Do you have to cheat?

"archierob" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any

Quoted message said:

'sport'?

You can............

Quoted message said:

archierob explained on 24/07/2007 :

Quoted message said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

I think it's probably less dirty now than it has been for a very, very
long time. Certainly use of drugs was endemic in cycling in the 70s and
80s - it's just that far fewer were being caught, and the sanctions
were less significant.

As for whether it's still worth following, that's harder to answer in
my opinion.

--
Simon

"archierob" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

Why should the pharmaceutical antics of a few dozen affect the joy you get
from riding a bike? The pleasure I get isn't from being the fastest thing on
two wheels (which is fortunate), it's from riding the thing.

I enjoy the racing too - and it was great riding the same hills I've seen on
the telly many times. I'm under no illusions as to the doping regimes -
Anquetil said it right IIRC. Let's not forget that the doping isn't magic -
they're hurting just the same, which means it's still the test it's supposed
to be.

I'd like it to be clean, and support the various actions going on to ensure
that, but I'm not going to abandon watching the sport because they haven't
succeeded yet.

(that said, I'm [censored] with Vino getting caught - he's always provided
great entertainment, and to have it demonstrated that part of that
entertainment was because he was cheating doesn't cheer me).

cheers,
clive

"archierob" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

Why should you go off on a guilt trip over someone else's antics? What the
professionals get up to should not affect your personal enjoyment of
cycling.

It is disconcerting watching the professionals bringing the sport into
disrepute but it's not something that I dwell upon when I'm twiddling my way
up a 1 in 5 in the Yorkshire Dales or indeed at any other time when I'm out
and about on my bike.

archierob said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

For me, the love of cycling comes purely from the act of pedaling.
Racing has very little to do with it.

See, I was hit by a pickup truck while cycling to graduate school. And
the accident put me into a coma. It also severely screwed up my
balance, making me unable to ride a bicycle. Because of this, I
discovered the greatness of trikes. So, yes, I still ride a
velocipede.

So, by "giving it up" do you mean just "racing" or "the entire act of
cycling"?

Don't let the acts of professional cyclists kill your love of the
sport. There's a lot more to cycling than racing.

Regards,
Cullen
http://www.comatimes.blogspot.com/

Quoted message said:

Let's not forget that the doping isn't magic -
they're hurting just the same, which means it's still the test it's supposed
to be.

I find it very difficult to believe a sane sensible person like you
truthfully believes that.
I never had any experience of taking a performance enhancing substance
myself so I can't imagine
whether the cheat feels like a Superman or like a normal.
Last year we watched a broken Floyd at the end of the day ready for
retirement from the race.
Next day we watched him flying uphill in a lone break and I just can't
believe he was feeling normal hurt
and I can't believe he was on the same level playingfield as the
racers he'd dropped.

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Let's not forget that the doping isn't magic -
they're hurting just the same, which means it's still the test it's
supposed
to be.

I find it very difficult to believe a sane sensible person like you
truthfully believes that.
I never had any experience of taking a performance enhancing substance
myself so I can't imagine
whether the cheat feels like a Superman or like a normal.
Last year we watched a broken Floyd at the end of the day ready for
retirement from the race.
Next day we watched him flying uphill in a lone break and I just can't
believe he was feeling normal hurt
and I can't believe he was on the same level playingfield as the
racers he'd dropped.

I think it's a variation on Greg Lemond's famous words - it doesn't hurt any
less, you just get faster. The doped up guys aren't working less hard, it's
just that their work results in more output.

So, no, they aren't on the same playing field - which means the competition
isn't fair. However they are still putting in insane effort - it's not like
they've got a motor pushing them along so they can take it easy.

When I said test, I was mostly considering that of the riders vs the outside
world and themselves - terrain, wind, etc, rather than the other riders. Coz
that's the bit I can relate to - I've been on some of those climbs, and it
is incredible seeing what they can do, doped or no, on them.

cheers,
clive

Am Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:35:15 GMT schrieb archierob:

Quoted message said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it?

Why should you not love cycling? I certainly enjoy cycling - independent
from some cracy cycling mega-event in France once a year. I've been
ignoring TV coverage of this event in recent years - as it's far away from
an honest competition... maybe it has always been. And if people like
Ullrich or Jaksche seem to have the attitude that doping is not cheating
because anyone at the top is involved - then this is a reflection of how
embedded this practice is in professonal cycling - at least for those at
the top.

