THe majority of elite sportsmen and women are on illegal PED's, they would be daft not to be.
The Lance Armstrong Story
- Thread starter Bungle
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THe majority of elite sportsmen and women are on illegal PED's, they would be daft not to be.
Minimeister
Player Valuation: £35m
There's another 2 and a half hour documentary on Channel 4 about him tonight if last nights wasn't enough!
Steve0
Player Valuation: £35m
I think with Cycling it's pretty much dependent on how well you've been doped. With football you still need to be actually good at the game.
Enjoyed that, we need people like Armstrong in centre mid, sign him up.
Yard Dog
Player Valuation: £950k
Armstrong has written the foreward in Emma O'Reilly's new book, which I find slightly curious, after absolutely annihilating her character/sexual preferences for years.
Also Quintana is the 20th on this list, which I find remarkable given that he is one of the purest climbers of the current generation, yet he is over 2 minutes down on Armstrong - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpe_d'Huez#Fastest_ascents
Also Quintana is the 20th on this list, which I find remarkable given that he is one of the purest climbers of the current generation, yet he is over 2 minutes down on Armstrong - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpe_d'Huez#Fastest_ascents
JDL
Player Valuation: £1.5m
Pointing out hypocrisy isn't laying into anyone.
As with lots of other sports, genetics are probably the biggest thing. Former British time trial champ Michael Hutchinson is big on that and basically says that you can train all you want but if your genes aren't in the super elite then you'll always struggle. Pro athletes are undoubtedly hard working, but they're also winners of the genetic lottery.
Pantani was a bit of a freak, and it's worth remembering that those 2004 times are bound to be quicker as it was a time trial rather than a summit finish. Even so, you can see times from the 'cleaner era' (say from Sastre in 2009 backwards) are a good few minutes slower. A 7-10% drop in times is quite significant, with many even outside of that. That's probably the biggest indication that the sport is cleaner now. Even with all of Sky's marginal gains stuff times are down.
As an interesting aside though, LeMond is widely believed to be clean, and you can see his time sneaking in the bottom along with Hinault and that is really quite a bit slower than the others. Indeed, you could probably get an amateur cyclist going up it not that much slower (I did it in around an hour, albeit with just the descent from Les Deux Alpes beforehand), so there is still a sizeable jump from his era.
Paul Kimmage featured in the documentary and was someone who almost had his career ruined by Armstrong. He wrote this article recently that nicely sums up our ability to bury doubts int he cupboard when it suits us
" A few weeks ago, while conducting some research for an interview, I was sent a clip with Richard Sadlier and a recent appearance he made on Second Captains Live. The debate was doping in sport. Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy were the hosts; Sadlier, Brian Carney and Derval O'Rourke were the guests and after some general points about the inefficiency of testing, McDevitt asked Carney if he ever doubted his eyes when he was watching sport.
"Well, I think we like to give people the benefit of the doubt," Carney replied. "I don't think there's doping - and Derval is better placed than me to speak about athletics - but certainly in rugby league and rugby union, doping is not rampant or a blanket problem."
"I don't think it's rampant in athletics," O'Rourke replied. "I think it happens."
But it took an interjection from Ciarán Murphy to spark the debate.
Murphy: "But if you take the (men's) 100 metre final in London in 2012; there's four of the eight that started that day have had drugs bans, either before or since the Olympics."
Carney: "Twenty-five years ago in the Seoul Olympics . . . There was only one guy who hasn't tested positive in that (final). So we should know this is coming."
O'Rourke: "But I think you have to have room for the freaks of nature. I think Bolt is clean. I just think he's a freak. When he was 15 years old running in Jamaica, he was running 19 seconds (for the 200m). It's incredible. So I think you have to watch it, and you have to have room for that magic."
Murphy: "That kind of strikes to the core of it doesn't it, as a sports fan?"
O'Rourke: "Yeah."
Carney: "I bought Lance Armstrong's two books, I want my money back."
O'Rourke: "I only put them in a charity bag today."
Carney: "I wouldn't give them to charity. It's an insult to charity. I read his piece where he said he went up the hill with his team in the rain; it took them five hours and he stopped and said, 'That's not good enough,' and they did it again. That inspired me. I thought: 'I'm suffering on the pitch but he's doing that.'"
McDevitt: "So you felt let down by him?"
Carney: "I felt cheated. I want my fifteen quid back for the book."
