Lance Explains That He Trained Hard and Doping Was Necessary

Who said it was like or death? What a really dumb assumption to make. He never implied that.

I read Hamilton's book and though I assumed doping was a required aspect of the Euro cycling circuit some of the details of how these guys train and dose their drug regimens were pretty severe. On the highest level you're just crushing yourself day after day, and with the drugs you then have the ability to recover some then crush yourself worse. Hamilton's wife was in a constant state of frustration because he could barely walk down to the cafe on most days and this was when they were healthy and riding strong. What a nightmarish existence. Then the specter of being caught and exposed as a fraud and losing it all...reeeeallly unpleasant way to live one's life. Very easy to understand the sport-wide paranoia and need for omerta and all of that. Armstrong of course came off as a sociopath but it was also quite impressive to read about his training habits. Show up late for a ride? Like by a few minutes, you're on the outs. Screw around or show a lack of seriousness with other important training habits, you're out. Ulrich never had a chance even though physically he was an absolute monster. Sadly it worked the other way too - Hamilton got too good and Armstrong was convinced he was angling to undermine him and claim leadership of the team, and just like that he was out too.

The difference is if Rupp gets caught cheating, outside of this message board, there won't be much backlash and no one will sue him. 95% of the American public has no clue who the guy is. More people can probably name the Cleveland Indians backup catcher.

He would receive a ban, not have his silver medal taken away, apologize, and eventually return probably with the same sponsors.

Dadfan this reminds me of a doping documentary that I watched back in the early 2000s. In the documentary there was an interview with a team manager, who had been in charge of several teams over a couple of decades. During this time he had a couple hundred riders that he supported, he said that he could count on one hand the riders that he knew were clean.

Dadfan wrote:

I really appreciate your frustration here. Back then, I worked on the Tour de France and saw it up close. I'm here to tell you, of the 198 men in that race, about 5-10 weren't doping. Lance isn't repentant because it was the reality of the sport at the time: good, bad or indifferent, that's the truth. If you wanted to race, you had to dope. If you know anything about Lance Armstrong, you know that he was an incredibly gifted endurance athlete from the moment he got into triathlons. Despite those gifts, without doping, he would've been just an interesting side bar in some Texas paper. Instead, he changed the way the world thought of cancer. Say what you want about the guy, there's no taking that away from him.

What???? wrote:

Who said it was like or death? What a really dumb assumption to make. He never implied that.

You are missing the point. It's not life or death. The doping has consequences that the Armstrong fanboy conveniently ignores.

Those consequences cost money. If he'd like to pay, that's great. Something tells me the fanboy won't.

hulksmash wrote:

Armstrong of course came off as a sociopath but it was also quite impressive to read about his training habits. Show up late for a ride? Like by a few minutes, you're on the outs. Screw around or show a lack of seriousness with other important training habits, you're out. Ulrich never had a chance even though physically he was an absolute monster. Sadly it worked the other way too - Hamilton got too good and Armstrong was convinced he was angling to undermine him and claim leadership of the team, and just like that he was out too.

While many sources confirm that Armstrong was a bully and very hard on his opponents and teammates systematically, it should be pointed out nobody should take anything from Tyler Hamilton's Secret Race at face value if the claims are not verified from other sources. The book is very untrustworthy on many occasions with questionable omissions, strange motives and half-truths.

At last count, of the top twenty riders from the 2005 Tour de France, the last one that Lance won, only one rider (8th place Cadel Evans) hasn't either been sanctioned for a doping violation or implicated in a doping scandal.

Did any of you see ESPN's 30 for 30 on the Ben Johnson 1988 Seoul scandal? They went back and interviewed Ben and the other eight runners in the final. Just about all the other runners in that final were caught in a doping scandal after the 1988 Seoul incident.

Agree complete. LA = AH

Like nobody ever worked hard (though who knows who was doping on whatever in the past).

Get rid of PEDs .Let's see what's real.

For me, if Lance only doped, that I could understand. Since so many in the peloton doped, this is not a reason to judge Lance differently.

