Remember, sports fans, don't let your doctor prescribe anti-PMS medications if you're an Olympic Champion like Hope Solo.

Which isn't doping per se, like what Lance did.

Ah, for the good old days when people who ran marathons frequently died.

(for some reason the whole Armstrong thing makes me think of The Triplets of Belleville)

I don't know if Armstrong doped or not. But the USADA is going to have to come up some a lot of new and compelling evidence if it's so.
They've tried to try him before and failed. He never failed a drug test and he's taken hundreds of them. He's never been caught with drugs. Every player who's offered up testimony against Armstrong is a known doper so their testimony has always been considered a little suspect.
I mainly find it odd that the USADA is going after a retired athlete. If it's so important to root out pro-athletes who are doping why are they going after someone who's been long retired? Again. After several unsuccessful past attempts.
Time will tell.

He's guilty as hell.

Cheat to Win.
Though I doubt he's worse than any of the others. The cycling game is about how much your corporate sponsors can pay to alter your internal chemistry without getting caught.

All professional athletes use performance drugs.

All of them.

If they didn't use them, they'd lose their job to someone who does use them. Period.

Even other professionals use performance drugs. Orchestra members take anti-anxiety drugs before big performances. They all know about it and talk about it too, because it's not illegal for them.

All this anti-doping shit is pointless.

Bullshit. Fucking USADA should be sued... the problem is that they don't need hard evidence... they can base their decisions on circumstantial evidence.

If I were Armstrong, I'd sue the living shit out of the USADA and bury their asses...

I don't care about their results... they have no hard proof.. they have testimony from Landis... Yeah, real reliable.

So much for our system...

No physical evidence.

Of course he dopes. All cyclists dope. It's a given. It doesn't matter. You still have to do the work. The dope doesn't pump those pedals; you still have to train and train and train until your kidneys are visible through your skin (yes, really) and grind out those impossible results in impossible conditions for hundreds of hours of work.

Favorite anecdote: Lucho Herrera of Colombia crashing in 1985 and smashing his face, and then getting up and continuing on up the mountain while a medic stitching his gushing face from a car driving alongside. He won the stage. These people are not normal.

You could pump me so full of EPO and whatever else you got until it was spurting out of my ears with every heartbeat and I wouldn't be able to hang with the last-place rider on the Tour. Lance Armstrong could beat me if he was completely drunk, riding a BMX bike with a flat front tire, and had a broken leg.

Anyways, it's not clear to me that doping gives you any bigger an advantage than the zillions of other scientific advances. Cyclists today monitor the levels of a dozen things (particularly oxygen) in their blood through constant draws, and high-end cycling is really a chemical race now, hindered only by the absolute limit of blood transfer of oxygen on a molecular level. The dope moves oxygen through faster, but only a fraction as much as just the scientific monitoring and training. It's a completely freakish thing to do whether you dope or not. And the equipment -- the bikes, even the SHOES are impossibly advanced from just a few decades ago.

@ 9, your defense of doping is unjustified, and as always you exaggerate because the plain truth doesn't support you. For example, you could never produce anything to support your contention that "all cyclists dope" if it meant saving your hide from the firing squad.

I'm 75% positive he doped. But the USADA better have hard evidence because it's a fucking witchhunt if they don't.

Actually he has failed drug tests. On of the charges against him is that he has had other failed drug tests covered up as well. Former teammates pulling out of the Olympics and retiring? Not good for Lance. It is one thing to keep your mouth shut to the press and other cyclists. Lying under oath in a federal deposition is a completely different thing. I doubt his former teammates would risk that.

And for the record, Lance is a major asshole. He always has been. In his hometown of Austin it is widely known. TO people involved with cycling it is widely known. Why fanboys get their panties in a knot whenever charges are filed against him just amazes me. It is also pretty funny.

@ 11, he deserves to go down solely for what he did to Greg Lemond.

@6 for the win.

Training at more extreme conditions than the eventual course is not cheating, @9. The majority of cheating is confined to short non-endurance events.

That said, all "national" sports are really just product testing for drug regimens and exercise gear/programs for corporations. Nation states are so 20th Century ...

ok, now, @12 that is a much better reason.

Man with only one testicle blows away other heavily doped, dual-nutted athletes by huge margins? Only possible with synthetic testosterone, among other enhancers. It's not even really questionable, because it is so obvious.

Lance is as credible as a Zimbabwe election result.

All professional athletes dope. A majority of collegiate athletes dope. It's not all steroids injected in a dark hidden corner in the locker room, there are many combinations of hormones, nutritional 'supplements', buffers, etc. that can enhance performance. It's easy to take what a trainer or coach hand you at face value, without asking too many questions that you don't want the answer too anyway. The problem for elite athletes is that as soon as a small minority are doing it, everyone else must follow suit. At that level, everyone has amazing genetics and any slight edge that one gets, everyone else wants too - especially if it can't be proven and noone is getting in trouble. It's part of the culture, and they all get to the point where they have to make a choice - give up their dream, or rise to the highest possible level with every tool accessible. Sad, but true. I've been there.

Oops. Please forgive my spelling error. Most athletes dope, and most athletes are as intelligent as everyone else.

I just argued with my mom about this: the dude definitely doped and he definitely thinks he's above the law. My mom, like many people, thinks he should be excused because of "all he's done for cancer." This is the same argument bankers and traders and other above the law types give, except for being "job creators," or some nonsense. Armstrong did the crime, he should do the time. I don't care how cute or charming or inspiring he's been.

@19 What Armstrong did for cancer was to steal a bunch of money that might otherwise have been used for research or patient care, all in the name of "outreach" and "awareness".

@18, "Oops. Please forgive my spelling error."

It's OK penchant. I take comprehension-enhancing drugs and was able to read around it.

