Sorry but ts incredible how adamant you are in believing someone is no doping.
Yet here it is, the case against Lance Armstrong, as laid out by the United States Anti-Doping Agency on Tuesday.Is any of this true? Did Lance really dope? Did he use performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions during his seven Tour wins from 1999 to 2005, his third-place finish in 2009, and his crashed-marred finale in 2010?
All of the Tour’s winners from 1996 to 2006, with one famous exception, were later caught, or admitted to, using performance drugs. The exception was Lance Armstrong, who was never caught despite being the most tested athlete in modern sports. That’s the story, anyway. Actually Lance was caught, twice: One in 1999 for steroids and again in 1999 for the red cell boosting drug, EPO.
In the 1999 steroid case, Lance’s doctors produced a legal corticosteroid prescription for saddle sores. The prescription may or may not have been backdated. Lance’s 1999 EPO positive was found in a frozen urine sample stored for a future (and better) detection technology, which appeared in 2005. The “A” sample showed evidence of EPO. The confirming “B” sample was compromised through mishandling and could not be used as evidence. Read the account
here and
here.
Let’s say you still believe Lance when he says did not use drugs or blood transfusions during his seven Tour wins. That’s an honorable position, consistent with American court standards. But it leaves you explaining how Lance Armstrong beat dirty riders such as Italy’s Marco Pantani, Germany’s Jan Ullrich and others during his seven-year Tour reign. How was that possible?
The answer depends on how much of an advantage an EPO/blood-doped rider has over a clean rider. That advantage, according to our friends at Science of Sport, is about 5% faster on mountain climbs at the professional cycling level. (It’s even more at the sub-elite levels.) How much is 5%? It doesn’t sound like much. But 5% is actually huge at the measurable world-class sports level. It is the difference between a world-record 2:03 marathon and a nationally good one of 2:09.
A clean rider could not have beaten a dirty Pantani or Ullrich in the 1999 to 2005 period.
It is true when Lance’s supporters call him a once-in-a-generation athlete, gifted with an odd ability to produce little lactic acid. It is also true that Lance worked harder and planned more intelligently than his Tour rivals. But it is fantasy to think that even this remarkably courageous, single-minded athlete could have spotted a 5% EPO or blood manipulation advantage to the likes of Marco Pantani and Jan Ullrich and still won as a clean rider. Did they not have big hearts, too? What, then, would be the source of Lance’s 5% advantage? It is not his fabled cardiovascular system, which is only middlingly excellent among history’s
great endurance athletes. If anyone can prove how Lance had a 5% physical advantage over the next best riders, let’s hear it.
The tragedy of Lance Armstrong is that he competed in an age of factually known rampant doping. Here, the statistical probability of Lance’s guilt is overwhelming — a clean cyclist had no chance of beating doped competitors who had a 5% built-in climbing advantage. It is thus likely Lance decided hehad to dope to compete against the dopers. That is why Lance’s highest-paid adviser was the Italian hematologist and EPO defender, Michele Ferrari, named in the USADA charges.
On a (more-or-less) level field of doped Tour cyclists, Lance proved himself the best of the tainted bunch.
Whether Lance’s heroic legacy can survive this likely truth is another matter.