It's all the other things he did, that set him apart:

- forcing his teammates to dope, not for themselves, but to be good soldiers for Lance

- using his influence to destroy or tarnish the careers, livelihoods, and reputations of former friends, employees, teammates, competitors, former cycling heros, journalists, and labs, who posed a threat to Lance's legacy

It's the long list of casualties that Lance left behind that distinguish him from the other doping cyclists. Ullrich and Pantani didn't do that. Contador didn't do that. No one was so destructive or offensive the way Lance was.

After Festina, 1999 should have been the year of redemption -- but Lance didn't seem to get the memo. Maybe doping was necessary in 1995, but I'm not so sure it was in 1999.

I recently watched "Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist", and left with enormous admiration for Pantani and his raw talent. So it's possible for me to feel positive towards a cyclist, despite being tarnished by doping.

I don't think Lance was more talented than Pantani. Head to head, one on one, clean and healthy, I think Lance gets left for dead on the mountains.

Greg LeMond won the 1986 tour against constant attacks from his own co-team leader, Hinault, under great infighting team adversity (much like when Contador beat Lance). Lance never won a single tour by himself, without his single purpose team of soldiers helping him achieve his goal.

Exactly. There's so much naivete on this subject it's stunning. If you've been around the sport, you know the reality. However, you want to characterize it, the environment riders found themselves in (during the Lance years) was riddled with drugs. It's how they survived in the pro ranks. And, I've worked across a ton of sports, it's laughable to me that people think cycling is some kind of anomaly. It's the only sport that makes somewhat of an effort to police itself and thereby it looks like the class clown when it comes to doping. It's sad because some people really believe they can change it. As long as there's something to win, there's always going to be someone willing to cheat.

The book was co-written by a respected cycling journalist via marathon interview sessions. Fact checking was sourced through old teammates and crew. It reads that way as well.

In the passage that Hamilton made the decision to leave Postal, Armstrong and Bruyneel instructed Hamilton to ride panyagua for several weeks then drove him to lead breaks over and over until he cracked. The effectiveness of doping in the peloton demonstrated in a perverse inversion.

I appreciate your post, while I still am not particularly in need for an illumination on the context of the book as I know it very deeply having read it some 3-4 times as well as the USADA/CAS-material and some of the Operación Puerto memos. Co-author Daniel Coyle's earlier book Tour de Force (aka "Lance Armstrong's War") is also on my list-to-be-read and I've browsed through it quickly in a library.I could give you several straightforward and easily verifiable lies from SR, but as you brought up the 2001 Tour, here an alternative view on Hamilton's decision to leave the US Postal that year from the book Wheelmen by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell, a book which is also based on dozens and dozens of interviews with large variety of people:

Tyler Hamilton’s tension with Armstrong was more personal than professional. Hamilton told people he thought Armstrong was hitting on his wife. Armstrong would later go on a date with Haven after their divorce.

The authors add in another chapter the following:

Any testimony he gave would also be compromised by the fact that he had an obvious personal grievance with Lance, having heard that his ex-wife, Haven, had dated Lance shortly after they divorced.

And don't get me wrong, even with its few credibility issues, I do consider The Secret Race to be a interesting, well-written and informative work.

Aragon wrote:

I could give you several straightforward and easily verifiable lies from SR, but as you brought up the 2001 Tour, here an alternative view on Hamilton's decision to leave the US Postal that year from the book Wheelmen by Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O'Connell, a book which is also based on dozens and dozens of interviews with large variety of people:

I'd be interested in reading your list of straightforward lies from SR

"Say what you want about the guy, there's no taking that away from him."

OK, thanks.

HE IS A COMPLETE FVCKING PENCIL-NECKED PIECE OF SHlT WHO WOULDN'T LAST 5 SECONDS IN MY WORLD. I WOULD LOVE TO GET HIS CONSENT TO A CONTEST, OF SORTS. IT'S A GOOD THING HE INSULATES HIMSELF.