Why shouldn't a rich white guy riding bikes in France think he's Above The Law, @19?

If it works for Mitt it should work for Lance.

Falderal®, from Prescott Pharmaceuticals: don't ride without it.

"cancer-fighting badass Lance Armstrong"? It's true he had a ball cut off, but that represents the entirety of his badass fight against cancer. His LIVESTRONG thing doesn't give a dime to cancer research. It just raises awareness of . . . cancer? I guess? It certainly worked on @19's mom.

Yeah, right...
http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=en-US&…

@24 - Livestrong is a whole different can of worms. There are some valid criticisms of the organization (in terms of fundraising, overhead, and what they actually do), but I have a close friend who said their free support services were a godsend as he fought brain cancer.

-Mike the Intern

Doesn't the goddamn USADA have better things to do than go after Lance Armstrong?

@12 Greg LeMond? Are you kidding? Fuck Greg LeMond. There are two sides to that story.

As for the "all cyclists dope" accusation? Wrong.

Ryder Hesjedal just won the Giro d'Italia. He doesn't dope.

From his team (Garmin)'s Wiki page:

When the team entered the Professional Continental ranks they began in the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE)[3] program to eliminate doping.[4] Participants are tested repeatedly to develop a bio-stable marker profile. Future tests check these markers have not moved. If they have, the rider is ill or has taken performance enhancing drugs. If any change has been noted, the rider cannot race until the markers have returned to normal. Riders are interviewed and tested for illness or doping.

He's a friend of a friend, and he's clean as a whistle. I'll wait till the jury's in on Armstrong, but it's possible he is clean. Not all riders dope.

@9 - More often than not, the loser of a race loses by just a few seconds. Doping doesn't need to turn you into Superman for it to greatly enhance your chance of winning. And EPO is pretty miraculous:

Here's a study showing that EPO doping delayed average biking exhaustion (under the extremely strenuous test conditions) from an average of 12.8 minutes to an average of 14.0 minutes. It seems like that would be an advantage in races where winning is measured in seconds.

Michael Phelps was caught on camera "doping", and I don't give a shit about that either.

@ 28, you can tell that other side, or you can go piss up a rope. Your choice.

Repeat corporate mantra after me: The solution to pollution is dilution

@20, If people give to a charity without finding out what the charity is using the money for that's the donor's problem not the charity's. Livestrong has always been explicitly about doing outreach programs. They didn't steal any money away from cancer research. If you wanted money to go to cancer research and then gave that money to Livestrong it's your fail not their's.

@12, 14, 16 Are you sure you're not confusing what Floyd Landis did to Greg Lemond?

Armstrong / Lemond = L.A.: you think I doped? I can defrost 10 retired cyclists who say you doped! and maybe L.A. screwed up Lemond's business relationship with Trek. Nasty but not unforgivable.

Landis / Lemond = Floyd, you really ought to come clean; it will change all of cycling for the better; let me tell you a very personal story about the hardest thing I had to live through... Cut to Floyd's business manager phoning up the night before Lemond's scheduled testimony "Hi Greg, this is your uncle. I’ll be there tomorrow and we can talk about how we used to hide your weenie."

It's easy to vilify Armstrong because he comes off as an arrogant prick, but not every evil act in the history of American cycling is his fault.

@15, I can tell you as a man with one testicle that my testosterone levels are on the high end of normal, and are higher than they were when I had two. This is a common outcome of having a bad testicle removed, no synthetic testosterone necessary.

@ 34, as I said the USADA better have the goods on him or the whole thing is a sham. But I'll never think well of the man, even if he was clean as a whistle.

Performance-enhancing drugs make you go fast, but they also do nasty shit to your internal organs. Seriously: steroids will *fuck you up*. This is not like an orchestra member taking Valium before a big show. If not for the huge health risks associated with steroids, I don't think there would be any controversy at all.

The problem with doping is that it's a prisoner's dilemma. If no one dopes, then the outcome of a competition should be roughly the same as if everyone dopes. But there's a huge incentive to defect, since if you dope and your competitors don't, then you're going to win.

If we allow doping, then we effectively mandate the use of performance-enhancing drugs for all athletic competitions. Do we really want to be responsible for that, as a society? Are we not hurting people (or encouraging them to hurt themselves), just like we do when we watch professional football? Look at all the quarterbacks who have killed themselves in such a way as to preserve their brain for medical research.

And yet, if we don't allow doping, we will have witch hunts like this forever. No one is better off for that happening.

Lance Armstrong is a dope.

He failed French tests many years ago, on the Tour de France. As far as I remember, since it was re-tested samples, taken before the EPO test was available, and tested afterwards, he was able to legally wriggle out of it, on a technicality.

But since it happened during the Dubya years, the American press went all "freedom fries" over poor Lance being wrongly accused by a traitor country.

And by the way, everyone knows that cyclists are doping on the Tour de France. "If they didn't", said a French humorist twenty or thirty years ago, "they wouldn't arrive on the Champs-Elysées before Christmas". For reference, the Tour starts and ends in july, on the Champs-Elysées.

I've seen the cyclists pass in front of me, for real, only once. It was on flat ground, they were going very fast. Their faces - they looked like machines escaped out of concentration camps, no fat anywhere. Very disturbing.

...all I know is that the Lance wannabes around here sure seem to be total testosterone-fueled assholes too -who also obviously believe themselves above the law like their Hero. If they're any example, I'll believe the stories about Lance.

Que the angry riding testosterone-fueled asshole cyclist freakout

...all I know is that the Lance wannabes around here sure seem to be total testosterone-fueled assholes too -who also obviously believe themselves above the law like their Hero. If they're any example, I'll believe the stories about Lance.

Que the angry riding testosterone-fueled asshole cyclist freakout