lance training when others were taking time off for little things like Christmas morning.
Third, and maybe most importantly, Lance Armstrong is an arrogant asshole. No, really. He taunts other riders to try to keep up - and they can't. He rubs in every victory, calls out every weakness, and talks trash mercilessly. On top of all that, he's rich from endorsements and gets to be the face of Cycling, for the huge achievement of riding in just one damn race per year.
There are plenty of guys who'd stick it to Lance just because they can.
To put this all in Slashdot terms, let's say you were pretty good at Starcraft. You can beat everyone in your school without too much trouble.
Then, one day, you get to play Starcraft against a professional from Korea. Of course, he rips you up like kleenex and just laughs at you. So you find a hack to start out with extra resources and units so you can teach him a lesson. The Korean still dominates you. So, since you're cheating and you know you're good, he's got to be hacking. He just has to be. Right?
So you get someone to watch the computer screen over his shoulder. You monitor network traffic. You upgrade your computer for an extra few FPS. But nothing says he's doing anything fishy. Still, you stick by calling him a hacker - there's just no way he could beat you so easily without cheating too, right?
Right?
Unless you are taking more time than alloted to eat your lunch WTF does "eating to much lunch" mean???
An easy way to get around that it to state that
1 the bag has more than one meals food in it
2 you need to have a baseline amount of food in you to prevent you from SNAPPING AND THEN CAUSING MASSIVE PROPERTY DAMAGE (like defenestrating managers)
this really works if you are physically larger than your manager
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Can we strip Travis Tygart of his title and ban him from employment, until he proves his claims have a solid basis? I mean if we tax payers are supporting him, then uhm that should be a real possibility.
The reason you have evidence is because people say anything.
People were burned at the stack as witches based on testimony.
If there's no evidence, you can't convict, no matter what people say, because if you do, then you can convict anyone *on what people say* and what people say sure isn't 100% justice and truth.
That reminds me of the time they kicked me out of church for political reasons. I knew that if I was given a fair hearing I'd be fine, but I also knew I would never get one.
"armstrong never failed a drug test" should read "armstrong never failed a drug test because drug test are always late compared to drug development". Armstrong 1999's blood was tested positive for EPO in 2005 , 1 year after the test for it was developped and blood in the past was started to get tested (2004 was the year it started). Anybody repeating the mantra "armstrong never failed a drug test" don't really understand that simple fact and the reality of high tech doping.
You need to be clear on what he was charged with. The agency is saying he got transfusions of oxygen-doped blood before races. Since oxygen is not a "drug" there isn't a specific test that can say whether it's present in abnormally high levels. The ADA will tell you this frankly. But if that's what Armstrong did, it was real genius. Oxygen-enriched blood will supercharge any athlete. And oxygen is not a foreign substance.
1) Assume Lance cheated
- How wasn't he caught in the act for so long?
- How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?
- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?
- How was he not caught cheating in 2009 when he placed 3rd after not racing for 2 years? Wouldn't he be expected to be a total doper taking a standing that high after being retired for so long?
- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?
- Lance packed his team with certifiably world-class climbers to set pace for him and run strategy on the large parts of big climbs. Other squads did not. Can't this help explain it?
2) Assume lance did not cheat
- Why are so many people out to discredit him? How big of an a-hole must Lance be to have this many people willing to take him down by lying?
- Why not fight these charges to the last?
- Why wasn't Lance more open in his Tours? The technology existed during his run to simply put Lance on camera 24-hours-a-day for the world to see he wasn't cheating. Why not do this, especially in 2009 when he took 3rd?
- How was Lance so good at simply laying the hammer down at the ends of big climbing stages? Is he just a freak of nature? Were his teammates really capable of simply relieving all the stress of keeping in the pack long enough for him to go balls out at the end?
- Why were later tests on his samples so dodgy? What was the motivation in even testing them?
