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Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but that's just not true, not all professional cyclists were doping. Even reading the accounts of other confessed dopers of the time such as David Miller. Or see the legal testimony of Frankie and Betsy Andreu record at the time, in court.

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.

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Sorry but it is naive to think people on the Tour were not doping. The tour speeds were simply too high to explain by human physiology. The tour speeds peaked in 2005 and the top riders all within 0.3%.

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.

To me it became obvious during the 90s that they must all be doping. It's simply not possible that a lot of top 10 guys get caught while the others don't engage in doping. This stuff is just too effective. I have seen people take steroids and putting on 30 pounds of muscle within a few months after stagnating for years of hard training. You simply can't compete cleanly against that. As far as I know the benefits of epo are also spectacular.

Well you’ve got your “hunch” that there were absolutely no clean riders but on the other hand there’s the testimony of people there at the time who’ve already been convicted.

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.

The TDF organizers have not awarded winners from the Armstrong area due to recognition that doping was widespread. That’s a documented fact and not speculation.

Wiggins is hardly clear of serious accusations about doping.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/sport/bradley-wiggins-dcms-re...

Yes I quite agree with you but that wasn't my point.

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.

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