Lance Armstrong Oprah Confession

[BigBadBrian]

Cycling is about as useless a spectator sport as NASCAR.

Not if you cycle yourself. You begin to appreciate the hard work and determination it takes to excel.

[Dan]

Fucking Cheat.:D

[Nitro Express]

[Seshmeister]

In the last couple of years now that they have clamped down on drugs all the times in the Tour De France have been significantly slower and within feasible human limits.

[binnie]

In the last couple of years now that they have clamped down on drugs all the times in the Tour De France have been significantly slower and within feasible human limits.

It's difficult to conclude either way.

Think about Ben Jonson, who ran the 100m at 9.79 when doped to the eyeballs. Guys can do that now without doping because of the advances in sport science, and because of unique individuals. But it works the other way, too. The British 400m, for instance, haven't produced an athlete who can match what Roger Black and Euan Thomas were doing 15 years ago - you don't conclude from that that those guys were doping, merely that there's been a dip in the talent pool in recent years.

With cycling, it could be that doping explains the changes. Or, it could be a dip in the talent; or, given that this is cycling outdoors, that the conditions were adverse in recent years. Without data over very long periods of time it is hard to be conclusive - the numbers of people involved is too small, as is the number of races, to do otherwise.

But conclusions aside, all of this talk about doping soils the enjoyment of sport considerably, IMO.

[Seshmeister]

A few years old but still applies...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/aug/16/world-athletics-championships-records

Women at the World Athletics Championships are competing in the shadow of a murky past but deserve more acclaim


Sanya Richards' best at 400m iis still 1.10sec slower than Marita Koch's in 1985. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/EPA
It was an enduring image: Usain Bolt, centre stage, at the Jamaican team press conference in Beijing, while squeezed to one side were his female Olympic gold medal winning team-mates. A thousand camera flashes illuminated the triple world record holder's grin as the women were comprehensively ignored.

Pursing their lips, Shelly-Ann Fraser, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Melaine Walker had been here before. Yes, Bolt's achievements were extraordinary, but for the female athletes the dynamics were all too familiar.

So why are women so routinely consigned to the bottom of the page? When she was finally given the microphone, Campbell-Brown bravely broached the issue.

"It's a touchy subject, but if I should be honest, I really believe men get more attention in this sport. It's based on the fact that the world record in the 100m and 200m for men is reachable. For me, my PRs [personal records] are 10.85[sec] and 21.74[sec], which I just accomplished here and I only ran that once. It is hard for me to even think about the world record."

Why so? Because since Florence Griffith-Joyner's 1988 world records in the 100m and 200m, no female sprinter has come anywhere near breaking them – not even a drug-fuelled Marion Jones. Meanwhile, in the men's sprints, the 100m world record has been broken 11 times in the past two decades. With Fraser and Walker nodding in unison, Campbell-Brown spelled out the awkward truth.

"It is beyond my reach. The 200m world record is 21.34[sec] and the 100m record is 10.49[sec]. How many females have even run 10.6[sec] in the past 20 years since Flo Jo set that record?" Actually the only other woman to run a 10.6sec time was Jones, ahead of the Sydney Olympics, but after admitting that she took performance-enhancing drugs in 2007, that mark was swiftly erased.

"It's disappointing to not get the respect that the males do," Campbell-Brown said, "because they are capable of breaking the record and people are excited to see them run because they know the possibility of breaking the record is close. I don't have that luxury."

The problem is not unique to the sprints. With 13 women's world records in the Olympic track and field events still standing from the 1980s – all before the introduction of mandatory random drug testing in 1989 – some feel that a clean athlete will never be able to surpass those marks.

Compare that to the men's events, in which only the hammer and the discus world records date back to the 1980s, and the opportunities for male and female athletes could not be more different.

The frustrations are obvious. How can it be that no contemporary athlete has managed to get within the same second as Jarmila Kratochvilova's 1983 mark in the 800m? Why is Sanya Richards' best – the fastest 400m runner in over a decade – still 1.10sec slower than Marita Koch's effort in 1985? Why is the legendary Carolina Kluft's best score in the heptathlon 259 points behind the world record set in 1988 by Jackie Joyner-Kersee?

There are no easy answers. Flo Jo and the others never failed a drugs test, but the flamboyant American's achievements were dogged by rumour and suspicion as critics whispered about increased muscle tone, an elongated jawline, a deeper voice, a hasty retirement and death by heart seizure aged just 38.

So why the discrepancy between the sexes? We know that doping has a greater effect on women than on men. Victor Conte, the man behind the Balco laboratory, explains. "Steroids can help a female sprinter to lower her 100m time by about four tenths of a second or four metres faster," he says. "The effects of steroids upon male 100m sprinters are about two tenths of a second or two metres faster."

But perhaps unattainable records are not the only problem. Even in the days when women were breaking sprint records they still didn't get the headlines of their male counterparts. Some may argue that personality is as much a part of the equation – and Bolt's celebration dances certainly add weight to that theory – but Flo Jo ran in one-legged fuchsia tracksuits with six-inch nails, so why were her achievements so often overshadowed by the rivalry between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis?