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Perhaps Armstrong never did fail a 'drug test' but that does not address what he was doing. The USADA says he was doing blood doping which is basically injecting your own red blood cells back into your body to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood. If you have skilled medical professionals helping you with this, as Armstrong allegedly did, it can be undetectable. The USADA also says Armstrong was using the drug EPO but avoided its detection by using smaller amounts administered intravenously, rather than ingested, so that it did not appear in urine samples. The USADA also says that Armstrong was using testosterone injections. Since testosterone is a naturally-occurring hormone, it is expected to be present in the body. The bottom line is that if you have a sleazy medical team that knows how to beat the tests helping you beat those tests, then to say 'I never failed a test' is...disingenous. Armstrong was busted cold because all of those people helping him were forced to turn against him...and he knew it. That's why he stopped fighting the USADA. If he had not, there would have been hearings and they would have been public and the testimony would have destroyed whatever tiny shred of credibility and respect that Armstrong has remaining to him. Finally, Armstrong DID fail a drug test. According to the USADA website: "Additionally, scientific data showed Mr. Armstrong’s use of blood manipulation including EPO or blood transfusions during Mr. Armstrong’s comeback to cycling in the 2009 Tour de France." By 2009, they had finally figured out what Armstrong was doing and what to test for and they had the deadwood on Armstrong. Armstrong was busted...cold.
No, this is supposedly a reanalysis of data from old samples. An actual laboratory reanalysis has not been performed. And they say the results are "consistent" with EPO use or transfusions (they haven't released the data, so we just have to take their word for it) which is something expert witnesses say of forensic evidence which has not been scientifically vetted in order to avoid liability.
All the people who said they participated and the Doctors especially, have they been given LIFETIME BANS?
Have the Doctors had their AMA cards and licenses revoked? They should.
OR have they been given a slap on the wrist because they came forward and told the "Truth"?
If they have all been given max punishment, then they might be credible. When they get easy treatment for throwing someone under the bus, they lose their moral high ground.
Some people claim that all the top cyclists were doping, and if Lance won the Tour de France at all, he must have been doping as well.
That's possible, but if anyone could have won the tour without cheating, it was Lance Armstrong. He had all the legal advantages he could have: his team always had a bunch of the world's top cyclists, riding for him; his team always had enough money that they could just ride whatever training rides they thought would best help Lance win (many teams have to win races during the season to get the prize money; Lance's team had plenty of money and didn't need to do that). Manufacturers gave him their best new technology to use. Heck, he would go ride the toughest mountain climbs multiple times, trying different angles through the turns and seeing what numbers he got on his power meter. In short, he had every legal edge.
On the other hand, the Tour de France is possibly the toughest athletic competition in the world, without hyperbole. How many competitions take 21 days to complete, with the athletes working hard for hours and only two rest days? And all that in the July heat in France? My bike mechanic says that he believes all the top riders are cheating, just because with that level of effort, the cheating would give an edge that non-cheaters couldn't touch.
Also, I'm deeply suspicious of the anti-cheating lab work. When Floyd Landis was accused of doping with synthetic testosterone, all sorts of details came out: the lab knew which sample was his, the lab engaged in shoddy lab work and flawed chain-of-custody procedures, and (worst of all, in my opinion) the same lab tested both the "A" and "B" samples. (Never mind whether a French lab is "out to get" an American athlete... it would be highly embarrassing if the "B" result was negative after all the hoopla over the "A" result. I would have much rather seen that B sample sent to a different lab in Switzerland or something.)
I'm also troubled by the question of fairness. There is an old saying, "military justice bears the same relationship to justice that military music bears to music." The anti-doping system is stacked against the athlete; once an athlete is accused, bad things happen to the athlete, and there is no hope. Even in the case of Floyd Landis, where a bunch of people worked to help him and submitted all sorts of testimony that (IMHO) invalidated all the evidence against him, he was still found guilty and stripped of his Tour win. (Later he confessed, so maybe he was guilty after all... but I still am not convinced that the evidence used against him should have been used.)
