:lol:
Thatās marvelous
When you have Irish and English people who donāt know much about cycling defending him, you can be damn sure heāll still have a legion of millions in the US who will believe in him till their dying day. Which actually quite upsets me.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion Sidney, there is no doubt sky started off as a clean team. But this years results have turned heads and there is a great deal of suspicion on them now.
[quote=āSidney, post: 151751ā]Des Cahill: āPeople donāt know what to believe now. But the amount of support he (Armstrong) is getting on Twitter is extraordinary. Personally I would always have had a lot of sympathy for him as I read his book.ā
Myles Dungan: āBut if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, then surely it is a duckā.
Des: āI donāt know, what is a duck, I mean I wouldnāt know the difference between ducks and geese.ā
On Cahillās bulletin trhere also that Bruyneel says that āthe fact that Armstrong has decided not to fight the charges proves how unjust they are.ā Nice logic.[/quote]
Quality. On Morning Ireland he mentioned how enjoyable and inspirational the books were and he hadnāt heard any drugs talk at that stage. Either Des read the books before they were written or he doesnāt have his finger on the pulse. Probably the former.
Itās the power of the personality cult. It gives you some insight into how religious lunacy works.
Thereās a great comment on the guardian article that sums it up:
āItās easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.ā - Mark Twain
[quote=ābalbec, post: 151747ā]
Spot on , Bruyneel is the real cancer in the sport, not Armstrong. Bruyneelās case is in arbitration, does that mean he is cutting a deal? I do not believe for one minute that Froome is clean.[/quote]
Agreed on Bruyneel but for similar reasons I hate Riis and thought Rocheās decision to join Saxo next year was oddly supported on here. I wonāt be supporting him next year.
Yeah Iād agree with that. Donāt think I ever expressed confidence in Froome sidney.
Sandy Bruyneel has been arguing that USADA have no jurisdiction on him as licence isnāt issued through USADA. Donāt think heāll go for arbitration.
Thatās what I mean, mate. Iāve been watching cycling for too many years to believe in the coincidental āgreat formā of riders from the same team.
Rocheās media work over the last couple of years doesnāt give me much confidence that I should be supporting him.
Fair comment sidney. The performances of Garmin for instance though are hugely optimistic and shows how far we have moved on.
Fair comment sidney. The performances of Garmin for instance though are hugely optimistic and shows how far we have moved on.
:lol:
[size=ā5ā]Wiggins on Armstrong:[/size]
[size=ā5ā]Seven consecutive Tour de France wins says it all but Lance was not someone who inspired me in the same way as the other names here. He was one of the fiercest rivals Iāve ever faced. To go toe-to-toe with him in 2009 was a dream come true. He revolutionised the sport and brought it to a much wider audience. His cancer survival story is incredible, and the sport has a great deal to thank him for ā not least for raising its profile so that big sponsors are attracted to it. [/size]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGtfpzT4Lqw
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Kimmage on Newstalk shortly
Riis is tainted but at least he admitted to his doping past. I support Rocheās move to a non French team, I am interested to see how he gets on. (read the code)
None of them rock the boat Sidney.Except those that were never any good, like Kimmage 
What does āread the codeā mean?
A wonderfully ignorant piece by Lanceās friend in the Washington Post. The number of references to Europe - as a substitute for evil - and America - as a substitute for good - is startling.
Lance Armstrong doping campaign exposes USADAās hypocrisy
By Sally Jenkins, Published: August 24
First of all, Lance Armstrong is a good man. Thereās nothing that I can learn about him short of murder that would alter my opinion on that. Second, I donāt know if heās telling the truth when he insists he didnāt use performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France ā never have known. I do know that he beat cancer fair and square, that heās not the mastermind criminal the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency makes him out to be, and that the process of stripping him of his titles reeks.
A federal judge wrote last week, āUSADAās conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.ā You donāt say. Then when is a judge, or better yet Congress, going to do something about it?