The media have a major part to play. Britain's 17-year-old Shaunna Thompson, who won double gold in the sprints at the Commonwealth Youth Games last year, says she sometimes struggles to recall who won the women's 100m at major championships.

"That's one of my events and even I'm forgetting sometimes! People know all the men, but sometimes the women get forgotten about. If Usain Bolt is all you hear about on TV then that sticks in peoples' heads. No one's saying Shelly-Ann Fraser, so everyone's like who's Shelly-Ann Fraser?" But with promoters consistently billing the men's sprints as the blue riband event, the idea that women's events don't deserve prime-time exposure is simply reinforced.

At the root of it all lies one question: is the fastest man in the world intrinsically more interesting than the fastest woman? Some people argue that the fastest time on the clock equals the biggest achievement, but with most people outside the athletics world incapable of quoting world record times, this theory doesn't add up. Surely the value of a race should be based on a combination of several factors – records, profile, the events of the race itself and personality. But with at least two of these four elements still out of reach for most female athletes, sadly we are unlikely to witness a female Bolt any time soon.

[Seshmeister]

It's difficult to conclude either way.

Not really, you can tell by blood tests.

http://news.discovery.com/adventure/tour-de-france-drugs-120629.html

[binnie]

Not really, you can tell by blood tests.

http://news.discovery.com/adventure/...gs-120629.html

Surely they were testing all of the riders during the period when the times were higher?

[Seshmeister]

Yes that's why we know the blood counts have gone down.

I think they just couldn't prove the mechanism.

[ashstralia]

Remember those huge swim bots? Whoahh.

[Nickdfresh]

Fucking Aye RIGHT! FUCK DR. PHIL TOO!

[Nickdfresh]

Welp, it looks like the death of another legend...

[sadaist]

aww...I miss Carlin

But the last several years of his life he wasn't as funny as the old days. He was really just angry. Or maybe he saw that's what the audience responded to and went with it the whole show? I don't know. He used to make himself laugh in his shows, near the end he was just an angry old man and never cracked a smile.

But he wasn't scared. And that's exactly what Lance is. Sure Lance is awesome for coming back from cancer and doing what he did. Hell, just competing 7 times in the tour de france is a feat of strength. To win it? Even if he doped, and beat a bunch of fellow dopers, it's amazing what he did. Out of all the dopers he was the best LOL! No other dopers have won it 7 times in a row. Especially not after nearly dying from cancer.

Yeah, fuck Lance Armstrong. And fuck Mark McGwire. But during their runs I was captivated and wouldn't trade those times back. awesome!

[Jérôme Frenchise]

The ICU has just stripped Armstrong from his 7 Tours de France.

Now those are a bunch of fucking hypocrites - officials, as well as the media, above all -, who know it well that professional cycling
(and athletics, and most sports) has long (if not always) been working on dope...
Didn't they already know about Armstrong as soon as he came back in the late 90s and became unbeatable for 7 Tours from '99 to
2005? Just as they knew that no cycling champion could run on clear water (as 5-time French winner Bernard Hinault said in the early
1980s) - damned! even regional races are run on dope...
Federations, organizers and the media are a bunch of fucking hypocrites! They all are aware of how things go, and any time an athlete
is caught on dope they will pretend to be surprised and point at the black sheep who in reality is no darker than any of the others...

So far, I'd had the feeling that the fierceness against Armstrong was unfair, because he had won all those titles while the cycling world,
the sports world in general even, and the media all knew precisely about how cycling races went.
Now they are all lynching him cowardly - why don't they recognize the truth? They would not necessarily lose face more than by continuing
denial.
All right, Armstrong and his peers, Bolt and his pursuers, and their colleagues in other sports are hard workers nonetheless, they keep training
like mad all year... But honesty would command to admit it publicly that sportsmen are "helped" - who wouldn't understand that cycling around
France or the USA (even more so) is kind of superhuman, even for supertrained athletes?...

Does the ICU honestly believe the 2nd behind Armstrong (and the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th and so on...) were clean??....

And what about Indurain (who was apparently an exceptional athlete with a lung capacity that was twice as large as
normal, but was surely not running on Evian) for example?

Fuck the ICU and sports media.

[Jérôme Frenchise]

I watch big sports events now and then - the Olympic Games, the World Championships of athletics even, the soccer World Cup
and the Rugby World Cup or the 6 Nations Tournament, but I'm no dupe, it all smells of doping to me...

Back in 1994 or 95, I read a two-page article about the Aussie rugby team in French sports (toilet-) paper "L'Equipe". They clearly stated
that the Aussie players who had come to France for a series of test matches had literally metamorphosed since the year before, as creatine
was allowed by the Australian federation - and those of the Southern hemisphere -, which use had the players gain a mass of muscles that
was impossible to gain without it (they wrote that 4 kilos in a year was a maximum with hard training only)... It was the beginning of professional
rugby, in the mid-90s.
Once the French team could use it (or something else...), any criticism of that kind was over in that rag... and as French rugby players changed physiologies,
everything was all right again in the rugby world for them...

Fucking media...