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Cycling Doping Fallacies

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Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#41

Post by Tao3300 »

dogmatism wrote: post #26

1) Armstrong was (is) an asshole who destroyed careers and lives, which is part of why they threw the book at him as opposed to others 2) That said, 7 in a row is still incredible. While he had a few incidents, he was always able to recover and never had an injury or illness that knocked him out. If Roglic could say the same, he'd probably have won at least 2 Tours if not three 3) Of course they're still all doping.…

Can we get 1940s football? I'd love to see the return of leather helmets and no facemasks.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#42

Post by hibikir »

stevenwoo wrote: post #30

I don’t buy his theory that Lance was clean early in his career because he only won one day races up to that point. Exogenous EPO was available for the first time by the time Indurain began his run on the Tour de France several years earlier- this was quite startling because he was huge weight wise by grand tour standards up to that time. Armstrong might just have not dialed in the doping just right in those early ye…

I don't think anyone should buy any story that any cyclist was clean anywhere near a professional circuit.

My uncle was president of a national road cycling federation. He had been involved with cycling teams, professional and amateur, since the 50s. He never raced himself, but many people wanted to be his friends: My grandmother owned a pharmacy, and he had access to get anything he wanted out of said pharmacy. So I'd hear the stories over dinner, or as we were following the peloton on stages that were nearby. He'd provide "pharmacological support" not just to racers alone, but team managers. He was more important in the 60s and 70s, when testing was really bad, and the substances racers would need were almost entirely things you'd get at the pharmacy counter. As doping became more professionalized, there was more use for specialized doctors, and things you couldn't just get straight from the pharmacy supplies, but contact higher up in the drug supply chain would still be helpful getting more exotic things.

Eventually he got caught: He was in the news as the police detained him and a few lower-tier racers. But since this wasn't, say, Movistar or Visma-Lease getting caught, it wasn't in every news feed, but it's someone that had been helping doping for decades.

It might be too much to say that everyone riding the Vuelta or the Tour for the last 50 years was definitely doping, but I'd expect that it's far more than 50-50. People don't keep up with top talent that is doing EPO and blood transfusions by just eating a lot of pasta for breakfast.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#43

Post by jdietrich »

diath wrote: post #6

Unpopular opinion but I really think that all competitions should be untested like WSM. As it currently stands, the competition in most sports is about who has the resources to best hide their PED use.

Cycling had a long and dreadful history of doping-related deaths.

The rampant doping in other sports reflects an unwillingness to learn the lessons that cycling learned the hard way. Armstrong never failed a drugs test, because the tests were a joke. The biological passport isn't a magic bullet, but - when seriously enforced - it places hard limits on what dopers can get away with, no matter how devious they are.

Most sports are in denial, because they don't want to endure the painful process of actually rooting out the drug cheats. They have weak, ineffectual anti-doping programmes that are trivial to circumvent, then imagine themselves to be clean because of the low rate of positive tests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlete_biological_passport

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#44

Post by jdietrich »

Zigurd wrote: post #7

Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. I recently bought an old high-end Look racing bike after taking up cycling for fitness, and I went down the Look, La Vie Claire, Bernard Tapie, Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong rabbit hole. Doping is just the surface of what must have been a money laundering cocaine fueled sex crazed decades long party.

>Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts.

There's a really interesting cultural divide in that respect. In the heartlands of road cycling it was long viewed as a sport like boxing, a way for tough kids from bad neighbourhoods to make something of themselves. Like boxing, many of the sponsors and promoters were from the same sort of background - businessmen with opaque arrangements and friends in low places. The revenues brought in by the new global audience of middle-class, middle-aged men in lycra has professionalised and legitimised the sport to a significant extent, but there's still a strong undercurrent of the old days and the old ways.

