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Comment by lom | Hacker News Reader

I started reading this, but then realized it was almost 20000 words long.. how much is there to say?

He faked his career, then got called out after some time, this topic really isn’t worth all the effort that was put into it

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I think the point was how many other lives and how much money was affected by just one person and to unravel it.

I mean there are several books and movies written about Armstrong and the like, cycling is full of drama and people apparently like it because Armstrong has a huge fanbase and is still very successful/wealthy despite all his exposed corruption and doping.

I am sure there are plenty of serious amateurs who are clean and honest but to this day I cannot watch professional cycling of any kind, they are all doping and cheating one way or another just using the excuse "well everyone else is doing it".

(adding link to reddit analysis just to be useful https://old.reddit.com/r/Velo/duplicates/uegizk )

When I read statements like this, I always wider what people think is happening in other sports, especially those where there is much more money involved. I mean the US professional sports don't even have proper testing. Baseball has had plenty of steroid abuse, for basketball one only need to look at how players look after a year of playing in the NBA (Dirk Nowitzki was a tall skinny boy when in Germany, he gained >20kg of muscle mass in the first season of the NBA). Soccer has had plenty of cases where games of referees and players trying to throw games, for betting or other bribes.

The thing is that cycling has just not enough money/influence in contrast to other sports. Just one example, in operacion puerto, which exposed blood doping of many cyclist. When there were strong indications that many of the so far unidentified blood conserves belonged to Real Madrid players, political influence quickly led to the whole investigation being cancelled.

I'm not defending doping in cycling, but it is extremely naive to believe that sports with several orders of magnitude more money involved dont have rampant doping.

One of Armstrong's team mates from US Postal days wrote a tell all biography after he was banned for doping: Tyler Hamilton the secret race, in it (paraphrasing) he said he saw athletes from every professional sport in the waiting room of the private doctor who was doing his doping.

I read Tyler’s book and don’t recall him saying that quite so directly. It is surely true though.

I met him at an unsanctioned/non-UCI race he showed up at during his ban but before he came clean. Weird experience, he obviously won the race and most people were supportive but it was such a weird scene. You could practically feel the tormented aura of guilt/shame/embarrassment coming off him. IIRC he had won that race as an amateur prior to doping as well.

I don't recall reading that part either. The book is a great book though, not just for the doping part but also because it gives a very interesting behind the scenes view of many iconic cycling moments of that time.

It has been a while since I read the book but skimming it now I can only see the Spanish police unofficially linked tennis players and soccer teams to the Spanish doctor they were using.

I maybe misremembering or misquoting.

> Baseball has had plenty of steroid abuse,

Most people to my knowledge think the exposure of this damaged baseball seriously, and maybe irreparably. It at least made fandom more local; World Series ratings are half what they were 20 years ago during the bulk of the steroid frenzy.

All of the friends of mine that have competed in competition level E-Sports have each told me individually at some point or another that literally - every - professional player uses either Adderall or methamphetamine during tournaments

Extend it to every professional sport. Cycling was one which tried doing something about the problem and paid a heavy price in popularity, funding and public perception. Other major sports won't repeat this mistake.

Soccer for example has none significant doping controls and it's obvious that every top player is doped to the gills. There is probably not a single clean one in top clubs. NBA is just a joke as well as is tennis.

About the only sport org other than cycling that tried to do something about the problem is the UFC. Before/after photos of some fighters are just amazing (they are way smaller/less muscular after introduction of doping protocols) even though you can still get away with some doping (some is difficult to detect or very short lived).

> I cannot watch professional cycling of any kind, they are all doping and cheating one way

You're missing out on some awesome displays of athleticism because of this wrong idea. At the top level doping has been stamped out more than in any other sport.

On the other hand I could name some huge mainstream sport associations that don't follow the WADA code and implement suspiciously lax doping controls, but perhaps that would derail the thread.

speaking about doping - as Russian sportsmen are mostly banned internationally due to the war, the top Russian sports officials have been publicly talking about "taking the Russian sport to the next level" by removing various supposedly stifling limits enforced by the international sport organizations. Officially those officials supposedly meant various technical limits and rules in various sports, while one can only wonder about what they would do with doping now that nobody is really watching (and given what they have already done when WADA was watching), and as they got that huge propaganda task of "taking to the next level" what they have to deliver on. So, get ready for Russian sportsmen say running 100m in 5 sec. with pure doping in their veins instead of blood :)

'Durianrider' (cyclist) on youtube will tell you that ALL top sportsmen, in ALL sports are on the juice.

> still very successful/wealthy despite all his exposed corruption and doping

He would be broke if he hadn't hit the jackpot with a $100k Uber investment.

What's the big problem with doping anyway? Even now, everyone is doping, it doesn't seem to be causing huge problems.

Wouldn't it be safer for everyone if it was all out in the open?

There's some scary stories from 80s when EPO usage was essentialy untested, teams and individuals pushed it to such extremes that athletes had to wake up in the middle of the night to stop their heart rate dropping too low as their blood was so viscous cardiac arrest was a real concern.

If it's permitted, then it becomes obligatory. In sports where doping was tacitly permitted, chances are that it was unthinkable for a player to even be a contender for the elite level without doping.

If obligatory, then it starts killing people. Consider football and concussions.

And then there's marketing. A certain amount of risk is accepted in sports, and is part of what makes it attractive to fans and sponsors. But when someone actually dies at an event, it overshadows everything else that happens. If that becomes a regular occurrence, fans and sponsors who pay for the coverage will begin to lose interest.

Part of the reason for rules in sports is to make a sport interesting for the fans, e.g., by preventing each match from being decided by a single factor that is predictable ahead of time. Financial sports already have financial rules. Pharmacological sports need pharmacological rules.

It's already obligatory if you want to compete at the top level.

> chances are that it was unthinkable for a player to even be a contender for the elite level without doping.

Which is really the case for most sports today.

Well I enjoyed it. And to some degree (as I've said elsewhere on this thread and as the author himself kind of indicates), in order to appreciate the scale of the deceptions, you have to see the whole picture. And getting there takes some effort. But yeah, if I weren't reading this for entertainment I would want to be paid, for sure.

There's a lot more to it than that. If you're curious, you can skip to further sections in the article to find out more - he manipulated and harmed lots of people and his conduct is way more complex than just one faked career.

Yeah he kinda screwed over an entire publicly traded company. He made millions as a very under qualified CEO on a fake CV. He was a real scum bag to a lot of people well before his fake pro cycling career. He lives in a million dollar house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods outside DC, renovated and paid for by local cyclist who thought they were buying from a real expert. That is before he got all the COVID stimulus money. He’s doing quite well, and other than having to reinvent himself, he really didn’t lose much except a temporary boost to his ego. The lesson here is faking it and taking shortcuts seems to work well for white men in America.

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