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  1. #101
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cyber Cop View Post
    but the tour has been a very different race since Indurain won 5 in a row. I still wonder about that.

    Bjarne Riis. He used to drop back on the line he'd stretched out on a major climb, check them out and then just drop the hammer and ride away. Hell he even returned a trophy didn't he? Mind you Hinault and Lemond used to ride away from the pack too.

    edit oops Riis was after the indurain run. I was thinking he was just before. It's all a blur.
    It's not so much the model year, it's the high mileage or meterage to keep the youth of Canada happy

  2. #102
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    Quote Originally Posted by concretejungle View Post
    Yep, all those pro basketball players who were raised by single mothers in the ghetto were rolling in the dough before their first contracts.
    Yeah, just like Landis riding in those Pennsylvania hills before he became a professional. Are you really arguing that professional sports teams don't spend money on their players (or individual professional athletes on themselves) to enhance their likelihood of success? Or maybe you think they're stupid and they're just pissing it away. Perhaps you can alert them all to their folly and they'll give you a nice bonus for saving them all that money.
    Quote Originally Posted by Tippster View Post
    Sometimes I think you guys are some of the smartest people on the web, other times I wonder if you were shaken as babies.

  3. #103
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hugh Conway View Post
    versus Lance who, if doped, built an entire selfbased industry on lies?

    It's beating up the kid who told you the tooth fairy isn't real
    Picking on Landis is exactly like beating up the kid who told you the tooth fairy isn't real. That is, if he had first insisted the tooth fairy WAS REAL, sued some people to prove it was real, destroyed his marriage and friendships trying to prove it was real, then wrote a book about the tooth fairy that started with the sentence, "The tooth fairy is real!!!" Also, if he would've set up a "Tooth Fairy is Real!" Defense Fund and cashed all the fucking checks given him by dupes who wanted to believe him.

    I did like Lance's line that, "at least we know he won't be in France telling his story." You know, because there's a warrant out for his arrest there, and all.

    Floyd can take his website banner and shove it up his ass. . . .

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  4. #104
    Hugh Conway Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by JoeStrummer View Post
    Picking on Landis is exactly like beating up the kid who told you the tooth fairy isn't real. That is, if he had first insisted the tooth fairy WAS REAL, sued some people to prove it was real, destroyed his marriage and friendships trying to prove it was real, then wrote a book about the tooth fairy that started with the sentence, "The tooth fairy is real!!!" Also, if he would've set up a "Tooth Fairy is Real!" Defense Fund and cashed all the fucking checks given him by dupes who wanted to believe him.
    He steal your Michelob Ultra or something?

  5. #105
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    Quote Originally Posted by woodstocksez View Post
    Are you really arguing that professional sports teams don't spend money on their players (or individual professional athletes on themselves) to enhance their likelihood of success?
    Is that how you read it?

  6. #106
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    Quote Originally Posted by concretejungle View Post
    Is that how you read it?
    How would you like me to read it? We're talking about professional athletes (Huckbucket was bemoaning Landis' $ advantage over the poor European professional cyclists, which he contends enabled Landis to buy more/better PEDs). But even if you'd like to talk about other athletes at other levels, the statement that "isn't it true for all sports that access to money generally increases your probability of success" still stands. (Note the use of the word "generally.") Lots of parents spending $ on their budding athletic prodigies these days. No guarantee of success, but, in general, it's going to provide an advantage. I bet even most of those poor ghetto basketball players don't just play on the playground until they sign their first contract ... and I doubt participation in that other competition comes for free. If money doesn't matter, explain to me why professional and college basketball teams spend a lot of money developing those poor ghetto players.
    Quote Originally Posted by Tippster View Post
    Sometimes I think you guys are some of the smartest people on the web, other times I wonder if you were shaken as babies.

  7. #107
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    Quote Originally Posted by Big Steve View Post
    Yes, because he has parlayed his T de F wins into cultural icon status, propped up by his pompous denials of using PED's. He'll be exposed as a phony baloney, and that will greatly disappoint those who believed in him. LA is not Charles "I am not a role model" Barkley. LA is a guy who has passed himself off as a clean cut boy scout good guy, and made great effort to transcend pro cycling to become a much larger cultural force, and has profited greatly from it.
    I didn't ask if he deserves cultural icon status, but rather is winning 6 TDFs a major feat/accomplishment even if juiced, because all of the competition is equally juiced.