The USADA proceedings are not legal proceedings in a courtroom environment, and the protections that the accused receive in a courtroom are not there. The head of USADA gets to act as prosecutor, judge, and gets to hand-pick the jury: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/sports/other-sports/usada-s-travis-tygart-plays-prosecutor-jury-and-judge-lance-armstrong-case
Now for one moment assume that Lance Armstrong is completely innocent. What possible recourse does he have within the USADA system? How can you prove a negative? He was the most-tested man in all of sports and he never failed a test... USADA doesn't care. The witnesses against him have something to gain from denouncing him... USADA doesn't care. How can he prove that he wasn't doping 17 years ago? He doesn't have a witness who was with him 24/7 and can say he never doped. He doesn't have lab results of his own, and if he did he wouldn't be allowed to present them. So if he participates, all he can do is stand there and say "it's not true".
Some people think that Lance Armstrong is implicitly admitting guilt by not contesting this ruling. But his public statement explicitly says he n
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Let these guys pump themselves full of whatever crazy drugs they want. How is it really that different than going on an extreme diet, like trying to survive off of ketosis alone, or doing more pushups than people normally do. It's all just chemicals interacting with other chemicals.
Football, especially, would be really fun to watch if you knew everyone there was on a meth high or something, with no regard to safety. Let them earn their million dollar contracts, I say.
It is a fact that people do lie. So in fact, if nothing else. The testimonies in question are dubious if not just plain out lie if they are not supported by any real data. In this case they do not seems to be here.
It is my opinion that Travis Tygart needs to be investigated for corruption, illegal activity as a CEO of USADA. He also should be suspended at this moment.
This has also happened before. Strangely enough. The circumstances are similar as they where in the case of Lance Armstrong. Wiki has an small article on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Landis
If you choose to believe that your personal vicarious hero is the single, solitary exception that that universal rule, go to it, but don't expect anyone rational or even remotely disinterested to share your deluded childish fantasies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You can absolutely detect blood transfusions. You can notice that the blood cells are different ages by more than the normal amount, and you can see that the density of them (per unit of blood) is way out of whack. If you inject soon enough that that doesn't work, you haven't done yourself any good anyway since you don't produce many new blood cells.
AFAIK you can't ingest EPO, it has to be injected. And either way, it'd come out the kidneys. There are tests for recombinant (non-natural) EPO, and he's passed them.
He's down a testicle, and he has approval for testosterone injections to bring him back to baseline.
This seems like a big hatchet-job against him. I don't care much one way or the other for him, but if they're going to negate years of wins and accomplishment because of the word of some people who've been bribed to testify, with reduced-length bans, then drug testing is a waste of time. Which is the point of the article.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
"The most unreliable witness is an eyewitness."
The sound was off on the TV I watched though.
If it happened, this is either 'delayed justice' or a GREAT injustice against Lance Armstrong.
CAPTCHA: traffics (Hmmmm...)
Spoken like a born polarizer. The use of "passing a test" is also bogus, if you bother to think. A scientific test can only clear you of cheating the test is designed to detect. Metal detectors don't prove you're not carrying a gun, they just prove you're not carrying a gun made of metal. I'm sure it's not easy to procure a gun made of anything else, but if the stakes are high enough the entrepreneurial spirit will find a way.
For that matter, even if witnesses say Lance lurking in dark bathrooms and sticking his buttocks with needles, that doesn't prove he's injecting a performance enhancing drug. Many assumptions.
It's also an assumption that if he cheated to win his third tour, he cheated to win his first and second. Maybe he could win at his best without cheated, and only resorted to cheating to make up the difference when he wasn't quite at his best. Or perhaps only when one of his competitors was better than best.
When we discover that sleeping around is "performance enhancing" are we going to strip Tiger of all his tour wins?
