Lance Armstrong

[Red_Polo]

Wow.

Imaging how dark a place the guy must be in now.

[Tee]

Imagine being one of his 'clean' opponents during those years. 7 years being in the shadow of a cheat...wow, that is a whole career for many. Wonder if they have any grounds to take legal action against Armstrong and his team.

[Alex]

I have got a better chance of winning next years tour than Lance Armstrong.

[RichC]

Moving on from Armstrong surely the UCI themselves need to be investegated.

For him to have apparently managed to pass hundreds of tests over the years it does ask the question if they themselves aided him with all of this, with all of the negative press cycling received for for riders being caught cheating having someone such as Armstrong coming in and "winning" clean year after year it will have been of huge benefit to having him as the face of cycling.

[Fosterbloke]

Moving on from Armstrong surely the UCI themselves need to be investegated.

For him to have apparently managed to pass hundreds of tests over the years it does ask the question if they themselves aided him with all of this

It has been revealed that the hundreds of tests weren't drug tests. He probably had half a dozen of those in his career.

[EwarWoo]

Imagine being one of his 'clean' opponents during those years.

I can imagine some wild and wonderful things, but being a clean cyclist is stretching it a bit.

[baitman]

saw on tv earlier that lance made a sizable donation to the swiss clinic that was doing the tests...

the head of the uci says that although it looks suss, he could guareantee the integrity of the drug testing facilities

check out the wording in this mail online article

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-2221584/Lance-Armstrong-stripped-Tour-France-titles-UCI-last.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

just a taster;

Saddled with shame: Cycling's snivelling chief still in denial over culture of cheating that has infested his sport

Cycling's world governing body are willing to accept that Lance Armstrong is a doping cheat. Hallelujah.
The UCI made it sound as radical a discovery as finding human life on Pluto rather than a belated admission from an organisation who — and we are being generous here — were complacent as the greatest fraud in sporting history unfolded before them.
Pat McQuaid, the snivelling, self-preserving president, said: ‘The UCI will ban Lance Armstrong from cycling and the UCI will strip him of his seven Tours de France titles. Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten.’

[Red_Polo]

I can imagine some wild and wonderful things, but being a clean cyclist is stretching it a bit.

Seriously though, it must have been devastating to be a seriously good cyclist and know all these cheats were out there. The temptation to join them if you couldn't beat them must have been enormous.

[baitman]

Seriously though, it must have been devastating to be a seriously good cyclist and know all these cheats were out there. The temptation to join them if you couldn't beat them must have been enormous.

a family member was a top amatuer cyclist and had the chance to turn pro back in the day. he spent some time training with the peugeot pro team but then declined their offer due to having to agree to take the "supplements" that the team doctor will be routinely injecting the lads with...

[Red_Polo]

Stinks

[Vermilion]

Ian Herbert: This is cycling's hour of need... so where is Bradley Wiggins?


Bradley Wiggins has not gone looking for the limelight just lately.

He gave up waiting and slipped quietly out the back door of the Manchester Velodrome last month when the Manchester City manager, Roberto Mancini, was late for a meeting with Dave Brailsford which provided some valuable national media profile for British Cycling. There was no great incentive to stay, Wiggins might say, because he is a Liverpool fan, but he and Mancini together would have certainly been a much-needed feelgood story for cycling. If ever Wiggins' sport needed its most famous athlete out there, at the vanguard, then it is now, as its reputation becomes more shredded and tattered with each passing day, and as Team Sky seek to demonstrate to an increasingly sceptical audience that they are a clean team, providing cycling with a brand new start.

Forgive the general public for not forgetting how they were asked to swallow precisely the same message in 1999 when, after the caravan raids and syringe stashes of the Festina crisis had reduced the 1998 Tour de France to a sham, the sport provided glittery packaging as it remarketed the following year's race as the "Tour of Renewal" with a custom-built saviour for this happy new beginning, called Lance Armstrong. It needs no one less than the most famous man in the sport to convince us that things will be different this time.

The problem is that Wiggins has never been much interested in the media scene. He never returned your call when he said he would in the days before sideburn masks became de rigueur and you didn't get the sense that spending an evening in the company of cloying strangers was his idea of fun when the release of the Usada report which upended cycling, earlier this month, coincided with a congratulatory soirée dedicated to Team Sky's success, to which Wiggins had signed up. To date, we really have only one snatched interview with him on the Usada report, for BBC Radio 5 Live, which is hardly the work of a talisman, positioning Team Sky on the moral high ground where they want to be.

