planetf1.com

exactly how I see it - well put.

Pro cycling: from what I've read/heard most of the top big/Tour cyclists have been using 'additives'for decades. To single any out is selective; imo Armstrong having his titles deleted is unfair; many others who won are guilty too, then.

I'm not supporting Armstrong or this practice, just looking at overall fariness.

To me Graham Obree must be the greatest for his clean feats winning the Hour records, against all the officlials and other 'packages' big budgets.

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The simple fact is that doping is rife in professional sports and has been for decades. Even in horse racing they need to test the horses as they can be given cocaine and other stimulants.

The way I look at it is this, if performance enhancement is cheating and doping is performance enhancement, how is doping different to other non-doping performance enhancement?

There are drugs that help with almost every sport, from cycling to soccer to golf and shooting.. From the most physical sports to sports that hardly seem physical at all.
An endurance athlete has EPO, blood doping etc available. The strength athlete has steroids and HGH. The concentration athlete beta blockers and anti anxiety drugs.

There was an uproar here in Australia before the Olympics when it was found that at previous Olympics the top swimmers were knocking themselves out with Stilnox (used because it has no drowsy after effects) every night, this meant that they were well rested before racing. Due to the uproar sleeping pills were banned and the Australian swimming team had pretty much its worse Olympics ever, with many of the athletes complaining they hadn't been able to sleep due to nerves. Try exercise after a good nights sleep vs after a bad sleep and you'll quickly realize that Stilnox was performance enhancing for those athletes. It wouldn't surprise me at all if F1 drivers took sleeping pills or anxiety suppressants.

Blood doping is another huge issue and when Operation Puerto in Spain found evidence of it on a huge scale it was kept very quiet except for the cycling names. The Doctor from it, Eufemiano Fuentes, has said ''In 2006 I worked with all types of athletes. Footballers, athletes, cyclists, boxer and tennis players.''
Now can you imagine the uproar if they turned around and busted Real Madrid or one of the big football clubs for doping its players? The simple truth is FIFA would do its utmost to stop it ever happening as it would quite literally cause riots! Yet Fuentes clearly implicates footballers.
It is also worth noting that when you google search "Operation Puerto" the name Rafael Nadal comes up. If this were proven imagine the impact on professional tennis!

Then of course there is performance enhancing the good old fashioned technological way. Which to me is just as bad! I won't go in to it myself because Alex Lloyd covered it so well, and from a position of far more insight in his blog. It's an article I strongly suggest you all read! http://jalopnik.com/5977371/racing-is-f ... armstrongs

I like to think that if other cyclists who have won events could be proved guilty, they would be.

However, if other sports carried out the kind of drug testing policy they have in cycling, I fear a lot of other champions in those other sports would have been found guilty.

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

I somehow doubt that. I don't recall Armstrong ever failing a test, which for a long time was his principle defence.

I find it rather distasteful the way so many people jump on the bandwagon to attack him long after the events took place. There's no doubt he did some very bad things, and by all accounts he was not a pleasant man to be around either, and he was not reliable. Witness what Webber said about him - and he's not the only one.

However, the drugs did not win races on their own, and by all accounts many of the top competitors were on similar regimes. So the real losers were the ones who were near the top and clean. But there's no way of knowing for sure who they are. Also Armstrong did an awful lot of good outside cycling. There must be very many cancer victims who are very grateful for what he did for them, but who hardly know what a bicycle is. The only reason for changing the record books is as a deterrent to others doing the same thing in the future. I wonder if that really works. Much better to improve the detection and penalise those that are caught when it happens, instead of many years afterwards.

There are reasons he possibly never failed a test Switzerland aside .

Is not simply picking on him for the hell of it . He was arguably the greatest cyclist the support had ever known. For him to have cheated so much and bullied other cyclists in to assisting is huge news. The fact people are jumping on him is hardly surprising regardless of what other cyclists were doing.

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Oh and Bernie, National flags should be raised not flipped. Sort it!