There's no way around it: a culture of adulation around the "win at all cost" mentality involves a large amount of sweeping history under the carpet. Absolute incentive corrupts absolutely.
The real solution is less hero worship in the first place.
People lie. drug tests don't lie they can be fooled but then that would make the test useless and its only useful on honest people. That means DNA testing is totally useless too if someone lies they are an eyewitness. The french hate Lance schooled there best racers and got someone to lie since he keeps passing tests.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I can think of lots of reasons for every different senario, both legal and illegal.
* The people that saw him "doping" may not have seen what they thought they were seeing. Without the substances tested, there is no way to know if it was doping or not. If they saw it, then they probably did it too and also passed all those tests. Why don't they explain how to the committee?
* Lance himself may not have known what was in the "dope." His trainers may have been using psychological methods with placeboes to help him believe he could excel. Nothing illegal about that.
* Lance always passed every drug test. That leaves three options.
** The substances used were not banned.
** The tests - all of them - were flawed.
** Lance and his trainers knew exactly how, when and what would be tested and always avoided anything in his system during all those times without fail. Doesn't that require 30+ days of non-doping to clear the system and hair?
So I'm inclined to think that
a) the tests were as correct as possible and that
b) Lance and his team were honest.
He is just a freak of nature, just like Michael Phelps and other best-in-the-world athletes. He also had a team - bicycle racing is a team sport like football is a team sport. He didn't to all this on his own.
For all those (and that's including Lance Armstrong) who continue to use the "never tested positive" argument as if that would prove anything, I present you the case of Austrian rider-turned-whistleblower Bernhard Kohl, who today admits to having been continuously doping throughout his entire professional career, having been verifiably tested over 200 times, coming up positive only one single time (after which he ended his career). There are more ways to get around a positive test or to pass a test than you want to know. And there are more ways of doping that cannot be detected at all than you want to know.
A positive test proves doping. A negative test DOES NOT disprove doping. Never has, never can, never will.
There's a bit of sleight of hand going on here. The doping he is accused of couldn't and wouldn't show up on a single test. It is not relevant to the debate. (Not to mention that it would be quite stupid to take drugs that you know they are going to show up on a test.) He is accused of injecting himself with testosterone and his own red blood cells. This is very difficult to detect with a spot test because these are naturally occurring chemicals. However, you can detect this sort of blood doping by looking at red blood cell counts over time by comparing levels from test to test. This is exactly what the anti-doping agency says they have done and they say it shows scientifically that the numbers change in ways that can't be explained by natural variation (the evidence isn't yet public, so that's hard to verify).
(And as an aside, he actually did fail a drug test once, but he provided a prescription for steroids apparently connected to his cancer treatment so it was not held against him)
Many of the athletes put a lot of thought and to the best of their abilities try to choose what "supplements" legal or illegal to put in their bodies in order to optimize performance. Many of them as well only do so if they are relatively certain that it won't harm them. Of course some of them don't care either way.
In essence they are voluntarily submitting themselves to a poorly controlled medical research experiment. Yet because we stigmatize any form of chemical optimization of human performance, due ultimately to primitive superstitious belief systems which fundamentally deny the essential reality of what we are: CHEMICAL REACTIONS -- we will throw away all of the potentially valuable scientific insights and data which these athletes have voluntarily generated.
So I would like to hear someone make a cogent argument about why it is morally wrong for beings which are nothing but chemical reactions to engage in the process of tinkering with the chemical reactions which make them go?
Tests are only as good as the people who perform and interpret them. None of us have ever seen the tests themselves; we've only heard about it from third parties.
