Lance coming up live on Sportscenter, getcha popcorn ready!

While many riders who have not been caught are still doping, it is your attitude that EVERY SINGLE ONE is doing it that is not only incorrect, but damages the image of the sport even further and perpetuates the belief that you have to dope to be a cyclist.

As a former high level amateur and a friend of a small number of professional riders (including a few currently at the ToC) I can say 100 percent positively that there are clean cyclists. I would bet my life on that. Clean, successful, professional cyclists. I personally know one athlete who doped to the gills and got caught, but I also am friends with about four or five professional cyclists who am absolutely positive have never touched dope.

I am glad to hear that. The reason I said what I did is because we have all be lied to so many times by Cyclists, Track athletes, Baseball players, Football players, Basketball players, Boxers, even Golfers... that it is hard to believe anyone. Unless you are on the inside like yourself and know for a fact.

I am a big T&F fan, and I wonder what is real anymore. Merritt getting busted recently was not a shock, not even a ripple.

broken arrow wrote:

I am glad to hear that. The reason I said what I did is because we have all be lied to so many times by Cyclists, Track athletes, Baseball players, Football players, Basketball players, Boxers, even Golfers... that it is hard to believe anyone. Unless you are on the inside like yourself and know for a fact.

I am a big T&F fan, and I wonder what is real anymore. Merritt getting busted recently was not a shock, not even a ripple.

Yeah, we'll, I'll admit, most cyclists testing positive would not surprise me.

There are a few that would shock me, but most would not surprise me in the least.

That said, Floyd Landis is still a piece of shit. His timing of this situation, his threatening Amgen to get into their race, his lying under oath and lying to his fans to get their money for his defense...this is not at all coincidental. He is a slimeball and would have people think he does this to "help clean up cycling" but that's complete bs. If he wanted to clean up the sport and help its image, he wouldn't have spent the last 4 years lying through his teeth, he would've done what David Millar did and admitted his wrongdoing immediately, made no/few excuses, and gone about helping the anti-doping authorities.

Floyd Landis does not give a shit about cycling, he is just a bitter angry man, regardless of whether or not he is right in his accusations. I'd imagine he's right in some of them, but not all, if I had my best guess. Either way, his credibility is so poor that I doubt anything will ever truly come from these accusations.

Former Cyclist wrote:

As a former high level amateur and a friend of a small number of professional riders (including a few currently at the ToC) I can say 100 percent positively that there are clean cyclists. I would bet my life on that. Clean, successful, professional cyclists. I personally know one athlete who doped to the gills and got caught, but I also am friends with about four or five professional cyclists who am absolutely positive have never touched dope.

Thank you for posting here, Floyd.

what about the emails wrote:

Former Cyclist wrote:

As a former high level amateur and a friend of a small number of professional riders (including a few currently at the ToC) I can say 100 percent positively that there are clean cyclists. I would bet my life on that. Clean, successful, professional cyclists. I personally know one athlete who doped to the gills and got caught, but I also am friends with about four or five professional cyclists who am absolutely positive have never touched dope.

Thank you for posting here, Floyd.

Yeah, right.

Unfortunately, even fat, bitter, lazy, no-longer-doping Floyd is still a little better than I ever was. Sad, eh?

what about the emails wrote:

Former Cyclist wrote:

As a former high level amateur and a friend of a small number of professional riders (including a few currently at the ToC) I can say 100 percent positively that there are clean cyclists. I would bet my life on that. Clean, successful, professional cyclists. I personally know one athlete who doped to the gills and got caught, but I also am friends with about four or five professional cyclists who am absolutely positive have never touched dope.

Thank you for posting here, Floyd.

see that's how you get away with it. You don't tell friends, you don't tell family, if possible you should even lie to yourself

One of many wrote:

what about the emails wrote:

Thank you for posting here, Floyd.

see that's how you get away with it. You don't tell friends, you don't tell family, if possible you should even lie to yourself

yes, but when you ride and race (and therefore live in tight hotel quarters) with them enough, you ought to know whether or not they're doping. I guarantee you there are a lot of cyclists out there that could sell out their teammates because if you spend that much time with a person, you have to know. It isn't hard to tell.

The guy we raced with that eventually got busted....well, lets just say people had their suspicions before he tested positive.

Even in the lower level amateur categories (the fat old cat 5 guys) you get the really rich slimy old guys who dope. There is a team of lazy fat polish guys in the chicago area that are all on HGH. personally, if you have to dope to win Cat 5 races, you might as well shoot yourself and get it over with. I mean, there are 13 year old kids that can compete with those guys.

