Armstrong 'must play team role' - and Junior's Anti-doping rant ..

Junior

Lance Armstrong may have to accept a supporting role to Astana team-mate Alberto Contador in next year's Tour de France, according to his team boss.

Astana cycling director Johan Bruyneel says Contador, the 2007 Tour de France winner, will not be leaving the team. "Alberto is the best professional cyclist in the world," he said. "The strongest rider will be supported."

Meanwhile, Armstrong has rejected a call to re-test urine samples from his first Tour win for the drug EPO. Pierre Bordry, the president of France's anti-doping agency, said Armstrong should have his first Tour de France win sample in 1999 tested for the blood-boosting drug.

But Armstrong said: "Mr Bordry is new to these issues and his proposal is based on misunderstanding the facts. There is simply nothing I can agree to that would provide any relevant evidence about 1999."

Armstrong won seven Tours in a row before retiring in 2005, but is hoping to make a comeback to the sport in January with Astana.

Source http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/cycling/7647467.stm

Hmm doesn't bode well for his future in france, but I suppose it was always expected that someone would drag this up..

The only closure the french are going to get on this is retroactively dope test everything on file and see who turns up what, it's a cause of shoulda coulda woulda, they need to move on with the future of cycling rather than trying to destroy what has happened.

I'm really getting fed up with this anti-doping thing, fair enough I 100% understand where it's coming from, and why we need a clean sport, but as pointed out by Raam in that other thread of the 200 'athletes' found in the Fuentes operation 50 were cyclists, we don't realistically see this persecution of a sport anywhere else. I wish the same sort of methods were placed on other sports, you know anytime you see cycling mentioned you nearly here the sport commentator snigger and wait for the chance to mention drugs ..

The French seem to be some sort of converted Zealot, they've had the Festina affair, Virenque etc coming out and hey it's ok, but they want to turn the screw on everyone else, it's like f*ck it we've been caught, lets screw everyone else at every given chance...

I'm really sad and angry at this sport and the way it's going.. grrr ..

There ya go folks some Lance News and a Free Rant !!

Feel free to abuse, pull apart the points I've made or ask me for my blood/dna passport..

Lumen

What is your reason for opposing retesting of the 1999 samples?

littleknown

i must say i have always wanted to believe lance is clean but the fact he wont go through with the retesting makes me more than a little suspicious. if he had nothing to hide he could just say go ahead do whatever you want. but no, its as if he has cheated the tests and doesnt fancy his chances second time round & when he is clean and next years race and doesnt win he can pin it down to old age, lack of training or not really wanting to win but generate awareness for cancer.

doesnt look good im afraid.

its a real shame. cycling itself is amazing but the competitive side ( at least professionally with drugs involved!) robs all of us part timers in a way in that i for one always marvelled at the abilities of the pros which one by one have been proved to be frauds.

ah well, theres always snooker.

Freddy687

Retesting the '99 samples will not end the debate.
If they show EPO then LA will say that the samples were tainted during the research analysis. Something he brought up at the time. (This was linked in a previous thread week "Kimmage and GarmenSlip Stream " by Liam08.)

If the samples return non postive, you will get doubters saying the samples were not stored properly and they degraded over time, etc.
I cant see Kimmage, Le Mond, etc coming out and saying sorry we must be wrong after all.

Mr. Presentable

Freddy687 wrote: »

I cant see Kimmage, Le Mond, etc coming out and saying sorry we must be wrong after all.

I can't see them being wrong.

Chips Lovell

Cycling dug itself into this hole. Now it has to dig its way out of it.

Just because doping is going on in other sports and isn't being clamped down on, does this mean that we have to put up with in cycling?

You've got to remember that while professional footballers and tennis players may be abusing EPO and the like today, it appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon. In cycling we had a deeply embedded culture of doping. From the early nineties onwards virtually the entire peloton was using EPO. You had young riders dying in their sleep because they couldn't dose themselves right. You had domestiques taking it not because they wanted to win, but just so that they could keep up, do their work for the team, keep their jobs and keep putting food on the table for their families.

And then you had a small coterie of riders who made millions because they were willing to spend a fortune on the best doctors and injest any kind of pharmaceutical they thought would give them the extra edge. You had team managers and owners who went along with it all because of the money it brought in, sponsors who were only too happy too see their names in lights and the cycling authorities who seemed to simply turn a blind eye to it until the French police stepped in in 1998 and they had no other choice.

And lets not forget the guys who got eaten up by the system. Jose Maria Jimenez, dead of a heart attack in a mental hospital at the age of 32. Pantani, found dead in a pile of cocaine in his hotel room at the age of 34. You just knew that it wasn't about being caught, it was about getting caught when everyone else was doing it and they were the one's still racing and he's the one who has it all taken away from him.

As for the French, at least they were the only ones to take it seriously after 1998. Rather than brush it under the carpet they introduced one of the strictist drug testing regimes out there for riders resident in France. It's why French teams are widely regarded as mostly clean, why French riders rarely win anything and why you get so few doping positives on French teams (with notable exceptions such as VDB and Miller).

Doping is so ingrained in cycling that if you're going to clean up the sport there's going to be a lot of blood on the carpet. You're literally talking about stripping an entire generation of riders out of the peloton and making sure that anyone left behind is tempted back into the old ways. There is no way you can do this without the scandals and the revelations. Nobody's being persecuted here. Cycling did this to itself.