Posted on 07/03/2010 2:56:15 PM PDT by LibWhacker
As the Tour de France begins, Floyd Landis, once a teammate of 7-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, has issued new allegations against the cycling great. In fact, Landis called doping in cycling "systematic," in a Wall Street Journal report.
Floryd Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France win over doping, then fought the allegation for four years. He even lied about his actions in his 2007 book, "Positively False," in which he also said he had no evidence that Lance Armstrong had used performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). However, he has since changed his tune, and not only says that Armstrong used PEDs, but that in the WSJ report, detailed incidents, including one from 2004.
Armstrong has steadily denied any use of PEDs, whether at the Tour de France or elsewhere. In May of this year, Armstrong said, "Floyd lost his credibility a long time ago. We have a person who has been under oath several times with a completely different version, written a book with a completely different version, someone that took money. He said he has no proof. It is his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand and we like our credibility."
Lance Armstrong is seeking his 8th Tour de France victory, and is riding this year for Team Radio Shack. He earlier announced that win or lose, this was his final ride in the Tour de France. Armstrong last won in 2005. He's 38, which is fairly ancient in cycling.
In addition to implicating Lance Armstrong, in great detail in the WSJ, story, Landis also brought up the U.S. Postal Service team director Johan Bruyneel in the WSJ report. In 2004, upset when his carbon-fiber bike snapped, Landis investigated and by calling the team's equipment sponsors, determined that a number of bikes, 60 to be exact, were not accounted for. Landis discovered that some of the bikes were being sold for cash, which . Bruyneel told him was used to fund the team's doping program.
All of this is one person's word against another's. As Lance Armstrong enters his final Tour de France, many still believe him to be a cycling god, and it is unlikely any past evidence will be discovered that ties him to PEDs, at least forensically.
Meanwhile, Landis sits on the sidelines of the Tour de France, watching with envy.
When you’re talking about other riders and even officials being involved in the cheating, you’re talking about the entire system being corrupted- systemic.
I have thought and said that LA was different, because he was able to remold his body specifically for cycling, after he went through his cancer treatments. I have seen such a thing before, a friend who had, through illness, lost 50 lbs, gained back 80 lbs of solid muscle because his body was in a super anabolic state (naturally).. but anyways, if it turns out that LA actually DID do stuff, I wont be surprised.
And for those who talk about all the testing done, the REAL money in drugs for athletes is reserved for the chemists who can figure out ways to MASK the usage of the PED. I used to know such a guy, via the internet that is.. was arrested in a national story...
C'mon, everyone, and I mean *EVERYONE*, in cycling or not, knows that Lance has been busted by the Fwench with banned substances in his hotel room.
Soap and deodorant...
Cheers!
You're absolutely right, I should have known that!
Evidently the Floydster wasn't a very good student was he? He got busted......
If Lance is doping it could just be that his drugs & his dosing are a couple of years ahead of the rest of the peleton. That would account for the “positve” that was alleged when the French retested an old Armstrong blood sample that should have been destroyed (but wasn’t).
So Landis is really saying that everybody was good enough at doping to beat the tests, but that Landis was too stupid to do so. And apparently so are dozens of other riders who get busted.
My favorite part of the Landis fairy tale is how the team stole 60 of their own bicycles and sold them on the black market to fund their drug habits.
You have to ask yourself, How does Landis have NEW allegations?
I mean, even if you presumed Landis would ever tell the truth (which i don’t, not after defending him when he insisted he was innocent, and being burned when he finally confessed), how can he have NEW allegations about what happened years ago?
My point: Landis came out last year and made claims against Armstrong. So, why didn’t he reveal THESE allegations at that point? Why did he hide some of the things he knew, once he was “telling all”?
It’s bad enough to be asked to believe that a known liar is now “coming clean”. But to be asked to believe, 6 months later, that he really DIDN’T ‘come clean’ before, but NOW is “coming clean”, is too much to bear.
I expect that every 4 months, Landis will tell us MORE things that Armstrong and others did, in hopes of keeping his name in the spotlight. How else can you explain why Landis didn’t tell us these new allegations months ago, except that he is making them up to get in the news?
Well, in all fairness to Landis, I had a friend who was hooked on crack who actually stole his mother's cadillac and gave it to his supplier in order to pay his drug bill..................
That just shows ya how extreme a druggie will go to pay for his habit............. While the above is true, it was meant as sarcasm.
Landis is nuts.......
After every stage of every professional bike race, the winner and random riders are tested by the race organizers and local jurisdiction legal authorities (at least in Europe). Given the prize money from even a single stage win, a positive drug test is equivalent to grand theft. LA has been on the French top 10 list for so long that I think he is probably the most tested individual in the world (you realize that France hasn't had a TdF winner in 20+ years?!)
Is it possible that LA has doped himself to win - I cannot (and neither can anyone else) prove a negative. Doping is a game of cat&mouse with the testing always a step behind the latest doping ability. However, even with the supposed positive test on a multi-year old LA blood test, there have been sufficient reasonable doubts about the honesty of the testers and the testing conditions to allow a first year law student to get it thrown out of any unbiased court!
