Posted on 10/13/2012 4:43:34 PM PDT by Vision
Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong demonized her as a prostitute with a drinking problem, and had her hauled into court in England. Ultimately, a legal settlement was reached, and Ms. O’Reilly tried to pick up her life, sometimes talking about Mr. Armstrong and drugs, but to little notice.
Ms. O’Reilly said she was once in a room giving Mr. Armstrong a massage when he and officials on the team fabricated a story to conceal a positive drug test result. Ms. O’Reilly said Mr. Armstrong told her, “You know enough to bring me down.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Post back after you’ve read it. It’ll be hard to put down.
Ha.
I’ll bet that this story gets more coverage than the Libya attack and cover up.
I don’t give a rats arse about some dumb jock cheating while he road his bicycle for a living.
It is hard to know what to believe.Some people pile on.
If you read Hamilton’s book you’ll know exactly what to believe.
I’ve always felt like Armstrong’s biggest “crime” was the fact that he is arrogant and not really likeable.
Had he been fuzzy, humble and warm everybody on the planet may not want to pile on.
Did he dope? I don’t know. But it sounds like everybody in the pro biking community did/does. Sounds to me like Landis had a Conseco moment and decided to take everybody down with him.
He still does some excellent work in the fight against cancer, imho. And overcame some pretty amazing odds to be able to even ride a bike.
Weasel Armstrong is one of the greatest frauds in the history of sports. Pure slimebag.
You’re not familiar with the culture of cycling in the last 30 years.
Oh they don’t check you?
Sure, they check for doping. The problem is that it is just too easy to cheat the tests.
Doping in various ways has been part of the cycling world really since the very beginning of competitive cycling. It was mainly amphetamines prior to the development of steroids and prior to blood doping.
Erythropoietin(EPO) was the drug that demolished the notion that someone could race clean and still be competitive. For a long time there was no test for EPO, so the people in charge tried to limit its use by not allowing a hematocrit of more than 50. When an actual test for EPO became available, the doping doctors and cyclists found that they could beat the test by microdosing EPO( by injecting small amounts under the skin.) They could calibrate how much EPO they could take and how long it would take to clear from their system. They also found that they could use EPO to mask blood doping. Blood doping(removing blood from a cyclist and transfusing it back in at a later date) results in an abnomally high proportion of mature red blood cells. EPO stimulates production of new, thus young, red blood cells which helps hide the blood doping. I think it was Andy Hampsten who said that before EPO a racer could be clean and still compete because the other drugs had enough negatives that someone who wasn’t using wasn’t at too huge of a disadvantage.
As far as beating the tests, It’s mainly about making sure the drugs have cleared a cyclist’s system enough by the time a test is likely to occur, injecting saline to dilute the concentration of drugs in the system(or to decrease the hematocrit to an acceptable number), and watching out for testers and avoiding them when necessary. George Hincapie(Armstrong teammate) has ridden in more Tours de France than anyone in the history of the race and never tested positive for drugs. He has admitted using them. It was standard practice for cycling teams during Armstrong’s era(and unfortunately probably still is). Tyler Hamilton(also an Armstrong teammate) is another cyclist who passed many, many tests while being a habitual doper. He was only caught because apparently someone mixed up his blood doping bag with someone else’s, and a test showed he had someone else’s blood in his system.
Cyclists joke that a doping test is really an I.Q. test. That’s how easy it is to beat the tests.
Very true. So much is hidden, that it all needs to come out and be sifted-through for facts, and the truth will finally come out.
and still nothing from Lance Armstrong.
It looks like the ghosts of Armstrong’s past bullying may be coming back to haunt him:
London (CNN) — London’s Sunday Times is considering suing Lance Armstrong over a libel case he brought against the newspaper over doping allegations which resulted in a costly payout.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/13/sport/armstrong-doping-sunday-times/index.html
But ... but ... never mind.
I would like to see the UCI then do an investigation on the entire sport, including Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, Alberto Contador, Carlos Sastre, and Oscar Pereiro, on all the involvement in drugs in cycling.
Bump. I am quite depressed about this whole thing. I always wondered why my old hero LeMond just wouldn’t leave it alone. Does that mean - could it mean - that LeMond was not a doper?
I guess I am disappointed the most by the lack of personal support support from Lance's mates and friends. Where are the glowing testimonials of what a great guy he is and how he always played it straight and encouraged others to do so? I used to ride with a guy who was a stud in every discipline but was such a jerk that no one sided with him in any disagreement. Of course, that means nothing in the scope of things here.
This doping thing has always been a double edged sword. If they let it go it could lead to horrible outcomes, but if they try to restrict it where do they draw the line. IS Red Bull and Goo still ok?
It would be interesting to see UCI declare a one time amnesty and ask everyone to honestly answer if they have ever used or witnessed use just to see how widespread the problem is and if the screening agents are just as widespread as the PEDs.
I have a little trouble believing a team that was cheating by doping would discuss their cheating in front of other people who weren’t part of it. It would take a lot of smarts, and an understanding of secrecy, to pull off a multi-year team-wide doping program, and that is the opposite of what is described by this woman.
And while I have no idea if Armstrong is guilty of anything or not, I firmly believe that you could get dozens of people to lie about something. That’s pretty much the standard practice of the elected democrats these days, even the “good ones”.
So I don’t find 20 “personal testimonies” much more compelling than 1. Firm evidence. The biggest problem the pro-doping-believer crowd has to overcome is the ability of an entire team to apparently thwart the active doping regime, WHILE almost every other team kept having their stars nailed.
I believe in American exceptionalism, but i don’t believe that Team Postal Service would have been uniquely qualified to beat the drug tests. And if it was this easy to do, no way Landis would have been caught.
It does seem odd that this agency claims to have positive drug tests, and yet in all the years everybody has been gunning for Armstrong, nobody could seal the deal.
Also, it is still disturbing that most of the people who are against Armstrong seem to have a personal hatred for him, which could cloud their judgment.
Oddly, if it wasn’t for the strong anti-doping programs, it would be asier to believe Armstrong was doping.
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