The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_LeMond_anti-doping_stan...
Talking to competitive cyclists in the US at the time, everybody knew everyone was doping because it had become physically impossible to do that speed without doping. The top 10 racers were within 0.3% of Armstrong’s time in the 2005 race. They were all doping and several have had their results stricken.
Armstrong was the fall guy and object lesson for a general cleanup of the sport because nobody liked him. The rest was hypocrisy.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_s...
If we give credit and admiration to leaders when they do good, as is pretty common here, we should give them analogous considerations when they do bad.
This is different to most sports where you are less likely to grossly manipulate the factors contributing to optimal performance with PEDs. Or at least not be able to manipulate them enough to be out of range of talented non-users.
I think that many sports just aren't looking very hard for dopers. We know that steroid and HGH use has been rife in baseball for many years, because the MLB was forced to implement a serious testing regime after Jose Canseco blew the whistle. Golfers would likely see a similar benefit in terms of explosive power, but the PGA has the bare minimum of anti-doping controls. A suspiciously large number of golfers have returned from the winter break with an extra 15lbs of muscle and 10 yards on their drive. Soccer places high demands on aerobic endurance so players could benefit enormously from EPO use, but FIFA's testing regime is remarkably weak.
Why do you think this dualism should exist?
There are certain qualities we admire and think make a good person.
There are other qualities that we detest and think make a bad person.
Should we really deem someone worse simply for the fact that he/she previously held admirable qualities? Shouldn't we just judge him based on the negative qualities, in of themselves?
These qualities don't make you good person automaticaly, they oftentimes make you an asshole. Plus environment where everyone wants to he sen as leader tend to be disfunctional.
Lots of people weren't doping. In fact the vast majority of humanity wasn't doping. Many of those non-dopers may have been competitive had cycling not been full of dopers. The cheaters drive the honest out of the sport.
Sitting in the slip stream of such a huge bunch of doped up riders would be a major energy saver for clean riders and naturally they too would post better times.
He was far worse than just cyclist who doped. Most others just doped, cycled and kept heir head down.
Armstrong was toxic bully and leader of the doping world who attempted to destroy other peoples life's. He crossed lines others did not cross. His gangsterism and strong-arm tactics against his accusers over the years deserve no sympathy.
He is the person who ruined cycling for the rest of the world. Tour de France no longer holds the respect that it used it.
It’s like professional body building now. Everyone dopes, the bodies are no longer natural and going into freak category. Tons of heart attacks and we’ve accepted it’s the price of the sport.
I don't think he's claiming he's the first. I think he's claiming he's the worst.
Depends on what you mean by 'sport'. Only wordrecords being broken may require doping. Competing at elite levels in any sport, including cycling, requires immense talent, perseverence and skill. Not to mention winning the genetic lottery (depending on the sport).
>Tons of heart attacks and we’ve accepted it’s the price of the sport.
That sucks, but which sport is without injury? Baseball pitchers get their arms jacked up, basketball players get their knees messed up, football.. no comment, MMA no comment..
One could have said that about the 1998 tour de France and the massive doping scandal. What Armstrong did was popularize road cycling in the early to mid 2000s for the American domestic market. Most of the benefit ultimately went to bike manufacturers and accessory sales. Look at the growth in sales for Trek (inextricably linked with Armstrong during this period, and LA is a trek shareholder).
I don't think it it considerably more or less popular in Western Europe than it has ever been. Nuat about the same.
To everyone else with some moral compass, his crimes cast a long, dark shadow.
Hardly any money it raised went to hospitals or research. Paid for a lot of nice private jet flights though.
Bradley Wiggins was greatly respected and admired in France and the rest of Europe, despite coming from a traditionally non-cycling country and dominating the Tour de France. Chris Froome, his successor as leader of Team Sky, often rides to a chorus of boos and jeers.
The difference is in spirit. Wiggins showed a respect for the heritage and tradition of the sport. He won with humility and grace. He was funny and self-deprecating. He turned up at amateur time trial events for the fun of it. He poured his heart and soul into the 2014 Paris-Roubaix and came ninth. He rode the Zesdaagse Vlaanderen-Gent and hung around afterwards to give autographs to drunken Belgians. He loved the sport more than he craved victory.
Froome is too efficient, too slick, too calculating. There's no drama about him, nothing to empathise with, just a relentless machine that stares at his stem and cranks out the watts. There's nothing about him that evokes the childish joy of cycling, the freedom of two wheels and your own power, of riding with no hands and showing off to your friends and skinning your knee.
The problem with Armstrong wasn't that he was an American or that he won a lot, it was that he clearly cared more about winning than about the sport. He was cold and hard and calculating in a sport that cherishes playfulness and vulnerability.