Standing outside of that cultural context, the glamour is much more apparent than the grit. Roubaix looks quite scenic from a helicopter, but it's one of the poorest towns in France.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#45

Post by kmeisthax »

dogmatism wrote: post #26

1) Armstrong was (is) an asshole who destroyed careers and lives, which is part of why they threw the book at him as opposed to others 2) That said, 7 in a row is still incredible. While he had a few incidents, he was always able to recover and never had an injury or illness that knocked him out. If Roglic could say the same, he'd probably have won at least 2 Tours if not three 3) Of course they're still all doping.…

Regarding #5, the main reason why these substances are banned is that they have long-term health consequences beyond what normal performance in the sport might do to the athletes. It's not just a matter of "ok maybe we just have separate clean and doped leagues so we can have literal supermen running around the sportsball field".

That being said, the NFL already chews through athletes anyway so maybe they've already silently decided "football[0] is just inherently doped now".

[0] American football

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#46

Post by stevenwoo »

stevage wrote: post #23

There's a link to this graph here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240105023309/https://nitter.no... Took me a very very long time to make sense of the chart. Watts/kg up, minutes over which that power output was sustained to the right. White points are Vingegaard climbs in the past, yellow points are Vingegaard climbs in 2022, pink points are other cyclists. The yellow and white curves are just trend lines? They seem…

Here some easier, older chart discussing the issues as understood at the time, though you have to check which riders got busted (all of them except Lemond and Indurain, and Lemond at least won the TdF pre-EPO, Indurain being faster than doped Armstrong is pretty suspicious and there was no testing for EPO at that point IIRC), on the other hand there's also the point that the climb may have come at a different point in the race.

https://sportsscientists.com/2009/08/performance-analysis-a-...

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#47

Post by stevenwoo »

nafnlj wrote: post #32
stevenwoo wrote: post #30

I don’t buy his theory that Lance was clean early in his career because he only won one day races up to that point. Exogenous EPO was available for the first time by the time Indurain began his run on the Tour de France several years earlier- this was quite startling because he was huge weight wise by grand tour standards up to that time. Armstrong might just have not dialed in the doping just right in those early ye…

(I am the author of the article) You are correct that he wasn't clean early in his career. He admitted to first using a banned substance in 1993, which was the year he won the World Championship, and I recall the 2012 investigation had testimony of his using drugs on Motorola in 1994. I also don't think there's any convincing evidence he actually lost much weight in 98 when he had his first high GT finish at the Vuel…

Also, him switching from triathlon to bicycle racing may have been just an easier transition at first with one day bicycle events.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#48

Post by operatingthetan »

diath wrote: post #6

Unpopular opinion but I really think that all competitions should be untested like WSM. As it currently stands, the competition in most sports is about who has the resources to best hide their PED use.

It also makes cycling a competition of who has the best genes and training plan. Which is kinda gross honestly. Open up the drugs and then there are whole other aspects to the competition than being born with good blood (literally).

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#49

Post by 303uru »

stevage wrote: post #25
ajcp wrote: post #4

> I do think that history has treated Mr. Armstrong unfairly for the essential act of his cheating. > To be sure, Mr. Armstrong brought much of his disparate treatment on himself. Perhaps history, but I think modernity has been far too kind to Mr. Armstrong. I'm floored that Lance Armstrong is still given a degree of celebrity and room as a public figure, and still more that he can make money off of that. That his ce…

>and all the while he openly and literally tried to destroy the lives and reputations of those who said as much Not just "tried", he completely destroyed a couple of journalists' careers. This is not something that should ever be forgiven.

Journalists and fellow cyclists. He destroyed Tyler Hamilton completely.

Re: Cycling Doping Fallacies

#50

Post by aredox »

diath wrote: post #6

Unpopular opinion but I really think that all competitions should be untested like WSM. As it currently stands, the competition in most sports is about who has the resources to best hide their PED use.

A French sci-fi author wrote a novel where they do what you proposed... It is called "La guerre olympique" - the Olympic war.

Needless to say it is a pure dystopia.

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