Unbelievable... what a moron!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/h ... ports/cycling/5221122.stm


Suspend for life, please.

with ears like that what do you expect?

He shall be put down!! :color:

Why do they destroy this great sport?

After all the crap Armstrong has gone through you would think no one else would be stupid enough to try sneaking in a win by illegal means. Idiot!

Testosterone? In a male driver? Unbelievable!

He should've taken estrogen to counter the testosterone levels. But then again, the resulting titties wouldn't be aerodynamic, I guess.

Its a shame really for the sport.

But thinking back on it, going from a total zero on Stage 16 to nothing short of a hero on Stage 17 would have required a miracle.............or drugs

Its sad really, Im all for great sportsmen making amazing wins like his Stage 17 appeared to be, so Ill withhold full judgement until we hear about the B sample. However, it does look bad.........numpty! illepall

Maybe he was just aroused? Humans have certain urges, and he might have been drug tested by a particularly attractive female doctor?

what the f***! i hope hes got testostirone in him!

maybe he saw some fat woman and things...... got harder for him

A big shame for the sport:weeping:

Lol, obviously Looney doesn't give a f*ck

Anyway, I do think it's a BIG shame for the sport... I feel so fooled, having watched and followed the Tour de France for 3 weeks and having to hear afterwards I've been watching a cheating bastard win.

Quote from mrbogeyman :

But thinking back on it, going from a total zero on Stage 16 to nothing short of a hero on Stage 17 would have required a miracle.............or drugs

On telly yesterday, was some expert who said that those things can't just happen over the night. In other words, he can't have decided to use "drugs" after his breakdown in stage 16 to have a better performance the day after. So either he must have used drugs before that, or the test is faulty...
I'm afraid we'll never really know...

You guys seem quick to condemn. Yes, sure, we want an equal playing field in sports, but still: if I had to sit on a bike seat for 3 weeks and pedal up mountains, I would be taking anything and everything I could get my hands on just to get through the pain. It seems that as a sporting audience, we set these guys up: we demand that they do the near impossible, and then when they cross an arbitrary line in the sand in terms of inputs to their body, we brand them a cheat and a fraud.

I think, the sad truth is, that 90+% of the riders are doped. Only that many are lucky, that they havent been proven guilty (yet).

Quote from jtr99 :

You guys seem quick to condemn. Yes, sure, we want an equal playing field in sports, but still: if I had to sit on a bike seat for 3 weeks and pedal up mountains, I would be taking anything and everything I could get my hands on just to get through the pain. It seems that as a sporting audience, we set these guys up: we demand that they do the near impossible, and then when they cross an arbitrary line in the sand in terms of inputs to their body, we brand them a cheat and a fraud.

Don't tell me it's impossible for well trained (all year!) men to do 19 stages of bicycling in 3 weeks without using drugs. Im more than a 100% sure they can, maybe not as fast as without drugs, but if no one uses it, the average speed (for everyone) would be lower, thus the achievability would be higher.

Don't get me wrong, Traxxion, I'm not saying it's impossible for well-trained guys to ride the Tour without taking drugs. I am just saying that in a paranoid and hyper-competitive environment it is very easy to see how they are tempted to take them, because they will often believe (possibly correctly) that their biggest rival is taking them and that therefore they'll be left behind if they don't.

I honestly see drugs in cycling (other sports too, but especially cycling) as a bit like the apple tree in the Garden of Eden. Do what you want, but just don't eat the apple. Yeah, OK. So what's going to happen?


Also, a slight tangent, but while I'm at it: the word "drugs" is such an emotively charged term. What bothers me about this whole issue is that it's often based on an imperfect understanding of physiology and human biology in general. If a guy eats a steak to get iron into his body that's OK, but if he takes an iron supplement that's bad? This is just ignorance. Or, to take my favourite hypocritical example, I remember seeing an interview with the coach of the Australian athletics team at the last Commonwealth Games, who proudly boasted of how many of his athletes were sleeping in hyperbaric chambers in order to mimic the effects of living at altitude and thus stimulate their bodies to produce more haemoglobin. OK, a bit extreme but within the rules I suppose. And yet if an athlete from a poorer country used an equivalent method of doping himself with stored supplies of his own blood in order to up his haemoglobin count, this would be condemned as cheating. Why, I don't know -- the line seems to be drawn at injecting things. But surely you can see this is arbitrary?

Again, please don't take this the wrong way. I think it's very sad how many cyclists have had terrible health problems and even died over the years due to the stuff they felt compelled to take. Marco Pantani was a prominent and tragic case. But I do feel that the venom directed at these guys when they're discovered to have taken something is misplaced. We should be looking at ourselves and the entire televised sport industry in order to root out the real source of the problem, not blaming the poor guys at the sharp end.