Cadel Evans remains extremely popular in Europe despite beating them all.
It's why he was the perfect fall guy; everybody was cheering that, finally, he got his.
The way you word you response it looks like you are implying that it was his personality.
Me and others are telling is telling you that it was his __actions__. His shady character was probably why he became such a gangster, but that's beside the point. We are cheering his demise not because he was the right guy and the blame is correctly attributed to the central figure. There was no other party who deserves the blame more than Armstrong.
His actions when hiding his doping usage were far worse than his cheating and doping.
Read the Tyler Hamilton book ("The Secret Race"). That's the book which really brought down Armstrong.
In it he makes clear how much better organized the US Postal Service team was than anyone else (except maybe T-Mobile and ONCE).
When he left and went to Phonak he was on his own and had to organize his own doping (which went pretty badly).
Yes it's true that there were no clean winners in that era, but there were clean riders. Christophe Bassons' book talks about it a lot, but Wikipedia has a decent summary[1].
It's also worth noting that there are no real allegations of drug use against Pereiro, Sastre, Andy Schleck, Evans and Nibali, who all rode against Armstrong or immediately after him.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Bassons#1999_Tour
Yes, of them Cadel Evans (8th, 11:55 behind) and Óscar Pereiro (10th, 16:04 behind) probably weren't doping. Christophe Moreau (11th, 16:04) has always claimed he'd stopped doping after leaving Festina in 2002 (and this results kind of back this up).
I'm not sure where you get the idea that "they all put in times that have never been matched".
It's true that Armstrong's average speed for that Tour was the highest ever. That's not very useful - the route changes every year so you can't really compare it.
It is more useful to look at times on long hill climbs to mountain top finishes. Unfortunately the best example in the 2005 Tour (the Courchevel stage) doesn't have widely documented times, so we can't compare.
Something like Alpe d’Huez is instructive. You'll note that around the 41 minute+ range you start seeing riders from the 1980s, who can't have been on EPO (since it wasn't invented). It's true that Laurent Fignon was banned for drug use, but the amphetamines he used are completely different to the oxygen vector doping (EPO and variants) used after 1991.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Tour_de_France#General_cl...
[2] http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/fastest-cycling-time...
They were all able to name professional cyclists of the time who were known by them not to be doping.
People disliked Armstrong not just because he cheated but because he did things like force other members of his team to to dope and fired those that wouldn't. At the same attacking their reputations so that they couldn't blow the whistle on him.
Armstrong wasn't the fall guy because he was famous he was the fall guy because he was the instigator.
I’ve done amateur cycling racing in 35+ categories and there’s doping even among Cat2 riders today. That’s how deeply doping is embedded in cycling.
If David Miller says he wasn’t approached about doping until his form started to flag that would indicate that there was a time before he doped.
Miller, Hamilton and Landis have all spoken about the riders they cheated of wins.
_My_ hunch is that if they believed that everyone riding professionally back then was doping they’d say so and they haven’t.
They might not have been in the top ten but they were still riding and still clean.
Wiggins is hardly clear of serious accusations about doping.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/sport/bradley-wiggins-dcms-re...
To clarify, there there were many dopers but there were definitely _some_ clean riders during the Armstrong years.
They haven't re-awarded Yellow Jerseys for those years because they can't properly identify who was clean and who wasn't.
That's not the same thing as saying that all riders were dirty. Even if it's just one lowly domesticate right at the back.
To suggest that every single rider on every single team was doping and that that somehow made the playing field level is just incorrect. We have the testimony of convicted dopers who say that at least some others riders were clean to back that up. They were aware of the difficulties and stress that they were putting on the clean riders.
Other senior members of the US postal team and its continuations were highly complicit, Hincapie in particular.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#...
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/sports/lance-armstrong...
Maybe in cycling, it was the first, maybe. State actors have been running these types of doping programs at the Olympic level for a long time.
I'm not saying that a great deal of doping didn't exist before the US Postal system made a systematical scientific practice out of it. The 1990s was rife with doping but on a more individual level. What Armstrong and Bruyneel did was organize it, protect it, engage their own scientific analysis resources to find ways to get around in-event and outside-of-competition doping controls, etc. And then bully, lie to, threaten both their own teammates and everyone outside of their inner circle.
More info on the team director for US Postal/Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Bruyneel
The concerted campaign to slander and ruin the lives of those who got in his way or called him out for his actions, that's the thing that made me lose respect for him as a person.
I've probably mentioned this here before, but Nicole Cooke's retirement statement [1] is worth reading. Every medal won by a doper is theft, no less.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-r...
I never saw anyone claiming Chris Horner was doping. He was not competitive internationally until his last years on the circuit when doping use somewhat subsided.