At first, Sadlier seemed content to nod and listen as the opinions flew back and forth. But he had seen something that no one else had seen and was just waiting for McDevitt to ask: "Richie, do you still believe in the really miraculous things that you see from time to time?"
"No," he exhaled after a beautifully weighted pause. "I mean the figures you just mentioned there from the Seoul games and 50 per cent from the last one (London), you'd have to be a little bit cynical. I think even in football now - and I can obviously name teams or players - but there is no way in the world professional football is clean of this.
"The money is there; the expertise is there and for you to put forward an argument to say professional football is clean, you would have to say, 'Well, there's something inherently decent about the people in professional football that is absent from other sports.' And no one in the world thinks that there's inherent decency in professional football."
I thought of Richie's comments quite a lot last week when live pictures of a doctor I hadn't seen since my last year as a pro cyclist in 1989, were zoomed into my living room from the World Cup in Brazil. He's not alone. In 2001, Paul Howard wrote a brilliant piece in the Sunday Tribune about the doping scandal at Juventus and migration of sports doctors from athletics to football, a trend that has continued.
Four years ago, Stefan Matshiner - a former Austrian track athlete - was sentenced to a 15-month jail term for enabling athletes and cyclists to dope. He had also worked with footballers. "Doping is as much a problem in football as it is in tennis, athletics, swimming and cycling," he said. "It's part of daily life. I've worked with footballers. They use testosterone, EPO, ephedrine and stimulants."
But has there been one conversation about doping on radio or TV or in print, since the start of this World Cup?
Two weeks ago, at a friend's wedding in Wicklow, I bumped into a former tennis player who would have spent the whole night talking about doping in cycling. But when I suggested his sport was possibly as bad he didn't want to know. There was nothing I could say . . . The ITF's indifference to testing; The top players' miraculous recovery rates; The cover-up of Andre Agassi's positive for methamphetamine in 1997; The association of Luis Del Moral - the Valencia-based doctor who had worked with Armstrong - with the sport; . . . to convince him.
And can you blame him? We've had wall-to-wall coverage of Wimbledon for two weeks now, and some curious games, but not once has the issue of doping been raised. Is there something inherently decent about tennis players?
And what of rugby? In his autobiography, Joking Apart, Donncha O'Callaghan tells an interesting story about the preparation for the second Lions Test in New Zealand in 2005.
"In the build-up to the match they gave us a dietary supplement called Focus. For consumption you added a bit of water. It had the texture of paste and it tasted horrible but I never got such a buzz from anything in my life. There were no labels on the pot and they wouldn't tell us what was in it. I've no doubt it was full of caffeine and taurine, a key ingredient in Red Bull . . . In the first Test Paulie pole-vaulted over one ruck early in the match in a crazy manoeuvre and I've no doubt he was acting under the influence of Focus."
If O'Callaghan was a cyclist, there would be an inquisition . . .
What exactly is Focus?
Are these 'stimulants' the norm?
What about the ritual abuse of painkillers? Is that not doping?
In rugby, they seem happy to carry on. And what of golf? Two weeks ago, on his return to competition after a back injury that required surgery, Tiger Woods was asked by Karen Crouse of The New York Times about the new sponsor on his golf bag. 'MusclePharm,' a dietary supplement company based in Denver, has been cited in the past for unauthorised use of certification marks.
"Would the MP on his bag make Woods a target for random testing on the PGA Tour?" But the former world No 1 just laughed. "I haven't been tested all year," he said.
" A few weeks ago, while conducting some research for an interview, I was sent a clip with Richard Sadlier and a recent appearance he made on Second Captains Live. The debate was doping in sport. Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy were the hosts; Sadlier, Brian Carney and Derval O'Rourke were the guests and after some general points about the inefficiency of testing, McDevitt asked Carney if he ever doubted his eyes when he was watching sport.
"Well, I think we like to give people the benefit of the doubt," Carney replied. "I don't think there's doping - and Derval is better placed than me to speak about athletics - but certainly in rugby league and rugby union, doping is not rampant or a blanket problem."
"I don't think it's rampant in athletics," O'Rourke replied. "I think it happens."
But it took an interjection from Ciarán Murphy to spark the debate.
Murphy: "But if you take the (men's) 100 metre final in London in 2012; there's four of the eight that started that day have had drugs bans, either before or since the Olympics."
Carney: "Twenty-five years ago in the Seoul Olympics . . . There was only one guy who hasn't tested positive in that (final). So we should know this is coming."