Former Cyclist wrote:

when you ride and race (and therefore live in tight hotel quarters) with them enough, you ought to know whether or not they're doping.

Why, because they can't keep syringes and vials anywhere other than in the pockets on their jerseys? They can't do any of that in the privacy of their home?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot wrote:

Former Cyclist wrote:

when you ride and race (and therefore live in tight hotel quarters) with them enough, you ought to know whether or not they're doping.

Why, because they can't keep syringes and vials anywhere other than in the pockets on their jerseys? They can't do any of that in the privacy of their home?

More just due to the necessity of extended periods of travel. Amateurs and low level pros don't really have the means to afford to own a home in both europe and the US or even across the country in the US. Training seriously, under the same coaches and directors, you get to know the ins and outs of your teammates very, very well. It depends somewhat on the organization of the team, but the more modern, well-organized teams stay together for much of their living and training.

Former Cyclist, you have made the best posts by far in this whole scandal. I was going to ask this to everyone, but you seem to have a better idea. How much does doping help them? People insist all the top guys are doping, but is it really enough of an advantage to make clean riding impossible?

LA is a big fake

Python wrote:

Former Cyclist, you have made the best posts by far in this whole scandal. I was going to ask this to everyone, but you seem to have a better idea. How much does doping help them? People insist all the top guys are doping, but is it really enough of an advantage to make clean riding impossible?

Clean riding isn't impossible, it just depends where in the chain you want to be. Certainly some guys win clean, but it doesn't take a genius to see a lot of the top champions are the most rampant dopers. A talented rider is a talented rider...you see a top level doper get caught, chances are he can come back and ride clean and be a decent domestique. If a decent domestique is doped through the gills chances are he can come back and be a low level pro. A low level pro who is doping could return to the mid-level of the elite amateurs, etc.

Doping can't give you talent, it just gives you a much much much better chance of capitalizing on the natural talent you have and sort of "boosting" it if you will.

A lot of it has to do with recovery. A rider who can win a grand tour and seem invincible is a more LIKELY candidate to be a doper than a guy who has a few bad days over the course. Not that either can tell you for sure, there are too many other factors, but a doping rider will usually recover much, much better than is physically possible without doping. Also, in my opinion you see the guys who are doped to the gills often looking very, very explosive in the mountains (climbers, obviously). A guy like Riccardo Ricco, for instance, could accelerate away from people effortlessly. A not-doped Ricco would have to grind it out like a human being.

There is no certain way to tell for sure. But it helps enough that riders feel pressured to do it just to get results that get them resigned to their contracts. There is always someone else coming up through the ranks, if it makes a pretty good rider get some pretty GREAT results, often its seen as worth it.

Sorry that wasn't a particularly definitive answer.

The rider who I know personally that got caught doping was an extremely high level amateur before he started, got signed to a regional level team...his mom got cancer and died from it, and he made the VERY bad decision to use all the left over EPO and make a habit out of it. He proceeded to become something of a wunderkind on the American stage racing circuit for about a single season before getting caught. Now he is once again a high level amateur, could probably turn pro, but nothing like the rider he was on EPO.

no, running is dead. has been for 20 years now.

i know im a dick wrote:

cycling is done. no one follows it anymore. no one cares. everyone knows to the depths of their souls that all those guys cheat like hell. bye bye cycling. good riddance.

Former Cyclist, thanks for the sane, calm analysis.

Your description of a doping climber's explosiveness makes me think of Contador in last year's TdF. What's your guess on him?

And off the doping subject: Do you think Armstrong can make up that gap on Contador this year?

I still like the "dead" spor wrote:

Former Cyclist, thanks for the sane, calm analysis.

Your description of a doping climber's explosiveness makes me think of Contador in last year's TdF. What's your guess on him?

And off the doping subject: Do you think Armstrong can make up that gap on Contador this year?

I don't like to place blame on anyone who can't definitively be proven to have doped. It's hard for the sport to survive if everyone who is good gets blamed...Contador gets the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that there are things about him that are particularly suspicious. He was also originally brought up in the names related to Operation Puerto, although he was later cleared of involvement. Make of that what you will.

If you want some cyclists to root for that I think are most likely clean...(although again, very few people would surprise me by testing positive, and my professional friends are U.S. professionals, I can't speak for the men in Europe)...

but, I feel that Michael Rogers is likely to be clean, also, I believe Damiano Cunego likely to be clean.

