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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I saw a listing a while back of the number of winners of the Tour De France that had been disqualified for drug releated cheating - I think it was fully half since 1990.

This is not one bad apple. This is an entire orchard.

At some point, where the proven drug users are merely fractions of percents ahead of the others, (The Tour is usually won by dozens of seconds over hundreds of hours of racing) should we not think that no-one can compete at that level without drug use. And just try a reboot. Or stop the whole thing.

I am totally in favour of encouraging fitness - but most olympic level athletes are frankly ignoring their bodies screaming at them to stop. cf the biographies of any marathon runner.

That seems unhealthy

This is the closest article I can find to my memory : https://www.smh.com.au/sport/cycling/tour-de-france-the-hall...

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From what I understand its a cultural thing, and accepted practice until recently. Essentially the racing circuit is too intense to survive A. Without informal rules like in the article. B. Drugs so you can carry on with minor injuries etc.

I suppose you could differentiate between some domestique in the 70s not making much money, needing to make a living and taking stronger pain killers to carry on cycling, and a modern well funded international team.

That's without getting into the morality of it. I hope that culture has now changed.

Cyclists have been using drugs for a long time -- Tom Simpson was doped to the gills when he died on Mont Ventoux in 1967. EPO, HGH, blood doping, etc. may only be worth a few percent, but at the elite level a few percent matter. For cycling, you can look at the power output on Tour de France climbs before and after they developed an effective test for EPO.

Elite level anything is unhealthy, because you're pushing the limits of what humans can accomplish, at the expense of everything else.

I don't believe there is even a single person competing at the top percentile of professional sports (household names) that is doing so without one or more forms of artificial assistance such as EPO, HGH, blood doping, etc.

I wonder, is this a controversial statement?

Controversial? Yes.

Wrong? I can't speak for all sports, but I know an ex-professional cyclist. Doping is less prevalent in the States than in Europe, but even in the States you see amateurs doing it occasionally. Plenty of Euros dope, but more ride the fine line of "therapeutic use" exemptions for drugs that just happen to improve their performance by a percent or two.

They're not all doping, but at least in endurance sports, many are.

> Doping is less prevalent in the States than in Europe,

That is certainly a strong statement, seeing that Armstrong, Landis or Tyler Hamilton are all from the States. Yes, most of the European riders are also not clean, but there are huge exceptions, like France.

I was a bit hesitant to write it, but that was just my friend's experience on the MTB circuit over the last 15-20 years. US Postal and Armstrong were awful and shameless, but I think they were an outlier among American pro teams. Also, there's less money in mountain biking, and it's not really a team sport, so the kind of organized team doping Armstrong created is much less likely to happen.

Anyways, I don't follow cycling as closely as I used to, in part because the pervasive doping was just so discouraging. Hopefully some combination of out-of-competition testing and biological passport will finally make the sport relatively clean.

What is your commentary on the article specifically, here? That both riders were probably cheating anyway?

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