I am not sure that you are attributing things correctly to the USADA and their scientific knowledge. If you think that the USADA truly believed that you could "ingest EPO" and that would make it appear in samples whereas small intravenous doses would not, you know absolutely nothing about what you are speaking of. EPO is a protein - any protein you "ingest" will be digested by your stomach and will neve appear in any urine test as it will only remain in its most simple form - amino acids. If the USADA actually thought that you could ingest EPO and they could catch you then they are even dumber scientists than they already come off as. I am still waiting for someone to truly show me that they have caught Lance cheating, not that they have decided to modify the rules that say you are cheating after the fact. Nor have I seen how the USADA is accounting for the fact that at least once in the timeline that they say that Lance was using EPO that the manufacturers of EPO changed their formulation of EPO which changed the way that EPO would appear on testing because the ratios of the various isoforms changed and caused some severe problems. Look up "Pure Red Cell Aplasia" and look for its links to EPO and the formulation change (or even the ridiculously high incidence of PRCA in Asia as a result of many new types of EPO that have flooded the market as biosimilars). Still waiting for some truly scientific proof.
The 'He never failed a drug test' statement he, and his defenders keep spiting out it just a straw-man argument.
There are many allegations that he did fail several tests that were covered up, with the respective money trail as proof. But that accusation is weak, so they focus there.
Anyone who understands doping in cycling knows these days everyone who's careful can ace those tests every time and still be doping. There are several ways of doing this, but the most used is through blood transfusions.
One major piece of evidence in this case is that several experts analyzed his blood and on several samples they found, among other residual traces of other illegal substances, EPO, which only gets into your blood one way, by doping. Other substances they can get away with saying 'Hey my cough medicine had some of that shit and was really sick the other day!', EPO you get on your blood by putting it there intentionally. His excuse is that the levels aren't enough for a technical positive, and he is right, but the level variations across several samples detected and analyzed by experts, clearly indicate manipulation of EPO levels in his blood stream.
That allied with several sworn testimonies of witnesses who say they saw him dope, his refusal to let experts take a look at the urine and blood samples of the first couple of Tour the France he won, having a couch that also facilitated the doping of other athletes that were caught, and many other less solid arguments, all tell the clear tale of someone who's carefully walking the line of what technically constitutes cheating. When he is caught he pays up, when suspicion arises, he invokes technicalities, or accuses others of lying, the drug lab testers included who had no way of knowing whose urine or blood they were testing.
The USADA sees this and so do the majority of apparently unbiased experts at their disposal. He's a cheater and was banned as he should. I pity the true athletes that this asshole raced against that just saw all their efforts rendered pointless through all this years. He'll be lucky if he's not sued by his sponsors and colleges as well, which he most definitely deserves.
Check out wikipedia, there is a lot of useful information there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Amstrong#Allegations_of_doping
Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
Actually that is the one part that I cannot understand. His name is going to be dragged through the mud and, assuming he is innocent, his is going to be wrongfully accused and convicted in the court of public opinion. I can understand that he feels the USADA is being unjust and not giving him a fair "trial" but, if that is the case, sue them for defamation in court. Then he and they will both have to compete by the legal standard and not by their own made-up rules and those testifying will be doing so under threat of perjury not whatever penalty the USADA can deal out.
Its the same standard puritans have used for 400 years. Lance is a witch! We saw him do magic nd cast evil spells that made him fly on that abroomstick he calls a bicycle. Drug tests never found any results because he bewitched the testers with frog blood and bat urine.
People can lie, (hundreds of) tests cannot. It's really that simple.
