Especially the part about the men shaving each others legs. :rolleyes:

and the massaging with oil...


we had a snackbar a "frietkot" in my home town
and one day there was a big cycling race

one team ( dad , uncle as trainer, and junior as cyclist, not a big team ) came to ask if they could prep in the mensroom
we said , yeah sure, didn't really think much about it
all good you know


till the end of the day , when they had left, we noticed that the place was dripping in oil, i mean everywhere... walls, floors, sinks...
and the sodding bstards hadn't even bothered to clean up their own ****...

You sure it was just oil?

well, oil and sweat i suppose
either way , pretty disgusting

me beeing about 12 at the time , and definately work shy ,

made a runner as soon as it became clear that "someone" would have to take a bucket and get some cleaning done...
i had a wel develloped instinct for avoiding anything work like at the time...

He was accused immediately after the first win (post cancer). This only got worse when an MD he knew was involved in a doping scandal (Michel Ferrari I believe was the name). It continued after he retired with the L'Equipe story, bought into by Dick Pound and LeBlanc.

oh well... guess i lost track of it , Frenchies released new stuff every year... even right now before TDF2006 ...

I saw on ESPN at lunchtime in the sports bar he might be stripped of his win.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/

Why is this a surprise? Wake up folks, steriods have been in heavy rotation for a long time now. Cycling, NBA, NFL, MLB, etc... It's happening everywhere, even on the local H.S. football fields.

Oh and LeMond is a joke LeMond speaks out. I remember him talking about *vitamin* shots to keep going...Pleaze...

David - I don't think anyone is surprised by this (especially in regard to Landis' 17th stage win where he nearly wiped out his 8-minute time deficit). What is surprising is that these riders (and others) take these chemicals and "think" they won't get caught.

I mean, considering Armstrong, the French, and now the legacy of steroids in American sports, one would have to be a real ass to not think they wouldn't be tested for this stuff.

DD74
have you ever spoken with a cyclist??
apart from Armstrong, and Merckx i've yet to see a TDF winner who can entertain anyone with any decent conversation...
they usually aren't the brightest light bulbs.... which makes sense if you gonna spend the best parts of your life as a 2 wheeled human powered vehicle...7x356 , no beer, no fun , just racking miles...

the coaches that guide these guys, are usually the ones who hire the team doc and dietist, and they tell the jock how to think , what to eat, when to take a crap, and so on....

the cyclist, most of the time, just does what he's told
and believes that all the supllements and medicines he get's are cool

Ah! Come to think of it, somewhere I've heard cycling in Europe is near the bottom of the totem pole. That it's a true blue-collar sport. Maybe it was in reference to Sean Kelly, and how in Ireland, whole families, sometimes even villages saved up for a kid's bike with the hope he'd be the financial savior.

Addendum - when I ride, I often see bikes that should cost over $2K. But when I drive, I often see Mercedes Benz cars that cost over $50K. I've seen and heard that in many countries, Mercedes Benz cars are taxis, and bicycles are a means of transportation. Hell, doesn't Holland have the honor system when it comes to bicycles - they're basically free for anyone to use?

It's the elitist thing here: high price road bikes and Mercedes Benzs, while elsewhere they seem to be the rule rather than exception. Maybe that's what has me confused about these guys having...well...intellect.

I am bummed over the Landis affair.
Over the years I have meet and am friends with many Pro cyclists.
Many of the European riders their way out of working at the local paint factory was to succeed at cycling. Yes they do ask if they will be caught but so many of the races you are not tested every cyclist knows which races are clean and dirty after a a year of riding and talking to other riders.
The team doctors sample your blood and "Top you off"
which means if the legal limit of testosterone is X number and you have a natural amount less then they top you off.

LOL

the junks in Amsterdam will honour a bycicle with 3 locks
anything less, is fair game....

and yes, cycling in Europe, wasn't really a high end sport
you should see the small town races where they race 20 laps around the local church, the town comes out, everybody

week after that, same riders, different town, different church

the one to win isn' necessarely the fastest one
they take turns , to make it worth while
note ,i'm talking really , the low end of the sport
we call it "kermiskoers" where i'm from

once read an article, that a lot of the guys who were in Armstrongs team, many of em trained in belgium, and actually lost their cherry in those kind of events... it's low visibility... no problem if anyone screws up there

Some food for thought. The IOC uses a pretty much foolproof blood test, the UCI uses a cheap and much less reliable urine test. Also, the IOC itself (keeping in mind that they don't do cycling testing) have found individuals with naturally occuring t/e ratios of higher than 6:1 - cyclings standard is a much more strict 4:1 - and thus don't consider a test result as positive until the subject undergoes endocrinolgic testing to determine what his naturally occuring range is.

Another thing-Floyd's power output (downloaded from his powermeter on the bike) has been available publicly since stage 18. Nothing unusual about it-the output was rather pedestrian for an elite athlete. Floyd got the huge time back as much from a tactical miscalculation by his opponents as anything else.


This is not yet a positive result.

And yes, you would have to be an ass not to expect to get caught for something this obvious, adding to evidence of innocence.

Well... it did follow on from a seriously bad day. It doesn't help the suspicion level.

Nevertheless, everyone (eg, cycling media) really should calm down and wait for the B sample.

There was a comment up the thread about "finishing the tour and going home to rest, rather than races a week after" - apparently they get big appearance fees (I read of 60k Euro), which would be motivational :)

Some other notes. Apparently, he was tested a number of times with "normal" ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone although I don't know what the ratio was on the other samples. Seems unlikely that if he was doping it would be only on a single test (steroids require more long term administration than a single shot).

Taking a jolt of testosterone the night before a big effort simply does not compute. It is not a stimulant like caffeine or ephedrine and doesn't have dramatic effects with short time between administration and onset of peak action.

Third, all tests are called normal based on 95% confidence intervals. That means that by definition 5% of the "normal population" can fall outside of the "limits" and still be normal.

not a week after, days after. tour ended on the 23rd? but he won a race 2-3 days ago in the Netherlands...


now , that's not even half a week to recoup from the TDF
60K doesn't make that more natural

especially not , if everybody (tv commentators, trainers, ex champs and anything in between ) in the cycling world is screaming that the TDF organisation is part to blame for the doping , because they make the TDF impossibly hard and long, to the point where a normal person can't hack it no more...

It has been pretty much traditional for the TdF winner to appear in a number of small Euro crits the week after a win; its usually nice money, plus its not hard. Lance didn't do it, but just about everyone else has. And yes, the guy usually wipes up-its normally local competition. Nothing at all suspicious about that.

+1