    I myself consider it quite an accomplishment, but I've read a fair bit on the subject and realize that pro cycling is one dirty sport. I think of Lance as more of the symptom than the disease, hate the game not the player etc.

    I don't think the average kid who looks up to Lance understands the depth of PEDs in cycling and will consider him a "cheater" (which all pro cyclists are). The lying about it serves two purposes, one is to appease cycling's governing bodies who "ban" PEDs, at least on the surface. It also lets that average kid still look up to Lance (and buy shit from his sponsors), this is the really sad part.

    Maybe a major icon being knocked down like this will help, at least minimally, clean up cycling. I sure hope so, I love to ride bikes, I love the idea of the sport, I can't stand the current state of the sport.

    Quote Originally Posted by Big Steve View Post
    And the fag drinks Michelob Ultra.
    Ok, lynch him.
    Quote Originally Posted by Tunco perfectly summarizing TGR View Post
    It is like Days of Our Lives', but with retards.

  8. #108
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    lance's real trick: beer and fruit loops
    ‎Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness

  9. #109
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    Quote Originally Posted by nick > jesus View Post
    lance's real trick: beer and fruit loops
    That would be the best commercial ever if:

    Maybe somebody other than Lance

    Better beer

    This song for the music:



    (except for it should be the original, replacements version, youtube had nada for that)
    Quote Originally Posted by Tunco perfectly summarizing TGR View Post
    It is like Days of Our Lives', but with retards.

  10. #110
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    Quote Originally Posted by dumpy View Post
    I didn't ask if he deserves cultural icon status, but rather is winning 6 TDFs a major feat/accomplishment even if juiced, because all of the competition is equally juiced.

    I myself consider it quite an accomplishment, but I've read a fair bit on the subject and realize that pro cycling is one dirty sport. I think of Lance as more of the symptom than the disease, hate the game not the player etc.

    I don't think the average kid who looks up to Lance understands the depth of PEDs in cycling and will consider him a "cheater" (which all pro cyclists are). The lying about it serves two purposes, one is to appease cycling's governing bodies who "ban" PEDs, at least on the surface. It also lets that average kid still look up to Lance (and buy shit from his sponsors), this is the really sad part.

    Maybe a major icon being knocked down like this will help, at least minimally, clean up cycling. I sure hope so, I love to ride bikes, I love the idea of the sport, I can't stand the current state of the sport.



    Ok, lynch him.
    you're nailing this subject! Pretty much agree fully with what you're saying. Drugs have been a part of cycling for as long as they've been running the tour, fuck, they used to snort coke way back in the day! it certainly isn't the athletes specifically as much as its just systemic within the culture of the sport. that doesn't make it right, but it just hasn't had a full cleaning out yet. and regardless, the top guys are still the top guys and more than likely would be if they were all clean. although I really don't want to legitimize the doping, also think realistically about what kind of physical torture is being asked of them in something like any of the grand tours...I can see why they look for any type assistance in recovery they can get, legal or not. I dunno, would love for them to all be clean, but its gonna to take one hell of a shake up for that to happen.

  11. #111
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    Lance is like Barry Bonds. Juiced as hell just like the competition, but other parts of his game contributed to make him the best athlete in his sport at the time.

    I remember reading a story about LA during one of the last TdFs he won before his retirement. It was about one of the worst climbing stages that year and how LA had been up and down that hill a dozen of times or so to familiarize himself with it and figure out where to put the hammer down and where to save his efforts. His strongest competitors hadn't been up it even once before the race.

    In a world where everybody is juiced, something else must be separating the athletes. For LA, I think rock solid preparation for the races was one of those things.
    You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.

  12. #112
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    Landis may be a loser. I don't want to believe him. I don't like him. However i said the same things about Canseco. But he was right. Over and over again. I fear Landis is telling the truth. The more I think about it the more I realize that my views on LA conflict with my views on athletes in general which are: They all are dopers. Not a single one is clean. Too much money is at stake.