The word from within his sport is that, after the Tour de France and the Olympics, Wiggins simply felt shot at and in need of a recharge. But the combined challenges of Col de la Madeleine, Col de la Croix de Fer and the Peyragudes pale in comparison with the task Brailsford has on his hands in demonstrating his team's probity now. The performance director is doing what he can to assuage any niggling doubts that Team Sky – set up on a prospectus about clean cycling – really is what he says it is, top to bottom. All 80 of its staff, we have been told, are being interviewed, primarily by Brailsford and GB psychiatrist Mike Peters, and then being asked to sign an agreement to say they have not been involved in doping. Except, as the former UCI doping adviser Dr Michael Ashenden asked at the weekend, how do we tell that the statements are worth the paper they're written on? If Sean Yates, who worked with Armstrong on the Motorola and Astana teams and is photographed arm-in-arm with "Motoman", Armstrong's alleged drugs mule, on photographs washing around the internet, signs Brailsford's statement, then is that the end of the matter? And what about the Australian Michael Rogers, a key member of Sky's 2012 Tour-winning team, who worked with disgraced doctor Michele Ferrari and is named in Levi Leipheimer's testimony about Ferrari's Tenerife training camps?

There is no evidence that either Yates or Rogers has doped but persuading the world that an athlete can be taken at his word, in this of all sports, will be as difficult as retaining clear blue sky between the unravelling storm and Brailsford's team. The extraordinary revelations in the weekend's Mail on Sunday that a former rider who has signed Brailsford's statement has been the subject of doping allegations by no fewer than three independent sources, all of whom worked with him, suggests that a bumpy road lies ahead.

All of which is why Wiggins needs to give Brailsford a bit more acuity now than he did in that eye-watering attack this summer on the "bone-idle" Twitter "******s" who suggested he might not be clean and for whom it is "easy... to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of ****, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something".

A little more diplomacy is certainly guaranteed for the next few weeks ahead, when we shall see Wiggins stepping back into the limelight to promote the new autobiography, My Time, which he has written with William Fotheringham and which has attracted a big-money serialisation buy-up. But we need more from him than the light biographical narrative and the happy sense of how he has got from there to here. Wiggins sometimes puts himself out there in unconventional ways and over Christmas we will hear him on the BBC Radio 6 airwaves, in conversation with his friend Paul Weller, talking music and playing some of their favourite classic tracks. We need much more than easy listening, now.

And, before all that, we have the launch event tomorrow of the 2013 Tour de France, when Wiggins will be on hand to discuss a route expected to include a double climb of Alpe d'Huez, three days before the finish in Paris, and a Mont Ventoux stage. Precisely 14 years on from the launch of the Renewal Tour, also expect plenty of promises about clean cycling and fresh starts. But we've been here before. It will take a lot more than a 30-minute press conference to rebuild cycling from the sorry wreck to which it has been reduced. Where are you Bradley Wiggins? Your sport needs you.

Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sp...#ixzz2A7Dg7GnN

[Fosterbloke]

So who 'won' those 7 titles now?

[JohnDoe]

No one. They were all on drugs.

[baitman]

So who 'won' those 7 titles now?

by the time they award it to the next placed guy, then test his "B" sample, then take it off him and pass it down the list to the next guy, etc... it might end up that the team doctor ends up winning it by default

[RichC]

Quite surprised at this, he's blanked it all until now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/20921004

Lance Armstrong to confess to doping - New York Times

Lance Armstrong is considering whether to publicly confess to his doping past, according to the New York Times.

The paper claims that the 41-year-old is close to admitting to the damning report from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) .

The report resulted in his lifetime ban from the sport.

Armstrong was found guilty of widespread doping and was also subsequently stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.

The Usada report concluded that Armstrong and his US Postal Service team had run "the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen".

The Texan, who did not co-operate with the Usada investigation, has remained silent since the sanction although he opted not to appeal the decision.

It is believed he is considering an admission because he wants to resume his athletic career, and has shown an interest in competing in triathlons.

Asked whether the American was set to come clean about his drug-taking past, his lawyer, Tim Herman, told the New York Times: "Lance has to speak for himself on that".

The newspaper claimed that Armstrong had met with Usada chief executive Ty Tygart - who called for the Texan to tell the truth last month - although Herman denied a meeting had taken place.