E-Male

The majority of the peloton takes drugs. Most, if not all of the "great" cyclists in the last 25 - 30 years have used doping to improve their competitiveness. Not defending taking drugs to win, but I imagine he beat out a lot of other drug users including Alberto Contador. :-)

Those who are speaking out against him, have also been convicted of taking drugs including Floyd Landis, and Tyler Hamilton. Maybe they have an axe to grind.

Good point Qrack. Also in today's NYTs is an article on how the use of drugs in baseball is now normative. This is the direction that many sports are headed in. When so much sponsorship money is at stake, sport becomes little more than a chance to get rich by becoming a corporate spokesperson.

""I wrote four books about the guy. All the evidence was out there since 2004 and people will still say there is no evidence. To me there was a wilful conspiracy on the part of sporting officials, journalists, broadcasters, everybody. Now we see the fruits of it: high-level cycling has been destroyed by corruption.

"I would have preferred it if Lance Armstrong had gone to a tribunal and we would have had all the evidence out there. But he has decided to accept these charges because it was the lesser of two evils from his perspective.

"It is not good for him because he has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and has been given a lifetime ban. He has lost every victory he has had since 1998, but the alternative was even worse – to have a tribunal in which the evidence from 10 former team-mates who all say they saw him doping would have been aired in graphic detail.

"That detail would have portrayed Lance Armstrong as a doper. It would have opened the eyes of the public to what the US Anti-Doping Agency believe was one of the greatest, most sophisticated doping conspiracies in the history of sport."


Interesting stuff.