I agree that it is better to use testing data over testimonies, however there is evidence to suggest that passing drugs tests isn't a guarantor of not being doped. Consider: -His competitors and team mates admitted to doping, without testing positive -He had doctors on his team that were convicted of being heavily involved in doping http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/18788834 Having doctors on your side would help enormously in the planning of getting a clean test -Athletes in other sports, eg the BALCO scandal, tested clean in many races before being caught - I agree the tests in the 90s were a joke, and (I imagine - see the quote) only testing out of competition became the norm during Armstrong's winning streak: "The rise to prominence of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in the late 1990s was a significant stimulus to the development of established and transparent out-of-competition testing practices" - I couldn't find exactly when out-of-competition testing became the norm in cycling http://www.faqs.org/sports-science/Mo-Pl/Out-of-Competition-Testing.html#b What the East Germans used to do, before going to international competition, was to test every athlete. Those that tested positive were withdrawn with an "injury". So even though he has tested clean - he had doctors that helped with doping, and teammates who were either convicted / admitted to doping. In this case the science is unfortunately all that its cracked up to be, hence the added weight to testimonial evidence I have a friend who is a big cycling geek, and a great source of info is this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Breaking-The-Chain-Drugs-Cycling/dp/0224061178
I often take a rather harsh stance on people's responsibility. In this case, having made so much money by
being a world famous athlete, Armstrong should contribute to sport and rationality by fighting to the
bitter end. If the anti-doping industry has truly descended into relying on personal testimony (always iffy,
but worse in this case), ignoring science, every effort should be made to expose it. Unless, of course,
he's guilty.
This whole thing stinks of an attitude that has been building for years, which is that anyone who is overly successful either cheated or isn't responsible for the success themselves. People who are overly successful have to be torn down somehow so others aren't made to feel like losers.
It starts in the poor performing schools where individuals that do try to succeed are ridiculed and often physically attacked by their "peers".
Then we have a President who openly states that people who are successful are not so through the sweat of their own brow, but due to the collective.
Look at the Chinese Olympic swimmer who was as much accused of cheating when she shattered world records.
It's all a sickness that is taking over where the losers and takers demonize the winners and makers. Instead of trying to emulate their success, they simply pronounce it illegitimate and try to take the success.
And the fact is that the Losers and Takers do or soon will outnumber the winners and makers.
Blood doping does not have to mean taking drugs, and therefore the lack of a failed drug test does not clear a person of doping. As Travis Tygart has stated in several interviews, including one I just heard on NPR this afternoon, the allegations against Armstrong are that the changes in blood counts from test to test indicate that levels of natural elements, such as red blood cells, changed in unnatural ways. These swings in red blood cell counts were statistically significant, had never been observed to occur naturally, and are consistent with known blood doping techniques. Because some of these techniques have been better understood recently, they were not likely to have been caught at the time Armstrong was winning championships. It's a pretty straightforward argument, and not one that is dismissed by talking about drug testing science.
Is Travis Tygart a Gay spurned want-a-be sexual lover of Lance Armstrong?
Sure looks that way.
For Travis Tygart, certified testing is not good enough, innuendo is!
Ah Ha. That is the 'call sign' of the USADA!
Case closed.
Er. Armstrong will win in a Court of Law.
Just another witch hunt by those who are jealous of someone else's capabilities... Just another example of the US's decent into decadence when science is discarded in favor of idiots with an agenda...
Sounds like Gates & Jobs.
As I had said earlier..... this kind of arbitrariness and disrespect for rule of law is becoming more prevalent in the US of A. To non-Americans, the lure of America was the Rule of Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law ....."Despite wide use by politicians, judges and academics, the rule of law has been described as "an exceedingly elusive notion"[4] giving rise to a "rampant divergence of understandings ... everyone is for it but have contrasting convictions about what it is"
Looks like he doesn't have the balls to keep fighting. :P
If you want to understand why Armstrong never failed a drug test and his results can now be discarded in favor of testimony, read this : USADA charges Lance Armstrong: Pieces worth reading.
Don't miss all the linked pieces, the letter sent by USADA to the ringleaders, the ESPN article by Bonnie D. Ford, best of all the Prof. Michael Ashenden interview and so on. These are must reads.
We have to stop being delusional and gullible. Sad but true Armstrong will now join the ranks of other infamous cheats like Marion Jones, Ben Johnson or all those East German athletes. By quitting now he will avoid just one thing, worse than cheating: perjury!