Cavendish and Wiggins have also been very, very outspoken against doping, and one wants to believe them and assume its not a ruse, although Wiggins ridiculous improvement as a stage racer leaves many people in doubt, I'd imagine. You can't know for sure, but those are some riders I believe are likely clean. Rogers and Cunego, perhaps Cavendish, perhaps Wiggins. All are winners.

One always wants their favorite riders to be clean, of course, which is why I was upset back when Vinokourov tested positive back in the day. I loved Zabel, too, and I actually do believe his claims that he only doped for a year...maybe that's naive, but whatever. For the record, I do NOT believe Johan Museeuw's similar claim, as much as I loved watching him race.

I want to believe the entirety of Garmin is clean, since that's their schtick, but obviously there has been a shadow thrown over that by Floyd. You can't know for sure. Vaughters (team director) as more or less admitted to doping as a professional, but everything about how their team has been run seemed to be legit (as surprising as that may be). Now, it's hard to know. Christian Vandevelde...I want to believe he's clean, he's an extremely nice guy, always ways very talented as a young rider, but unfortunately there's just no way of knowing, even for a team as transparent as Garmin.

To answer your final question:

I do not believe Lance can overcome Contador, assuming Contador is in peak form for the TdF. It doesn't help Lance that he's been sick and missed a LOT of racing in the spring, and now he's missing a big time trial test at the ToC. Personally I think he's very, very short on racing this year. We'll see, though, he's a guy you can never count out, for whatever reason...

Former Cyclist:

Despite the numbers of exposed dopers (I liked Vino, too, and Rasmussen), I still feel like you do when people I've admired as racers and as people turn out to have been doping. I'm glad to be able to trust Paula Radcliffe, who I saw in Edmonton at the 2001 Worlds walking along the side of the track holding up her big "EPO CHEATS OUT" sign because Yegorova of Russia had been allowed to run the 5000m (she won it) after failing an EPO test that was then overturned on a minor technicality. And (as many know), Radcliffe has asked that her blood be taken any time and stored, and then tested later when new tests are created that are better than the current ones.

Ryan Hall's too genuinely religious not to be clean, you'd think. (And then you picture Rachid Ramzi's big kneeling prayer on the track after the Beijing 1500.)

I hold out a hope that Usain Bolt is clean, despite that case with a couple of his training partners, because (a) he was just as good as a kid (junior WRs) and (b) he doesn't have the pop-eyed, tensed-up, lifter-going-for-a-max look of Lindford Christie, Ben Johnson, et al.--he reminds me more of a bigger, better Carl Lewis, relaxed and flowing even at that speed, with the late-race acceleration and without the blast-off start.

So, of course, I try to prepare for Bolt being dirty--it would kill track deader than cycling supposedly is. And what about Haile and Tergat? Rowbury/Barringer/Wurth/Pierce, Ritz/Webb/the OTC crew? You almost want to just cut off the news now.

I hope you'll still like watching the Tour.

It's really easy to ask for that when you know that nobody is going to do it. It's like Armstrong challenging anyone and everyone to test him anywhere and anytime. Didn't he pull the plug on his supposedly 'independent' self-testing due to "logistical reasons"? Plenty of dopers have railed publicly against cheats before they got busted. You could call it ethics-washing, put on a public display of being anti-doping and people will take that to mean that you'd never dope. Gwen Torrence was also known for a similar tactic.

Just like Ted Haggard was too genuinely religious to lust after men? A lot of really sleazy stuff has been perpetrated by people who made a big show of being "genuinely religious." Not saying that I know that Hall has, just saying that you can't accurately judge a person's ethics based on how religious he seems to be to the outside observer.

Or wake up, pull your head out of the sand, and stop enabling dopers and their doping. Enjoy the competition for what it is, just don't attach your enjoyment to the fortunes of any individual.

yeah, that last point is an excellent one.

No matter what happens and who gets busted in the Tour every year (and the fact that I obviously wish it didn't happen and find it extremely depressing whenever it does), the race remains an excellent sporting competition and great TV.

I'd love it even more if I could know everyone was clean, but the effort and the tactics and the racing is great either way. Like I said before, as much as I hate the cheats...doping can't make you a good cyclist, it can only make you a better one. The best riders are still the ones competing, its just so disgusting that the clean riders out there have to be relegated to suspicion and second class results for NOT cheating. That is what makes cheating such an awful thing in sports, in my opinion. Not sure what you could ever do about it though.

I've always been a bit confused about Lance's bout with cancer. Was he essentially allowed to legally use PEDs for a time because of his cancer? And if it's like the guy who used his mom's cancer meds, then wouldn't Lance have had some leftover and probably some knowledge about what they could do?