General Discussion
In the downfall of Lance Armstrong there is a lesson for us all.
Make sure you can trust your team mates not to grass you up.
The yanks thought the europeans had a touch of sour grapes against good
old Lance winning all those tours.
Who I feel sorry for is the clean cycle teams who came second to
this cheater.
Now he wants to compete again because he says he's a competitor.
No Lance you are a cheat.
One could argue that the (very belated) intention in the US to take a firmer line on doping in sport simply makes Lance Armstrong unlucky to have been caught. Perhaps he annoyed the USADA enough for them to take action. If his relationship with his team mates had been better, he probably would have continued to get away with it.
It seems to me, as one who knows nothing about cycling, that the doping problem has been systemic and has involved many Tour de France winners. There appears to have been a decades-long arms race between the big teams and the anti-doping agencies with the International Cycling Union not wishing to rock the commercial boat and wishing that it would all go away.
You will certainly become bored well before the end of the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling
In this context, it seems almost unfair to single out Lance Armstrong for the pillory when there is a strong inference that they were all at it but, from time to time as testing advanced, some poor unfortunates would be found out and punished for the bad publicity caused by their being caught .
As one of the Olympic drug testing team said before the recent games, athletes are now always one step ahead of the testers and he didn't expect to 'catch out' any of the major athletes at the Olympics even though he implied he expected the majority would be using drugs.
Lance Armstrong had over 500 negative drug tests, so what does this say about the hundreds of drug tests being 'passed' by other athletes. Why he was singled out and pursued so relentlessly is puzzling, and I'm sure there is more to this than we know about, after all such sophisticated undetected drug taking required a team of medical and sports professionals for it to be successful and I am assuming some people in the 'team' didn't get what they were promised so blew the whistle on the operation.