I don't know if Armstrong did the things he's accused of doing, and neither do you,' concludes Hamilton adding that it can't work both ways. 'Either a drug test is the standard, or it isn't.
Spoken like someone who has no idea how the science works. The drug test IS a standard but what it tests for is very specific. If the athlete does something outside the parameters of what the test can detect, it isn't going to detect anything. The drug tests are a necessary step but by themselves they cannot eliminate doping because they cannot test for every method of doping and new ones are developed constantly. It is pretty much the worst kept secret in the world that you can dope and still test clean. Marion Jones never tested positive but she is a self admitted doper. The athletes who dope have doctors too and they are typically at least one step ahead of the dope tests. The ones that get caught are the ones that are either stupid or clumsy. (Or like Ricardo Ricco both stupid and clumsy) The athletes either use drugs that aren't being tested for or they administer them in such a way that the tests cannot detect their use.
Evidence comes in many forms besides a drug test. Cyclists and their teams have been caught with doping paraphernalia (drugs and stuff to administer them) by the police multiple times in raids and checkpoints. Read the book by Willy Voet about the the Festina doping scandal at the 1998 Tour, one year before Lance started his run of wins. If Lance doped, he didn't do it by himself. Someone had to buy the drugs, deliver them, administer them, store them, and somehow the athlete has to pay for them. If a transaction can be tied to Lance for purchasing EPO, that is clear evidence of guilt since there is precisely zero reason for such a transaction to exist unless he was either doping or assisting others in doping. E
Also let's apply a little reason. Literally the majority of athletes that have stood on the podium at the Tour with Lance Armstrong, all very talented cyclists themselves, have been busted or admitted to doping in the years since. It is also well known that doping was rife throughout the during that time. Furthermore Lance had numerous teammates who were busted for doping some of whom were talented enough to win Grand Tours like the Giro d'Italia themselves. So we are to believe that Lance was somehow so much better that he could compete clean against all these athletes who were doping? That is absurd on the face of it. There may not be a smoking gun in the form of a failed drug test, but the other evidence pointing to his guilt is extremely substantial.
First, most cyclists ride in several races during the year. By the time they get to the Tour de France, they've already ridden in the Giro and have had only a few weeks to rest ahead of the Tour. And, they may have ridden in some events in between.Lance rides the Tour de France. That's it. So he's fresh in a way the rest of the field isn't, and probably financially can't afford to be.
Plenty of riders do not ride the Giro and do ride the Tour. Lance is not unusual in riding only one or the other grand tours. In fact only a minority of riders ride both the Tour and Giro and most of the ones that do aren't racing to win but merely to train. Racing is an extremely effective form of training and most of the peleton races to get into shape.
Second, Lance Armstrong is a notorious trainer. You don't have to look far to find stories of how Lance pushed his teammates to train when they thought they didn't have to, or to find Lance training when others were taking time off for little things like Christmas morning.
Everybody in the pro peleton trains hard. Lance is nothing unusual in this regard. Lance is not such an unusual physical specimen by the standards of the pro peleton. Even if he could train slightly harder, many of the athletes he was beating were known dopers. If you seriously are going to argue that hard training beats a doping program at that level of the sport than you have no idea what you are talking about. I have competed at top tier college levels (my coach was a 2 time Olympic champion) which in my sport is only one step below the Olympics and the differences in physical ability at the very top are extremely minor. The winner of the Tour will win by a few minutes in a race that lasts for over 80 hours of riding. Doping easily can boost performance by enough to erase that gain. Literally the majority of the guys who stood on the podium with Lance were at some point busted for doping. (Ricard Virenque, Jan Ulrich, Ivan Basso, etc) All of these guys were extremely talented riders, every bit the match for Lance. Furthermore a huge percentage of Lance's own team has been busted for or admitted to doping while they were riding with or against him. It doesn't matter how hard a trainer you are when everyone else is doping.
