Lance Armstrong...again....sorry...but

[rich p]

Now if this was a thread about the position of Kate Mosse, no not that Kate Moss, on the allure scale of thinking mans' pin ups I might be prepared to squander a lot more electrons.

is that a chinese word?

 

[vernon]

is that a chinese word?

Made a modification to remove the ambiguity

 

[PaulB]

There may be SOME justification in his claim that since everyone was doing it, he was simply levelling the playing field but there is NO justification in the lies and cover-up he felt obliged to indulge in at the time and subsequently. Oh what a tangled web we weave, and all that.

 

[byegad]

The thing that really makes it bad is his constant insistence that he was clean, and resorting to lawyers to stifle critics who KNEW otherwise. The only solution, if the UCI want to clean up cycling permanently, is to issue a lifetime ban to every rider caught cheating with drugs, no exceptions.

 

[PaulB]

The thing that really makes it bad is his constant insistence that he was clean, and resorting to lawyers to stifle critics who KNEW otherwise. The only solution, if the UCI want to clean up cycling permanently, is to issue a lifetime ban to every rider caught cheating with drugs, no exceptions.

Yeah, for the bad drugs but what about the poor rider/sportsman who takes inhalers legally in his own country and is unaware that the same product overseas contains a slightly different formulation which puts him a tiny fraction over the threshold? Is it entirely fair to ban that guy for life?

 

[ASC1951]

Yeah, for the bad drugs but what about the poor rider/sportsman who takes inhalers legally in his own country and is unaware that the same product overseas contains a slightly different formulation which puts him a tiny fraction over the threshold? Is it entirely fair to ban that guy for life?

You're absolutely right.
Inhalers, yes - beef sandwiches, no. Pro Cycling could be cleaned up in a season or two if all the team sponsors said - as Sky have - that they will not employ even ex-dopers.

 

[Hotblack Desiato]

Is he the baddest sports cheat baddie of all time? Is there anyone else who compares? I can't think of anyone...can anybody?

I did think of Michelle Smith de Bruin, but as I see that she has become a practising barrister I realise that I was clearly mistaken and apologise profusely.

 

[swee'pea99]

More than one poster seems to be suggesting that the real baddy was not so much the doping - after all, everyone was doing it - but the lying and denying. Well once you've decided to go along with the former, surely the latter is unavoidable. What are you going to do? Say 'Yes, I've been taking performance-enhancing drugs'? Hardly.

 

[Herbie]

Not to defend him - he gives every impression of being an peanut - but the situation is surely muddied by the fact that during the whole period he was competing, the entire sport was, by common consent, absolutely awash with drugs. Indeed he apparently refers at one point in his self-justification to doping up 'to achieve a level playing field'.

It seems pretty much certain that if he hadn't won all those Tours, they would've been won by someone else on drugs. Surely to be a 'cheat of cheats', you'd have to be grabbing yourself an unfair advantage. Since the competition was for the most part 'cheating' equally, it's not entirely clear that that's the case.

He was a cheat but seems he was a better quality of cheat than the also rans

 

[vernon]