And precisely HOW did he "change the way the world thought about cancer" that was in any way attributable to some honorable effort and motive on his part?

IN NO WAY, THAT IS HOW. EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT FVCKING TOOL IS SELF-SERVING BULLCRAP.

HE'S A CHICKEN-SHlT WIMP WHO WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR EVEN HIS OWN LOW STANDARDS.

ABSOLUTE LOSER.

Cheating implies gaining an unfair advantage. What sort of advantage did he gain if all of the GC contenders were on EPO and using blood transfusions? Let's think a little more critically here.

Because I'm doing some research on the subject matter as one of my projects, I'll give you only one example on a way which Tyler manufactures his own "truth":

Tyler tells in The Secret Race that after his doping bust in 2004, his "high school friend" set up "Believetyler"-website and $25,000 worth of money was gathered through selling wristbands, money which was donated to the charitable Tyler Hamilton Foundation in the end. If I recall correctly, the narrative is a little shaky whether the website was where the items actually were sold.

If you locate the actual website, two things catch the attention:

- There actually were two founders of the website, Mrs. D.M and Mr. C.D., of whom the former happened to be the CEO of Tyler Hamilton Foundation with salary of some $85,000 and the latter a non-compensated employee of the foundation (I have somewhere a copy of the 2004 tax forms of the foundation that confirm this).

- There was a "donate"-button in the website and in a short period of time, the donations ran already at $34,000 with no mention of any wristbands.

The magnitude of the cash-collecting-apparatus apparently wasn't anything reminiscent of the Floyd Fairness Fund that gathered close to a million a few years later nor does anything even prove that the money was used in Tyler's legal fees.

In the same theme, Tyler also mentions in passing that Phonak owner Andy Rihs "was supportive" and told that he would "spend his own money to fund an independent scientific investigation of the test". How did Andy help him? Tyler can't give any concrete example on what Mr. Rihs did for him as the guy just drops out of the radar for the rest of the book as Tyler emphasizes how he and Haven had to hire lawyers and sell their nice house to pay the legal bills.

Interestingly Daniel Coyle's earlier book Tour de Force tells that Phonak [=Rihs]"spent $800,000 assembling a panel to research the accuracy of the test" (p. 309). That is a lot of money spent on Hamilton with very little credit given to his former boss.

rekrunner wrote:

It's all the other things he did, that set him apart:

- forcing his teammates to dope, not for themselves, but to be good soldiers for Lance

The team owner, Thom Wiesel, who still runs USA Cycling, is suggested to have supported this policy.

Thom has an alleged history of hiring "doctors" for his previous hobby teams as well as another legend involving his national team staying at his Park City vacation home "topping up" before a national championships.

LanceLover wrote:

Cheating implies gaining an unfair advantage. What sort of advantage did he gain if all of the GC contenders were on EPO and using blood transfusions? Let's think a little more critically here.

How about you trying to think a little more critically yourself before posting more pro-Lance drivel.

Does everyone respond to PEDs the same? Have you done any reading on the subject? Any critical thinking about how Lance went from a doped up single day classics rider to the greatest grand tour rider of all time?

Why did Hamilton, White, and others apologize to "all the clean cyclists?"

Does Ben Johnson deserve his gold medal back since it's likely all of the gold medal contenders were using PEDs as well?

Here is something many of you do not understand about the TdF. I had the opportunity this past summer to drive the course with my wife, pre-tour.

The TdF course is not meant to be accomplished without support of pharma and recovery devices. The human body cannot do that course clean at a high level. There is too much physiological damage. My car had problems going up many of the climbs. I can't imagine on a bicycle at the end of 4-5hrs or hard riding.

On a side note: why do we draw the line on pharma, when elite athletes hook themselves up on Compex machines and strap on Normatec compression boots in order to aid recovery? How is that different than an IV or transfusion?

We are all such hypocrites, popping our Advil, foam rolling, getting dry-needled, getting therapy and chugging Gatorade - things we all do that enhance performance.