  13. #113
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    Quote Originally Posted by lionelhutz View Post
    Landis may be a loser. I don't want to believe him. I don't like him. However i said the same things about Canseco. But he was right. Over and over again. I fear Landis is telling the truth. The more I think about it the more I realize that my views on LA conflict with my views on athletes in general which are: They all are dopers. Not a single one is clean. Too much money is at stake.
    This little passage pretty much sums things up...

    As the rider disqualified after winning the 2006 Tour and one who now admits to years of doping, it is easy to dismiss the Landis emails as the lies of the one who had it all and then lost it. Especially as you suspect that if offered a million dollars to stay quiet, the other Floyd Landis, the one who felt entitled to something better than the Mennonite way of life, would have accepted.

    The key to assessing the worth of the Landis accusations is to remember they do not exist in a vacuum. What Landis has put before us is not circumstantial but direct evidence. He says he was there, he witnessed it. He is not the first to offer such evidence. Lying in that tent at Gorak Shep on Thursday evening, thoughts turned to some of the forerunners.

    A July afternoon in 2003 spent at the Liverpool home of the former head soigneur of the US Postal team Emma O’Reilly. She told of her five years with the team, especially the two when only she was allowed to give Armstrong his daily massages. Once she travelled from France to the team’s headquarters in Spain to pick up what she believed was a doping product that she later handed to Armstrong in the car park of a McDonald’s outside Nice.


    She told, too, of the time she disposed of Armstrong’s used syringes, and of the time before the 1999 Tour de France when Armstrong asked her to get some make-up to hide the syringe marks on his arm. And in some detail, she described the evening on that 1999 Tour when Armstrong learnt he had tested positive for a corticoid and how with the help of two team officials, they came up with a plan to backdate a medical exemption for the offending substance. O’Reilly would later repeat all of these accusations under oath. Armstrong dismissed her as a disgruntled former employee.

    I thought, too, of an evening in October 2003 spent at the Auckland home of Stephen Swart, who rode with Armstrong for the Motorola team in 1993 and 1994. According to the New Zealander the Motorola team, frustrated by a lack of results, decided to dope to catch up with their superiors.

    Armstrong, he said, was the leading pro-doping voice in the team. Swart would later repeat these allegations under oath.

    Armstrong said Swart was a bitter former teammate.

    Then there was the afternoon in December 2003 at a hotel in Detroit when another former Motorola and US Postal teammate, Frankie Andreu, told of the seven years he had ridden with Armstrong. Once, in the early years, Armstrong had laid out on the bed of a hotel room all the pills he was taking. “Man,” Andreu said to him at the time, “you’re nuts.” Andreu also told of being in a room at Indiana University Hospital in October 1996 when he heard Armstrong tell doctors he used banned substances prior to being diagnosed with testicular cancer. Andreu’s wife, Betsy, who was also in the room, said she heard the same admission from Armstrong.

    Before the Andreus repeated these allegations under oath, Armstrong emailed Frankie and asked him to remember that his [Armstrong’s] success in cycling benefited everybody.

    I thought, too, of Mike Anderson, the personal assistant employed by Armstrong for two years, 2003 and 2004. So central was Anderson to the lives of the family that Kristin Armstrong referred to him as H2, husband number two. I met Anderson in Austin, Texas, and he told of the day that changed his view of Armstrong.

    It was the spring of 2004, the Armstrongs had separated, Lance had hooked up with the singer Sheryl Crow and was taking her to the Girona apartment for the first time. According to Anderson, who was in Girona ahead of his boss, Armstrong called and asked him to go through the apartment and “de-Kik” it [Armstrong referred to his former wife as Kik]. While doing that task, Anderson claimed he found a small bottle in a medical cabinet that had the label “Androstenin”, and after looking up the list of banned products on his laptop, he was sure his boss was doping. Their relationship was never the same after that.

    When Anderson made public his discovery, Armstrong dismissed him as a bitter former employee.