Quite independently of Lance, with whom I wrote two books, for a long, long time Iāve had serious doubts about the motives, efficiency and wisdom of these ādopingā investigations. In the Balco affair, all the wrong people were prosecuted. Itās the only so-called drug investigation in which the manufacturers and the distributors were given plea deals in order to throw the book at the users. What that told us was that it was big-game hunting, not justice. It was careerist investigators trying to put athletesā antlers on their walls. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment became a muddy, stomped-on, kicked-aside doormat.
So forget Lance. I have so many problems with USADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ā which is supposed to be where athletes can appeal, only they never, ever win ā that itās hard to know where to begin. American athletes have lost 58 of 60 cases before the CAS. Would you want to go before that court?
Anyone who thinks an athlete has a fair shot in front of CAS should review the Alberto Contador case. Contador was found to have a minuscule, insignificant amount of clenbuterol in his urine during the 2010 Tour de France. After hearing 4,000 pages of testimony and debate, CAS acknowledged that the substance was too small to have been performance-enhancing and that its ingestion was almost certainly unintentional.
Therefore he was guilty. He received a two-year ban.
CASās rationale? āThere is no reason to exonerate the athlete so the ban is two years,ā one member of the panel said.
Would you want to go before that court?
The decision was so appalling that even the Tour runner-up, Andy Schleck of Luxembourg, couldnāt swallow it and refused to accept the title of winner. āThere is no reason to be happy now,ā Schleck said. āFirst of all, I felt bad for Alberto. I always believed in his innocence. .?.?. I battled with Contador in that race and I lost.ā
The former prime minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, had openly declared his belief that Contador was innocent. When the CAS ruling came down, Zapatero expressed ābewildermentā and suggested it was so irrational it gave āsufficient reasons to open a debate about their fairness.ā
The response of WADA President John Fahey? A rant in which he suggested that Contador was given a two-year ban instead of one because Zapatero had dared to open his mouth. Let me repeat: The president of WADA actually suggested publicly that an athleteās penalty was made harsher because his prime minister had the nerve to challenge WADAās authority.
Again, would you want to go before that court?
When are people going to grow sick enough of these astonishing overreaches and abuses to do something about it? As my friend Tommy Craggs has written for Deadspin, WADA and USADA have become āa gang of moralizing cranks .?.?. and it is beyond me why an organization that wants to ban caffeine again hasnāt yet gotten laughed out of polite conversation.ā
You can put me down on that side of the argument. You can also put me down on the side of professional basketball player Diana Taurasi, who has called the international drug testing bureaucracy āone of the most unfair processes you can be put through,ā and attorney Howard Jacobs, who makes his living going before CAS. He told USA Today, āA lot of times athletes are getting run over in the quest for clean sport.ā
How does an agency that is supposed to regulate drug testing strip a guy of seven titles without a single positive drug test? Whether Armstrong is innocent or guilty, that question should give all of us pause. How is it that an American agency can decide to invalidate somebodyās results achieved in Europe, in a sport it doesnāt control? Better question, how is it that an American taxpayer-funded organization can participate in an adjudication system in which you get a two-year ban because āthere is no reason to exonerateā you? At what point is such an organization shut down and defunded?
In his decision last week, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks declined to intervene in USADAās case against Armstrong because to do so would āturn federal judges into referees for a game in which they have no place, and about which they know little.ā But in the next breath Sparks expressed an opinion on certain matters he does know about. āThe deficiency of USADAās charging document is of serious constitutional concern,ā he wrote. āIndeed, but for two facts, the court might be inclined to find USADAās charging letter was a violation of due process and to enjoin USADA from proceeding thereunder.ā Among other things, he was disturbed by USADAās āapparent single-minded determinationā to go after Armstrong and force him before CAS.
All of which I find far more worrisome than the question of whether he may have transfused his own blood in trying to climb a mountain on a bike. It wasnāt a judgeās job to intervene with USADA. But it most certainly would seem to be the job of Congress. The WADA-USADA system is simply incompatible with the U.S. legal system.
wiggins is defo more of a cheat than armstrong- the Anglophile cycling fans here are so easily manipulated