A final quick statement about LA. he first won the Tour in 1999 when his US Postal Team was poor and barely in the top class of teams. 1999 was the year when Ulrich and Pantani were serving drug suspensions and so there was strong testing even then by the race itself. I cannot, myself, believe that he could do all of this for this long without being detected.
It’s like the commercial and they ask Lance “what are you on?” and his response “my bike 6 hours a day!”. Lance has won too many times for it to be drug related, Floyd totally crapped out and then made a remarkable comeback for one victory that was taken away.Floyd cheated. If Lance has a substance that he uses,it must be legal because the French despised him for years but never could prove any thing.Now they appreciate what he has done for their race.
As there is no evidence for your “quite clear” opinion, it’s hard to see how you define “fantasy world”.
In order for you to be correct, several improbable things must be true:
- Lance Armstrong has cheated for years, and no riders other than the occasional known cheater years later have ever thought to say anything, even though many of them hate Armstrong.
- Lance Armstrong has access to drugs that nobody else has which is what made him better than the rest (your “just as good, if not better than the cheaters”).
- Armstrong has managed to fool every drug test ever done on him, even though he is tested randomly, constantly, and in many times prejudicially. The only drug test ever to indicate anything was on an uncontrolled sample of old blood, and that wasn’t conclusive.
- Armstrong has also managed to pay off or cajole the silence of the doctors who developed this wonder-drug, the people who supplied it, the supposed testers who lied about the occasional bad result, his entire set of teammates who were taking drugs with him, and apparently the wife who he cheated on and left for Cheryl Crow.
- (OR, he did this cheating for years without the knowledge of his wife).
On the other hand, to believe Armstrong, I just need to believe in one seemingly improbable thing, which isn’t really improbable if you understand probability:
- Lance Armstrong managed to be better than every other rider, even cheaters, for 7 years.
The reason that’s not really improbable is that each year, SOMEONE has to be the best rider. It was also likely that at some point, someone would put enough effort in that they might well be a dominant rider for years in a row.
If it hadn’t been Armstrong, it might have been Contador, or one of the other riders. And whatever rider it was, the same “improbability” would be applied to suggest they must have been using drugs.
Armstrong didn’t just suddenly get better. He had cancer, and as a result, focused intense effort on getting better, which taught him focus for the intense effort of winning the Tour De France. He was always good at climbing, and the rest is teachable. He didn’t need the money, nor is he like most european riders, so he focused on the single race, saving his body.
Sure, he COULD be taking drugs. I don’t think there is something especially nobel about Armstrong. But you don’t need drugs to explain his success, and in the absense of any evidence whatsoever, and with the wealth of evidence (drug tests) and lack of contrary evidence (the testimony of a single reliable source), it is a fantasy to be certain about something none of us has the ability to know.
Landis is an entirely unreliable source who lied under oath, and as recently as a couple of years ago was still insisting he had no evidence Armstrong had used drugs.
Which itself points out a flaw in the argument: Landis was trying very hard to convince the world that he was innocent. The last thing he could risk was to have one of his OTHER statements found to be false.
In that environment, why lie about other riders, when they are still riding and could be caught at any time? Landis would be a fool to convincingly lie about his own innocence only to be tripped up because Armstrong gets a bad blood test and decides to tell all and proves that Landis was lying.
I know this is all logic, not knowledge. But we don’t have the truth. We can’t mind-read, we don’t have access to the “facts”. We have what we know, so the only things we can really use to shape our opinion is what we know and how it logically fits.
If you find it impossible to believe that a man could rise from adversity, and reshape his life to be the best at something, you are stuck with “drug use”. I don’t choose to be so constrained.
That is not a fact, that is an opinion -- and so far as I can tell, an opinion not based on evidence before us (other than anecdotal).
The tour tests large numbers of riders, and only a few are found to be doping, and they are thrown out. Anybody beating Lance would get tested because they test all winners.
In fact, given the extreme testing of the TDF, if I were a cyclist who wanted to keep clean, the TDF is the one race I would take on. Which is what Lance has done.
Note that if every rider is doped (and your "hundreds of dopers" means all of them, since there are only hundreds of riders in the tour), then his acheivement still means he's beating everybody else on a level ground.
Which doesn't refute your argument, but sure refutes the only real "evidence" for his doping, the argument that since he's older than a lot of the other riders, the only way he could beat them is if he doped. If they are doping, his doping wouldn't help him be better than they are, just level the playing field.
So whether you believe based on actual facts and tangible evidence that there is almost no doping among the leaders of the TDF, OR we accept your opinion that pretty much every single rider in the TDF is doped, Lance's acheivements are equally remarkable.
Barry Bonds plays in a league that didn’t have mandatory testing, didn’t hardly do any random testing, and pretty much proved they didn’t care one way or another who was using drugs.
It’s not surprising in the least that someone could play for years without getting a positive test.
Cycling is, in contrast, extremely tested. Every one of the top riders each day are tested, plus a random sampling of others. They also test off-season, and have the right to show up anywhere at any time and do tests. They do that to Lance, they do that to other cyclists.
There is no comparison between the Cycling world’s drug testing and major league baseball at the time of Barry Bonds.
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