O'Rourke: "But I think you have to have room for the freaks of nature. I think Bolt is clean. I just think he's a freak. When he was 15 years old running in Jamaica, he was running 19 seconds (for the 200m). It's incredible. So I think you have to watch it, and you have to have room for that magic."
Murphy: "That kind of strikes to the core of it doesn't it, as a sports fan?"
O'Rourke: "Yeah."
Carney: "I bought Lance Armstrong's two books, I want my money back."
O'Rourke: "I only put them in a charity bag today."
Carney: "I wouldn't give them to charity. It's an insult to charity. I read his piece where he said he went up the hill with his team in the rain; it took them five hours and he stopped and said, 'That's not good enough,' and they did it again. That inspired me. I thought: 'I'm suffering on the pitch but he's doing that.'"
McDevitt: "So you felt let down by him?"
Carney: "I felt cheated. I want my fifteen quid back for the book."
At first, Sadlier seemed content to nod and listen as the opinions flew back and forth. But he had seen something that no one else had seen and was just waiting for McDevitt to ask: "Richie, do you still believe in the really miraculous things that you see from time to time?"
"No," he exhaled after a beautifully weighted pause. "I mean the figures you just mentioned there from the Seoul games and 50 per cent from the last one (London), you'd have to be a little bit cynical. I think even in football now - and I can obviously name teams or players - but there is no way in the world professional football is clean of this.
"The money is there; the expertise is there and for you to put forward an argument to say professional football is clean, you would have to say, 'Well, there's something inherently decent about the people in professional football that is absent from other sports.' And no one in the world thinks that there's inherent decency in professional football."
I thought of Richie's comments quite a lot last week when live pictures of a doctor I hadn't seen since my last year as a pro cyclist in 1989, were zoomed into my living room from the World Cup in Brazil. He's not alone. In 2001, Paul Howard wrote a brilliant piece in the Sunday Tribune about the doping scandal at Juventus and migration of sports doctors from athletics to football, a trend that has continued.
Four years ago, Stefan Matshiner - a former Austrian track athlete - was sentenced to a 15-month jail term for enabling athletes and cyclists to dope. He had also worked with footballers. "Doping is as much a problem in football as it is in tennis, athletics, swimming and cycling," he said. "It's part of daily life. I've worked with footballers. They use testosterone, EPO, ephedrine and stimulants."
But has there been one conversation about doping on radio or TV or in print, since the start of this World Cup?
Two weeks ago, at a friend's wedding in Wicklow, I bumped into a former tennis player who would have spent the whole night talking about doping in cycling. But when I suggested his sport was possibly as bad he didn't want to know. There was nothing I could say . . . The ITF's indifference to testing; The top players' miraculous recovery rates; The cover-up of Andre Agassi's positive for methamphetamine in 1997; The association of Luis Del Moral - the Valencia-based doctor who had worked with Armstrong - with the sport; . . . to convince him.
And can you blame him? We've had wall-to-wall coverage of Wimbledon for two weeks now, and some curious games, but not once has the issue of doping been raised. Is there something inherently decent about tennis players?
And what of rugby? In his autobiography, Joking Apart, Donncha O'Callaghan tells an interesting story about the preparation for the second Lions Test in New Zealand in 2005.
"In the build-up to the match they gave us a dietary supplement called Focus. For consumption you added a bit of water. It had the texture of paste and it tasted horrible but I never got such a buzz from anything in my life. There were no labels on the pot and they wouldn't tell us what was in it. I've no doubt it was full of caffeine and taurine, a key ingredient in Red Bull . . . In the first Test Paulie pole-vaulted over one ruck early in the match in a crazy manoeuvre and I've no doubt he was acting under the influence of Focus."
If O'Callaghan was a cyclist, there would be an inquisition . . .
What exactly is Focus?
Are these 'stimulants' the norm?
What about the ritual abuse of painkillers? Is that not doping?
In rugby, they seem happy to carry on. And what of golf? Two weeks ago, on his return to competition after a back injury that required surgery, Tiger Woods was asked by Karen Crouse of The New York Times about the new sponsor on his golf bag. 'MusclePharm,' a dietary supplement company based in Denver, has been cited in the past for unauthorised use of certification marks.
"Would the MP on his bag make Woods a target for random testing on the PGA Tour?" But the former world No 1 just laughed. "I haven't been tested all year," he said.
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