Lance Armstrong accused of riding a motorized bike in TDF win

Zero Fox Given wrote:

Lance was a very very good cyclist wrote:

It's really not about the dope.

I know that's what you want to believe and you can't be educated about how the human body actually works, but there are people out there who do real science.

There are also people out there who do vague and unsubstantiated claims posted anonymously on running message boards.

Lots of writers make up fantastic power numbers. It seems to be an obsession in books, magazines, blogs, websites. None of them bother to check whether those numbers make any sense.

It doesn't matter if the rider is doped or not. The impossible numbers keep coming. This has been going on since the 80s.

Excuse me, Jonathan Vaughters is not an honest and trustworthy man.

And besides, Lance wonthe World Professional Road Race Championship in 1993, not 92

Wiggins Froome and Farah are dirtier than Lance

Lance was a very very good cyclist wrote:

Excuse me, Jonathan Vaughters is not an honest and trustworthy man.

And besides, Lance wonthe World Professional Road Race Championship in 1993, not 92

I never claimed JV was an "honest and untrustworthy", only that he has not many inventives to whitewash Lance about EPO-timelines (who isn't his best friend).

I made no reference to it, but 1993 is the correct year when he won his World Championship gold, not 1992. In the recent 30/30 doc he claims having started doping c:a 1992.

Yep. My experience debating this subject over the years is that people were upset that some guy from Texas was beating them and their favorites at their own doping game, and not upset with doping itself.

I wore the yellow bracelet for years but there's no way you can watch that video and think that Lance isnt doing something. I raced bikes and I never "scratched my butt" like that the same way in multiple races. Dude cheated to the high heavens and if he never raced for Radio Shack would still be enjoying legendary status.

The way I see it is, if:

1. He knew about the motor technology

and

2. He believed he could get away with using it without being caught

then he'd absolutely do it without hesitation.

creeps wrote:

Wiggins Froome and Farah are dirtier than Lance

I would agree. Froome is the worst of all these guys - he's the equivalent of a f--king 14min30 5000m guy who goes on to be the Olympic champion.

Look you can say what you want about Lance but to me the biggest shame is never knowing what he could have been clean. And I say this in the context of nobody else cheating because obviously if they were and he wasn't he would have been destroyed.

If you think Lance was some kind of hack that just cheated and became a 7 time Tour winner, go watch the Inside 30 for 30: Lance - its the follow up to the Lance documentary on ESPN. There you will hear Bobby Julich talking about Lance as a teenager relative to himself and Hincapie who were the best American juniors at the time. I promise you Bobby Julich is not going out of his way to talk Lance up or j@ck him off for no good reason.

Harambe wrote:

It's a bit funny how butthurt the French are about Lance. He's completely guilty, stripped of titles, disgraced, etc, yet they still are finding new things to accuse him of 10 years later!

Everyone else was doping, plenty of disgraced champions before and after him, but man are they upset that an AMERICAN did it better than everyone else :)

Reminds me of the American hypocritical butt hurt about Ben Johnson. Or for that matter, Mo Farah.

Human Torch wrote:A motor is a fundamentally different kind of cheating that is much harder to internally rationalize. I doubt it. What's next, runner using super shoes?

A runner would never use a type of super shoe.................oh, wait a minute. Ok, nevermind.

astro wrote:

Yep. My experience debating this subject over the years is that people were upset that some guy from Texas was beating them and their favorites at their own doping game, and not upset with doping itself.

I think this is almost certainly the narrative when it comes to discussing Lance with most people.

In most doper/doping discussions it's about the ethics/morality of someone gaining an advantage over someone else by doing something they aren't. With Lance this isn't possibly the case as 90% of pro riders in the era (heck may have been even higher) were cheating too.

What it usually boils down to is people getting upset at how Lance treated people (other riders, people around him like Andreu and O'Reilly) but this issue is separate from doping. There are plenty of great sportspeople that aren't nice people that don't get the same fire as Lance. People want to leverage the cancer stuff because it's highly emotional and hence effective in promoting their narrative but the reality is, taking cycling and how he did it out of the equation, Lance and his foundation generated millions of real dollars for cancer and it gave hope to thousands of cancer sufferers. He took the burden of things that many of us will never understand - such as being the last person some people ever spoke to - people who were complete, yet innocent strangers. We can never appreciate this.

Usually I find the people who are so angry and vehement now about Lance were once his biggest fans who would aggressively defend him in the face of the comically obvious, and just feel like he "betrayed" them - hence why they flipped so hard. Kind of like being cheated on by a girl you don't care about vs being cheated on by a girl you love - either way it's all emotion and not ration.

Even the cancer foundation has been questioned, because it gave very little money to actual cancer research.

Salvitore Stitchmo wrote:

creeps wrote:

Wiggins Froome and Farah are dirtier than Lance

I would agree. Froome is the worst of all these guys - he's the equivalent of a f--king 14min30 5000m guy who goes on to be the Olympic champion.

Froome actually has 2 pairs of legs grafted into one. That's why his arms look so skinny in comparison. He has a VO2 max if 120 almost double that of a normal human.

Femke Van den Driessche has been accused of the same:

"During the race, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) checked the bicycles of Van den Driessche and found a motor in a bicycle that was in her pit. Almost six years since the first allegations of "mechanical doping" in cycling, this was the first time in cycling history that evidence of technological fraud had been found."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche

Grassrunner wrote:

The way I see it is, if:

1. He knew about the motor technology

and

2. He believed he could get away with using it without being caught

then he'd absolutely do it without hesitation.

Nailed it !

Good podcast with a key person involved in uci testing used to catch her

Starts about 17 min into the interview

creeps wrote:

Wiggins Froome and Farah are dirtier than Lance

+1

Somalians, Kenyans, and Paul Weller fans are the very worst.

I always wondered why he had a quart of Valvoline strapped to his bike frame instead of a water bottle.

another casual observer2 wrote:

If Lance had a motor in his bike - you probably would have heard about it from any of the dozen or so teammates who have come clean about the doping and cheating that went on. Especially the Andreus.

This is the key argument for me. Everything else he did seems to have been exposed, either by teammates or associates or by Lance himself. Why would the motor in his bike stay covered up? It would have to be his own sole endeavor and no one else knew about it. Seems unlikely at best.