I think you need to do some reading across the board on Armstrong because your conclusions are being drawn from a lack of info.

It's not a conclusion. It's just my take on it, which I know very well many will disagree with.

I was a competitive cyclist many moons ago, so I have some idea what the sport is like to participate in.

What interests me is the likelihood or not of F1 drivers resorting to pharmaceuticals to give them an edge. More about Armstrong is probably getting way off-topic.

Maybe there should be a decent testing procedure, just to make sure none of them even dream about it.

I agree it's somewhat unfair to delete Armstrong's titles as the guys he beat were equally as dosed as he. He would probably still have been great in a clean era. But probably not everyone in the field was using drugs, and it's a necessary step to clean up the sport.

For Armstrong is still a hero, but more of an anti-hero as well. It's not something you can really put into words.

It does make you glad to have guys like Roger Federer, Michael Schumacher, Tiger Woods, Tendulkar/Lara/Ponting and so forth. And that is actually quite a poor statement to have to make, from Lance Armstrong's point of view.

I don't understand how people can feel sorry for this guy.

Whether those around him were also doping, it does not make him any more deserving of the titles that were ultimately stripped from him. The fact of the matter is that he cheated, and at the end of the day, whether or not he was the only one to cheat, someone who breaks the rules does not deserve the recognition of being the title holder.

I have a big problem with the cancer debate too, partially because I currently have cancer, and it just feels like a sympathy game. Again, in terms of relevance, cancer has nothing to do with his victories, his doping and his stripping of the aforementioned victories. Yes, he was inspirational to a lot of people with his battle, but that doesn't make him any more deserving of sporting success. To give you the world's worst analogy, I'm currently unemployed, and am seeking work. It would be kind of like people thinking that I deserve to get a job because I have cancer. Or people singing me praise for trying to get a job while having cancer. It's just a ridiculous excuse. As I said, his cancer had absolute bucklies to do with his races, so it's a non-issue really.

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I hope from the bottom of my heart that you successfully fight the disease! And I hope you find a job that will help you fight it.

There used to be a forum member who was a big fan of Eddy Merckx. "The Cannibal" is still generally considered the best cyclist the sport has ever known - Armstrong apparently did very little outside of the Tour de France. When Merckx was interviewed a few years ago, together with some of his Belgian contemporaries, he was asked whether he "took". His answer was "no more than the others".

What do we tell young people who look up to these 'icons', when they ask us about them? That they were not really interested in a sports competition but in money?

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Lance did take doping to an industrial level of sophistication. And he bullied and blustered (and possibly bribed) himself out many a tight corner when it came to being found out. Perhaps the most concerning part of the whole business is the allegation made by the likes of David Walsh and other journalists that LiveStrong was essentially a front for Lance, a branding exercise that was designed to make him untouchable. Using cancer like this is seriously wrong.

But on the other hand, he has genuinely changed some people's lives for the better, albeit mostly through inspiration (his foundation actually does not spend any money - hasn't since '05 - on cancer research, the focus is instead on awareness). Also, he was not the first to dope. He did not start the doping. To be competitive, to have any chance at the Tour, he had to dope. How many of us would make the choice to be one of the few not to dope in that environment? To stay clean and guarantee ourselves failure when we'd spent so many years putting our heart into reaching the top of the sport we loved?

I just tend to feel sorry for the entire lot of them. To be effectively forced into it because the odd one or two bad eggs were willing to be ruthless enough to take an illegal advantage in the first place. The UCI dropped the ball. These sports need their parent organisations to be ahead of the curve when it comes to testing, to dedicate a lot of resources to it.

I hope this is also not going on in F1. I really do. I fear for tennis, another sport I love. The men's game is ridiculous now. Five hour matches and the players look far, far too fresh.

+1. That's no joke there and I've had some similarly bad news today, so good luck mate

Merckx was caught a couple of times though, he was not spotless like Armstrong. I really liked him too. He was inspirational as well, coming back from a horrible injury that left his pelvis twisted if I remember correctly