    I stayed in touch with O’Reilly, Swart, the Andreus and Anderson long after the interviews ended. And one thing always puzzled me: why would good people make up vicious lies about Armstrong? The difference with the Landis emails is that he presented them as a challenge to cycling and anti-doping authorities: what are you going to do about this?

    Long ago, cycling’s authorities decided it would not wash in public any linen belonging to Armstrong. The United States Anti-Doping Authority has taken a different line and appointed the federal investigator Jeff Novitzky to the case. Landis and Armstrong’s former wife are understood to be co-operating. The choice of Novitzky is significant because if his work in the infamous Balco case proved anything, it was that lying to federal investigators is not a good idea.

    If Novitzky concludes that US Postal did run a doping programme, Armstrong and others could face charges. Through Tailwind Sports, the US Postal team was funded by taxpayers’ money. The penalties for misusing such funds are draconian.

    The Landis emails may have been but the first chapter in a story destined to become far more interesting.
    "We don't beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully." - Randy Pausch

  14. #114
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    it pisses me off that people in the US get so up in arms over doping in cycling, a sport most people dont even watch, but they dont a shit about the fact that damn near every baseball player is roided up
    ‎Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness

  15. #115
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    Quote Originally Posted by runethechamp View Post
    Lance is like Barry Bonds. Juiced as hell just like the competition. . . .
    There's evidence to suggest that Bonds and LA were juiced better than their competition, with the latest greatest juice. Bonds had Balco. LA had Dr. Ferrari. Not all juices and juicers are created equally.

    Speaking of Balco, Victor Conte, like Canseco and Landis, ardently claimed for years that his clients were clean and, after years of such claims he confessed that he was pedalling PED's. Like Canseco, Conte's confession was proven to be true.

  16. #116
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    Quote Originally Posted by Big Steve View Post
    There's evidence to suggest that Bonds and LA were juiced better than their competition, with the latest greatest juice. Bonds had Balco. LA had Dr. Ferrari. Not all juices and juicers are created equally.
    A lot of people have gone to Ferrari though.

    Isn't his skill not so much the effectiveness of his doping regiments vs others, but his ability to time things out in order to avoid detection?
    Quote Originally Posted by Tunco perfectly summarizing TGR View Post
    It is like Days of Our Lives', but with retards.

  17. #117
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    Quote Originally Posted by dumpy View Post
    I think of Lance as more of the symptom than the disease, hate the game not the player etc.
    This pretty much goes to the heart of the matter.

    There's two kinds of douchebags in pro cycling.

    There are the doper-scum douchebags and the dope-organizing-scum douchebags. You have a situation where riders are pretty much just trying to live the dream in a crooked sport and come up the ranks as young men in crooked teams where the team owners and directors make doping easy and not doping a career limiting decision. As long as riders who get caught keep their mouths shut and go along with the charade that doping is matter of rogue individuals working in isolation, they do their time and are welcomed back, and business goes on as usual. The team owners and directors get to play "heads I win, tails you lose" - they run doped teams, the rider takes the fall, and the rider cooperates or gets shat out of the sport. That's why the first line of defense against uncooperative riders is always "He's just a bitter man without any credibility. Who would listen to some guy who doped and lied about it?" This is the omerta - the code of silence. Shut up, do your time and come back to the big bucks or go paint houses for a living. It is created and enforced by the team principals; the riders can play or leave the sport.

    Evidence that Armstrong was ordinary doper-scum long ago passed the point where it strains credulity to think he rode clean.

    But that's not the point here. What Landis has done is put Armstrong, part owner of Tailwind Sports, manager of his hand-picked employee Bruyneel, squarely into the dope-organizing-scum camp.

    Running an organized dope ring - procuring dope for other riders and instructing them how to use it, hiring employees who are complicit in doing the same, that's a whole different kettle of fish. Even if he were doing it with some funny sounding foreign sponsor on his jersey it'd suck to be him and have the Feds take up residence in his ass for the next few months, but oh man, he did it with it a Federal agency on his jersey. He's in deep shit, and if his ex-wife or any of about a dozen other riders sing, he's likely cooked.

