May 25, 2010
on dope
There were 14 other podium spots available during his seven-year streak and, in all, eight riders occupied them. Five of those riders at some point admitted doping, were suspended for it, were convicted of it in court, or paid a fine to have charges settled: Ivan Basso, Raimondas Rumsas, Jan Ullrich, Alexander Vinokourov and Alex Zulle. Two others were linked to doping investigations then cleared or never charged: Joseba Beloki and Andreas Kloden. Just one, Fernando Escartin, had no direct association with doping allegations (though his Kelme team later would).
What I concluded—and as it turns out, this was the most isolating judgment I could have arrived at, because neither side agrees with me—is that based solely on what we publicly know, there’s no rigorously objective path to either yes or no. Whatever you believe about Armstrong is a matter more of faith than fact. Those of us who weren’t there seem to decide first what we believe about Armstrong, then construct a canon from the same set of incidents cited by those who just as passionately swear the opposite.
Also, in the New York Times:
It has long been known that athletes can use small, carefully timed doses of the blood booster EPO to beat urine-based drug tests yet still gain a significant performance advantage. But research by scientists in Australia and France has found that the technique also eludes the long-range biological passport program that was supposed to overcome the shortcomings of conventional testing.
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One of the problems with trying to find your ground in the dope debate is that there are fanbois, egos, conspiracies, contradictions and false syllogisms on both sides.
For instance, in the ‘Armstrong dopes’ camp, the prevailing view is that the French riders are clean because they lose, except for those that win who must be on dope but might not be because the French anti-doping authority has used the biological passport for years to root out the cheats but the anglophones who have had only brief experience of this system are cheating because it’s so easily circumvented, any baby could do it, especially Armstrong because he’s got so much money and power and Armstrong must be cheating because he gets grumpy when people call him a cheat and all his team mates cheated plus EPO gives you cancer.
Dan, exactly.
The entire thing is so complicated I’m not even sure how I’d feel if it were proven he cheated his way to all 7 TDF titles. On the one hand, there’s disappointment that a hero, the man responsible for the growing popularity of pro cycling in the United States is a cheater (a fraud?). And on the other you have a man who, without even considering the cancer, has more TDF victories than any other doing what was required of him to compete at the time.
I want to be angry at him and respect him at the same time.
Do I feel differently about Floyd? I do and it’s a little hypocritical, sure. But mostly I’m mad at Floyd because he got caught, spent 2 years denying everything and then changed his story when he thought it suited him. But I do think that, even if the Armstrong question is never answered, what Floyd did might be the catalyst that cleans the sport up further and I do think it is important the sport is cleaned up.