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The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

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    #26
    The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

    One shitty thing that's only just occurred to me about Lance and the Giro - it may now mean that Filippo Simeoni, despite being Italian National Champion*, doesn't get an invite from the organisers, so as to keep Lance sweet.

    Indeed, even money says that's why Lance is doing it...

    * fuckin' A, by the way!

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      #27
      The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

      It's funny how the riders who look like they're cheating (Kohl, Schumacher, Ricci) are discovered to be cheating. Rasmussen, too, of course.

      And why all the love for Contador, by the way? Isn't he under probably as much doubt as Lance for chewing his way through several tons of EPO?

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        #28
        The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

        Well, the circumstantial case against him is pretty minimal. Armstrong showed a marked improvement/change in riding profile, has been credibly linked by teammates to doping, had (legally inadmissible) samples from his first win come back positive, went out of his way to intimidate anti-coping campaigners, was trained by a notorious cheat doctor, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

        Contador looks like the rider he always looked in his teens like he'd become, before the aneurysm. He's blotted his copybook a bit by associating with Bruyneel/Astana. But the Puerto connection just doesn't seem to hold up - of all the riders, big big names, alleged to be involved in that, Fuentes singled Contador and Allan Davis, both of them mere kids without any particular power or pull, as wrongly accused.

        There is a fair bit of innuendo about him. But (a) I reckon it's unjustified by the evidence, and (b) the fact that it's less than that surrounding Armstrong is certainly justified.

        Did Kohl look like he was cheating, btw? Seemed to me he was hanging on in the hills every day, with no fireworks and just a little bit better than he'd been doing for the few years before...

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          #29
          The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

          Fingered in Puerto. Rode for Discovery. Rode for Astana. Superficially it looks pretty dodgy. Particularly given how succesful he's been.

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            #30
            The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

            Well, Discovery became Astana, and not Vino's Astana. So only one of those counts - though you could throw in Liberty Seguros, I suppose. And as I say, the Purto connection looks unfair. There's much less than Lance, at any rate.

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              #31
              The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

              Let's just say that I won't be surprised if he does get caught at some point, and I won't be pinning my hopes on him as the great counter-point to Lance. I can get excited about him as a rider, but not as the paragon-of-cleanness up against other riders about whom there is suspicion.

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                #32
                The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                Straw man though, surely? Who has held him up as that?

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                  #33
                  The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                  It's the feeling I've been getting because he's the person who's getting the anti-Lance love.

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                    #34
                    The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                    That's because, certainly speaking for myself, he

                    a) entered ALL of the grand tours, rather than gearing his season around "the big one"
                    b) won them all and
                    c) has done so without becoming a charmless fucker a la Armstrong, Evans.
                    He even rode as a domestique for the national team in Beijing.

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                      #35
                      The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                      [Edit: Very odd double post]

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                        #36
                        The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                        Interesting end-of-season chat on Dutch Tv yesterday between various wheeler journalists, team-leaders and riders. The bits I can remember are.

                        1. Riders are tested between 30 and 50 times a season. They are tested more rigorously than any other sporters. Despite that only 4% of tour riders were found positive. If any other sport was tested as heavily the failures would be much higher. So sponsors by pulling out of cycling are encouraging other sports to down-grade their anti-doping efforts ever further. More than 100 nations have no out-of-competition testing, and that number is growing.

                        2. The Parisian lab that found a way to find CERA, had spent a lot of money on the new tests and were under a lot of pressure to find positive riders.

                        3. Riccardo Ricco is considered borderline insane by the other riders in the Peleton, whereas Bernard Kohl is just a bit dim.

                        4. There was a LOT said about Schuey, but I can't remember what - sorry.

                        5. Lance isn’t serious about winning the Tour, otherwise he would not have agreed to ride the Giro.

                        6. Despite Lance’s close relationship with the Bush family, he won’t back either candidate for the Presidency because he’s scared he will lose half his cancer-charity money.

                        7. However his long term goal is to become President of the USA, with the intermediate task of becoming the Governor of Texas. This return to racing is partly about raising his charity’s profile, but mostly about setting up a run for political office.

                        There was more, I’ll come back to it when I remember it.

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                          #37
                          The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                          I was in Belgium over the weekend and was very interested to see that the Giro de Lombardia got bigger coverage there than it normally does here in Italy. They really do take their cycling seriously (especially on the Flemish channels).

                          On the other hand, the German broadcasters announced that they will not be covering Le Tour at all next year; road cycling is really becoming a pariah sport in Germany, at least at the professional level.

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                            #38
                            The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                            Which is as I say, what is driving other sports to downgrade their testing regimes. They know they'll get a lot of positives if they test like cycling does, and are scared that will similarly drive sponsors away.

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                              #39
                              The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                              You need look no further than the gridiron NFL (arguably the most sponsor-driven league in the world) for evidence of that effect.

                              Comment


                                #40
                                The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                                Dark humor in this clever Dutch advert.

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                                  #41
                                  The "Drugs in Cycling" Thread Will Never End

                                  Ha, excellent.

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