    What cycling fans have learned over the last 15 years or so is that while the governing bodies can make some definite though limited headway against doper-scum but it is effectively powerless against dope-organizing-scum. The most significant investigation was Operation Puerto - where Jesus Manzano played the Landis role, triggered a Spanish criminal case that took down Manolo Saiz (and damn near half the peleton). The next biggest scandal, Festina, was also a police investigation conducted entirely outside the national cycling federations and the UCI.

    Whatever Floyd's sin (and they are many) breaking the omerta is a rare and very good thing for pro cycling.

  18. #118
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    I keep getting stuck on why on earth Lance would come back to this if anyone had anything other than circumstantial evidence and hearsay. I'm no fanboy and I seriously doubt he was clean while everyone else doped at US Postal. But he can make money in other ways besides sitting on a saddle 6 hours a day and all of this rattling and humming would've died away if he had just stayed in Aspen impregnating his model girlfriend and riding in charity rides. And he had to know all of this.
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  19. #119
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    Quote Originally Posted by nick > jesus View Post
    it pisses me off that people in the US get so up in arms over doping in cycling, a sport most people dont even watch, but they dont a shit about the fact that damn near every FOOTBALL player is roided up
    I fixed it for you.

    Your view on baseball players is significantly jaded. You're stuck in time 5 years ago. If you don't believe me, look at the numbers players are putting up these days... nothing close to what was being accomplished in the 90s and early '00s. I'll bet the percentage of baseball players on steroids (not counting HGH, which shouldn't really count anyways) is very, very low.

  20. #120
    Hugh Conway Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by JoeStrummer View Post
    I keep getting stuck on why on earth Lance would come back to this if anyone had anything other than circumstantial evidence and hearsay. I'm no fanboy and I seriously doubt he was clean while everyone else doped at US Postal. But he can make money in other ways besides sitting on a saddle 6 hours a day and all of this rattling and humming would've died away if he had just stayed in Aspen impregnating his model girlfriend and riding in charity rides. And he had to know all of this.
    Better to go down in the saddle than end up like LeMond

  21. #121
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    ^ ^ ^ You mean hanging out in his 5000 square foot log house in the Yellowstone Club?

    My theory is that LA got back in the cycling game with the hope that he could win clean or sorta clean and then feel good about himself. OTOH, he's a very weird guy, so I've really go not idea what goes on in his head.

  22. #122
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    Quote Originally Posted by JoeStrummer View Post
    I keep getting stuck on why on earth Lance would come back to this if anyone had anything other than circumstantial evidence and hearsay. I'm no fanboy and I seriously doubt he was clean while everyone else doped at US Postal. But he can make money in other ways besides sitting on a saddle 6 hours a day and all of this rattling and humming would've died away if he had just stayed in Aspen impregnating his model girlfriend and riding in charity rides. And he had to know all of this.

    while lance could make money doing other things, nothing he could do would give him the fame and profile the professional cycling does.

    Pretty much everything he does is driven by ego. seems pretty simple to me.
    ‎Preserving farness, nearness presences nearness in nearing that farness

  23. #123
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    I'm going on vacation in a couple weeks. Can someone stop by and make sure my refrigerator stays running?
    "Have fun, get a flyrod, and give the worm dunkers the finger when you start double hauling." ~Lumpy

  24. #124
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    Quote Originally Posted by nick > jesus View Post
    while lance could make money doing other things, nothing he could do would give him the fame and profile the professional cycling does.

    Pretty much everything he does is driven by ego. seems pretty simple to me.
    Right, I get the ego bit of this. Anyone whose comeback is accompanied by the slogan "Hope Rides Again" is not without ego.

    I believe there are no grounds for federal prosecution here, and he knows this. Even if there are grounds for charges, which I don't see, the statute of limitations would've expired in most of this stuff.They can trot out Jeff from BALCO all they want but he doesn't have a hammer. And I think Lance knows this. So if all he is exposed to is the same cacophany of innuendo and allegations he was before he retired, why not come back?
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    I predict a massive influx of little yellow rubber wrist bands into North America's landfills and a sudden drop in donations to livestrong.

    Somehow, this seems ironic:

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