Quote from jtr99 :

Don't get me wrong, Traxxion, I'm not saying it's impossible for well-trained guys to ride the Tour without taking drugs. I am just saying that in a paranoid and hyper-competitive environment it is very easy to see how they are tempted to take them, because they will often believe (possibly correctly) that their biggest rival is taking them and that therefore they'll be left behind if they don't.

I honestly see drugs in cycling (other sports too, but especially cycling) as a bit like the apple tree in the Garden of Eden. Do what you want, but just don't eat the apple. Yeah, OK. So what's going to happen?


Also, a slight tangent, but while I'm at it: the word "drugs" is such an emotively charged term. What bothers me about this whole issue is that it's often based on an imperfect understanding of physiology and human biology in general. If a guy eats a steak to get iron into his body that's OK, but if he takes an iron supplement that's bad? This is just ignorance. Or, to take my favourite hypocritical example, I remember seeing an interview with the coach of the Australian athletics team at the last Commonwealth Games, who proudly boasted of how many of his athletes were sleeping in hyperbaric chambers in order to mimic the effects of living at altitude and thus stimulate their bodies to produce more haemoglobin. OK, a bit extreme but within the rules I suppose. And yet if an athlete from a poorer country used an equivalent method of doping himself with stored supplies of his own blood in order to up his haemoglobin count, this would be condemned as cheating. Why, I don't know -- the line seems to be drawn at injecting things. But surely you can see this is arbitrary?

Again, please don't take this the wrong way. I think it's very sad how many cyclists have had terrible health problems and even died over the years due to the stuff they felt compelled to take. Marco Pantani was a prominent and tragic case. But I do feel that the venom directed at these guys when they're discovered to have taken something is misplaced. We should be looking at ourselves and the entire televised sport industry in order to root out the real source of the problem, not blaming the poor guys at the sharp end.

A well thought out, reasoned and articulate argument. However I do feel that in the end it's a question of personal choice and mental strength of these althletes that choose to take these substances.

Quote from jtr99 :

Marco Pantani was a prominent and tragic case. But I do feel that the venom directed at these guys when they're discovered to have taken something is misplaced. We should be looking at ourselves and the entire televised sport industry in order to root out the real source of the problem, not blaming the poor guys at the sharp end.

Marco Pantani died from a cocaine overdose, or so it seems. His death was not directly related to the substance abuse that may have occurred during his career. In fact there was no evidence of doping when he was precautionally stopped from racing, there was only a suspiciously high hematocrit level probably related to the use of EPO. Instead, Marco Pantani's death is directly related to the personal failure he felt after being shamed and to the depression that followed its retirement from professional racing, but to say or imply that his death is directly related to sport doping is stretching things a bit too far.

Thanks for the info, Albieg, I wasn't aware of some of that stuff. I stand corrected.

BUMP

Looks like its all over for Landis now?!

Quote from zeugnimod :

I think, the sad truth is, that 90+% of the riders are doped. Only that many are lucky, that they havent been proven guilty (yet).

yeah lol didn t 50 entrants get caught that same race?

Hi, I think I heard Landis failed a second test..... I dunno, I thought physical sports was supposed to physical not chemical.
LOL he shoulda just used crystal meth in the final stretches if he just HAD to cheat

We recently had a big scandal here over with Baseball and players using steroids.
Barry Bonds became a house hold name, but not the same way as Babe Ruth's did.

Has there been any reports of it being used in other sports (besides olympic ones) Like Soccer or Rugby.. or Cricket? You'd figure that
steroid use might be happening in the World Cup

I imagine in the future we'll probably hear allegations of it's use in Golfers.

lol sport fishing.

Anyways, I can sorta understand, seeing all the pressure he was up against He couldn't just go out there and ride - he was EXPECTED to win.
It doesn't justify anything. And stripping him of the title and the yellow shirt?
Man, his actions pretty much ruined the whole tour.
I think if athletes faced criminal and civil penalties for steroid use maybe alot of this would stop.

Quote from Racer Y :

I think if athletes faced criminal and civil penalties for steroid use maybe alot of this would stop.

They face reputational ruin, which is much worse than criminal / civic penalties for a "sports personality" / sports man / woman, yet despite this the greed to win is stronger. Conventional penalties seem rather pointless imho.

tbh you get drug users in almost all sports, and they do test for it in a lot of them; including football (thats soccer, not that rugby-copy-with-girlie-pads that every american plays [stereotyping or what? ] )

If someone gets found posative for doping, they should be forced to work in kindergarden for a year. If screaming children doesn't scare them out of it and they repeat, then they have to spend a year working in an old persons home. No one would reoffend after that

But to be honest, what's more shocking is not that people cheat, but that they still try and ban it and people act shocked. I'd bet that 9 out of 10 people cheat. Just very few get caught.

Nobody should be cheating at major sportevents like Tour de France ,but I knew that he was on dope as soon as he made that impossible comeback after the collapsing in the middle of the tour and after that coming back stronger.