Exactly. We already have regular reports about athletes dying due to heart failure. If doping - which often works by allowing the body to surpass its own limits by negating its self-protection - were legalized, we would see a lot more of these cases.

We would also see gross caricatures of human bodies, disfigured by excessive use of HGH and similar hormones, with a total life expectancy of perhaps 40 years.

I don't think that that's a solution.

Some of those who confessed earlier have described the system pretty well. The problem is that, as a cyclist, you have to invest a _lot_ to become successful. And after doing that, you may find out that you have no chance at all to compete on a professional level, no matter how hard you train, because there are to many others who use doping. At this point, it is very, very hard to not tell yourself "everybody's doing it, I'm not really cheating if I'm doing it too" instead of either accepting that one will always be an unknown domestique, or look for another profession.

I would not say the Americans, I would say Lance. But at the time, the Italians, Germans, Spanish, and Italians were just as bad about doping. They just got caught quicker.

Not too mention the majority of the doping/technology was not coming from America but from doctors/businesses in Europe.

And anyone who thinks the sport is clean now....is just blind.


As for Lance, he became the biggest scapegoat ever for UCI. Let's not forget he passed all his "official" drug tests, and lets not forget that the UCI most likely covered up all transgressions in that period.

At least in the long run, Lance Armstrong did something useful by using his "name" to get a lot of money for cancer research.

Now, i would say had the sport been clean during that time period, Lance still would have won 7 titles. Only because of the fact that he only prepared for the TdF, the tactics they used were just for the TdF, and he spent all his time training at altitude and knew those stages better than anyone. The majority of his wins were by a large margin over a field that doped just the same or even worse.

I love cycling but i will say the sport has a shit ton of issues and they are trying to use this to hopefully get people off of the others issues and current cheaters and what not.

As long as they keep making the TdF longer/higher/harder, what do they expect the riders to do. At least during that period it was entertaining. The tour sucked the last couple of years in my opinion.

its all about entertainment. sports are entertainment for me.

athletes, as entertainers, are not real people to me.

i do not care what real people do to themselves, for the sake of MY entertainment.

i think ALL sports should encourage steroid use. jack all these full up and let em run wild. i could give a flying fuck aobut their health or them as people.... because, they are not real people, to me.

it is no different, to me, than some actress getting a boob-job. its the exact same thing to me. i fail to see the issue. at all.

role-models? i dont care.
needing to use drugs to compete? i dont care.

i want to be entertained. period. (although, i do find it entertaining listening to french people whine about lance. that was "worth the price of admission" for sure!



like with baseball here in the USA... it is far more fun to watch and follow when these guys are all doped up.

It's about presenting a level playing field and those athletes who do compete fairly, not their health. and about sports not being a complete farce.

Doping is rampant in any endurance sport. Whether it be cycling, swimming, rowing, track ect. It's just something that no sport truly has control over since every time testing technology advances so does the ability to mask or deceive the same tests in some way.

Armstrong was one of the most obvious dopers in any sport I've ever seen and yet he went on and on with the officials turning a blind eye and the public in absolute ignorance for the past decade. The only other doper that is close to being that obvious in recent memory I can think of is Michael Phelps in swimming.

Unfortunately athletes are no longer athletes they are becoming something that no normal human can compete with and doping isn't even close to being the only issue causing this. The only way to make it an even field in the future is to realize that this has change has occurred and either make it lawful to allow or separate the competition fields into "ultra-human" and "just-a-human" categories that compete separately similar to how boxing has weight classes.

He lost all 7 of his Tour wins.

He got kicked from his charity foundation.

He lost all his edorsement contracts.

He lost his reputation in the eyes of the world.

He will forever be remembered as a cheater.

Things are not going too well for this guy. At least he enjoyed his fame and fortune while it lasted. I dont watch cycling or the Tour so i dont really know that much about it.

Wow.

That's exactly the kind of contempt for other human beings that will brings us back into the dark ages, with crowds cheering while some poor guys kill themselves in the arena, or are ripped apart by some wild beast. Who cares, they aren't real people.

I'll interpret your statement in the most positive way that I can, and assume that you are trolling. Otherwise, it'd just be very very sad.

Anyway, here's so song about bored people who manage to be entertained by not really caring about the things that they see on a screen:
Es lebe der Sport (Long live the sport).
Unfortunately, you'd need to understand Austrian (or German, but that might not be enough) to get the excellent lyrics, but I don't know any English song that captures the sentiment equally well.

It's a shame because his cancer comeback story is a great one, and he's raised a load of money for cancer research.

Becoming? They have been that for quite some time. The professional athlete is a tool, honed to perfection using the best techniques available at that time. It takes thousands of hours of incredible effort to get where they are. Of course no normal human can compete with that.

Professional sport provides the useless - nay, harmful - social service of brand identification, the brand in question being your team or your country. We should all forget sports and focus on a much more important debate, namely, PC vs Mac!

Just kidding. The two-party swindle is awful no matter the parties in question. Until and unless we can watch professional sports as pure entertainment (like I already watch biathlon), with only the competitors giving a damn who wins and who loses, screw it.

That is cold, I really hope you are trolling there, otherwise you are one deplorable human being.

Doping Rights Management? I think we've already got that. Time to get athletes in who *aren't* managing the dope, I think. :)

Re: Armstrong - Honestly, I think it's shameful all around. Who knows if he really doped or not. I'm hearing one set of people say one thing, and another set say something else, and for years everybody said he was clean, so who's to say they aren't lying now to get a scapegoat? The kind of public mudslinging that's going on makes everyone look bad.

If the drug tests were so bad and unreliable that he could get away with this for years, then *everyone* - every single professional cyclist - should lose their medals and all the testers be fired. Time to start over. If not, than Armstrong is being scapegoated and this is all whitewashing to make it look like the officials are doing something.

This may sound cold, but he cheated. Worse, he not only lied about it to the world, but he also lied to himself. Personally, I think he is a decent guy, but Mark Mcgwire almost lost everything because of cheating. Mcgwire brought alot of baseball fans back. I wish both of these men well in the future.

This is an open secret. We knew it for a long time. It's still sad though, he was a good athlete.