Third, and maybe most importantly, Lance Armstrong is an arrogant asshole. No, really. He taunts other riders to try to keep up - and they can't. He rubs in every victory, calls out every weakness, and talks trash mercilessly. On top of all that, he's rich from endorsements and gets to be the face of Cycling, for the huge achievement of riding in just one damn race per year.
Nobody, including Lance, rides just one race per year. Armstrong rode in numerous races leading up to the Tour each year including the Amstel Gold, the Dauphine Libere, and many more. Lance was unusual in that he focused on just one race but he was hardly the only guy who did that either. The Tour is the biggest and most prestigious race in cycling. There are about a dozen guys every year for whom the Tour is primary focus of their season every year. Pro riders at that level are paid quite well and while Lance may have done exceptionally well, guys like Jan Ulrich were hardly hurting for cash.
http://nyvelocity.com/content/interviews/2009/michael-ashenden
Looks pretty clear cut, the man is a liar, he did dope.
It's a real shame, I love cycling but I don't like Tour de France etc, because I'm not interested in watching a bunch of cheats race (maybe they're not, but I can't tell can I).
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Interview with a doping test researcher had him saying that you effectively couldn't detect autologous blood transfusions. (transfusion of your own blood).
You can only detect homologous transfusions. (transfusions of other people's blood).
I am sure there are outliers or events that can allow you to test for autologous; but these same things are well known by dopers, and as such they don't make the mistakes that let them be detected.
because he is nothing more than a communist, nigger loving ape-shit (a much better term than atheist) .
Just let athletes dope, and if they injure or kill themselves in the process they bear the consequences. It would be my bet that if there were two sporting regimes, one "clean" and one "open", the "clean" regime would wither and die in a few years due to lack of interest from fans and athletes. This is like the controversy around letting "professionals" participate in the Olympics. Its going to happen.
There is a game afoot.
As any reward based system those playing the game
will "game" the system to their own ends. This game
has nothing to do with Lance. This game has everything
to do with prosecution and "winning" by the prosecutors.
Those that look will find it at play in courts world wide.
The game is one that plays rats against rats.
The problem is that the wrong rats are getting tossed
in jail (found guilty, jail may not come to play).
It is most visible by way of the prosecution of US drug laws where
reduced punishment or even exemption from prosecution is
traded for information (good and bad).
The result of the game is that the ones with the least
information to trade get the maximum punishment while
those with the most culpability get a "get out of jail free" card.
Consider the immediate family and girlfriend of a drug criminal.
A vehicle gets pulled over and enough contraband is found to
prosecute. The girlfriend with almost no knowledge or awareness
about the "bag" under the seat has no information to trade
so gets 20 years. The boyfriend gives her up and perhaps some
kid ( 18) that "works" the corner. The owner of the car looses
because the car is impounded then confiscated and sold at auction
to pad the local budget. The most culpable criminal gets
little or no punishment because he cooperated. The least culpable
get the most punishment because they have nothing to trade.
The prosecution chalks all the prosecutions including the plea bargain
as a win. Most are in truth of fact collateral and manufactured offensives.
The media news outlets are on to this in Iraq and Afghanistan
where a surgical strike using a dull knife kills bystanders. Decades
ago in South East Asia such body counts were counted and inflated
when ever possible (not at first, but the metric was gamed).
So the issue that I see is that the regulating organizations have
put this system in place and are abusing the system to improve
their own won loss tally.
Since all the contestants are not tested equally this is a very
handy game. Reality is that the entire event is likely void if
the rules were applied to all.
I would ask that those enforcing the rules be fully subject
to the same random and on-call testing, access and location
rules.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Maybe Lance learned early on that chemotherapy drugs, diluted to D42 were remarkably effective and undetectable.
It's not quite right that USADA relies entirely on rumors. Their spokesman claimed that they have blood test results that can only be explained by blood transfusions, which are classified as doping, are illegal and were denied by Armstrong. I am just repeating what I understood---please correct if you can.