Chris Horner is the victim. In a better world it's Chris Horner who won Tour de France.
Sure, you can get it. Where the "Advanced" part comes in is passing cat1 level blood and urine tests taken at random times in random places.
It’s not expensive once the infrastructure exists, the marginal cost is pretty small.
In the redacted documents from the USADA investigation of Lance Armstrong, several people are not identified still, rider 15 is never identified but his name is redacted out. Because they used a font that is not uniform width per character, there has been a lot of speculation over the years that rider 15 is Chris Horner because a.) his name fits the redacted space, and the parts of the characters USADA did not redact match the letters in Chris Horner, b.) the background described for rider 15 match Chris Horner.
Many people came to this conclusion separately. Someone who actually didn't dope and raced against Horner in his first prime wrote a lot about it - a sample http://stevetilford.com/2013/10/24/unbelievable-chris-horner...
There were lots of victims to various degree of the Armstrong era. Even on USPS people like Frankie Andreu were to some degree victims.
Chris Horner wasn't one of them.
Chris "Redacted" Horner[1]?
The guy who "won" the Vuelta at 41? The guy who joined pro-continental teams only to have their race invitations withdrawn?
You can bet there are a lot of claims that Horner was a doper, and many claims that he was one of the worst.
Maybe Jonathan Vaughters's Tweet about him shows the utter contempt the pro peleton feels for Horner. Maybe Francisco Mancebo is hated more on the US circuit, but probably not.
[1] https://cyclingtips.com/2018/04/commentary-a-partially-subje... (read the comments if the "redacted" doesn't make sense, or Google "Rider 15")
Doping is not a forgiveable offence in professional sport, imo – I advocate for lifetime bans in all sports – but as a reformer Millar has convinced me he is genuine; unlike Armstrong, who is utterly unrepentant. I loath Armstrong for what he has done to the sport of cycling. I'd have a beer with Millar. Two even.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6797630-racing-through-t...
It is a curious law that he used and fortunate that the sponsor happened to be the government, had they had another sponsor, e.g. AmGen, then they would not have had this legal route.
He just had to be made an example of, by people he had pissed off. And he was brought down by his own disgruntled teammates. Not by a + test.
It's widely known that athletes at the highest level have encountered people who use roids. If you just don't inject yourself to the gills with it and cycle out, you stand a good chance of passing the test.
You can use it and compete with the rest, or you can choose to not use it and watch the others run past you in a pace you thought was supernatural.
Bikers used to drink alcohol and climb the hills in the Tour all the time. Is alcohol not performance enhancing when it dulls the throbbing pain in your legs?
Bring those cyclists down too. Then you'll have everyone's support.
Make a league for people who want to use roids, and for the ones who don't. It'll multiply your revenue 2x, organisers.
We don't need to "bring down" those who drink alcohol. Drinking alcohol makes you slower not faster.
The reason that we don't just let cyclists like Armstrong just use any "supplements" they want in a special league is because they then pressurise their domestiques to do the same. This is what Armstrong tried to do with Frankie Andreu.
There are serious long and short term health implications to that, see Tyler Hamilton's description of taking a "bad" blood transfusion in The Secret Race. Many professional cyclists died from "mysterious" night time heart attacks. Some just young neo-pros. Can you really say that they understood the risks of over thickened blood?
I think we'd all be happier if Armstrong and the other cheats found a country where it's legal to dope and set up a dirty league there and left the UCI sanctioned events clean.
Of course the dopers would then have to contend with a new generation of cheats trying to sneak eBikes into the drugs only league.
For a small set of sports, alcohol was on the banned substance list until last year (https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...)
I think the fact that it makes you more relaxed is (thought to be) performance-enhancing in sports such as archery and shooting.
It also was on the list in airplane, motorboat, and car racing. I think that was because of safety concerns.
It still may be forbidden in archery in some competitions (https://worldarchery.org/news/153442/statement-wadas-withdra...)
though I'm curious what sorts of nootropics or mental alertness drugs a grandmaster level player might be tempted to use. Adderal?
I add “possibly” because the abstract mentions two effects: losing more time due to running out of time and playing better, and doesn’t discuss when one of them might be better.
I wonder if beta blockers have a use in chess for some players.
Armstrong wasn't alone in doping, but he thoroughly deserved to be made an example of. He posed an existential threat to the sport of cycling and the mistakes that allowed his reign must never be repeated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Simeoni#Feud_with_Lanc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Bassons#1999_Tour
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2013/08/27/lance-arm...
Now, even the figures by WADA are not perfect (since women require lower levels of the agent to raise performance and might just not get caught) but I feel we should discuss the incentives for doping. I sure as hell don't want teenagers making stupid decisions about their health for the prospect of becoming a millionaire celebrity before they're 30.