At the start of the tour in London eight teams demanded a stricter policy
against doping. These were T-Mobile, Ag2R Prévoyance, Gerolsteiner, Credit
Agricole, Bouygues Telecom, Agritubel, Cofidis and La Francaise des Jeux.
It is revealing to notice that those eight teams have so far been
consistently behind the other teams if you look at the results.

Quoted message said:

It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

Well non-competitive amateur sport, just to have some fund and keep fit,
should be pretty safe from doping. I'll stick to that :-)

Andreas

archierob said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

Yes to a great degree many sports are clean. Maybe the odd rogue. But
your sport is riddled.

Off course the whole team pulled out. They couldn't risk any of the
others being tested.

Cycling is a drug sport and every winner of the Tour de France in the
last 15 years at least has been doping. Including your hero Lance.

They ALWAYS refuse to admit it. Last years winner had synthetic
Testosterone in his blood and he is trying to get off on a technical
point.

Close the sport up, remove it from the Olympics and put it away for
ever.

Quoted message said:

Last year we watched a broken Floyd at the end of the day ready for
retirement from the race.
Next day we watched him flying uphill in a lone break and I just can't
believe he was feeling normal hurt
and I can't believe he was on the same level playingfield as the
racers he'd dropped.

That may be the case but the lab screwed up so royally we will never
know. However if he was guilty as measured then he will probably be the
first athlete to have been sanctioned for the removal of natural
performance enhancing substances from his body recalling that it was his
epitestosterone that was abnormally low, not his testosterone that was high.

Tony

Quoted message said:

Cycling is a drug sport and every winner of the Tour de France in the
last 15 years at least has been doping. Including your hero Lance.

They ALWAYS refuse to admit it. Last years winner had synthetic
Testosterone in his blood and he is trying to get off on a technical
point.

Close the sport up, remove it from the Olympics and put it away for
ever.

I'm afraid I'm inclined to agree. I haven't watched professional
cycling since the days of the Big Mig because no matter how I might gasp
at the riders' speeds, or thrill at their daring, or, like Clive George,
marvel at their attacks on the climbs, I can't shake off the feeling
that their near-Superman feats are poisoned shams. I wanted (naively it
seems) to be amazed at the magnitude of the difference between their
abilities and mine, but it is their fantastic human abilities I would be
interested in, not their chemically adjusted ones, which bear no
relation to my real life experience.

Watching "The Flying Scotsman" I goggled all over again at the
magnificent cycling of Graeme Obree and remembered the feeling at the
time that "He's like me, only many magnitudes better". That's so
different from "He started out like me but then followed a furtive
chemical regime designed to give him a sneak advantage" which is my
reaction to TdF and the like.

For my money, the whole "sport" can be binned with little loss.

--
Brian G
www.wetwo.co.uk

Brian G said:

For my money, the whole "sport" can be binned with little loss.

But the /whole/ sport includes a great deal of iceberg under the
waterline where drugs are a non-issue. If I turn up to a local club's
amateur TT I'll get whipped not because they're doped, but because
they're better than me. Ridiculous to stop everything, and that's what
binning the whole sport entails.

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Peter Clinch said:

Quoted message said:

For my money, the whole "sport" can be binned with little loss.

But the /whole/ sport includes a great deal of iceberg under the
waterline where drugs are a non-issue.

I'm not so sure. Locally I see public adverts offering and asking for
performance enhancing drugs. I don't know if the market for those ads
are amateur sporters, but it strikes me as likely.

--
Membrane

archierob said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

One of the joys of time trialing "against yourself"

BugBear

Peter Clinch said:

Brian G said:

For my money, the whole "sport" can be binned with little loss.

But the /whole/ sport includes a great deal of iceberg under the
waterline where drugs are a non-issue. If I turn up to a local club's
amateur TT I'll get whipped not because they're doped, but because
they're better than me. Ridiculous to stop everything, and that's what
binning the whole sport entails.

Sorry, sloppy posting on my part. I referred to "professional cycling"
in my first line and my subsequent remarks were directed at that.

--
Brian G
www.wetwo.co.uk

Quoted message said:

Last year we watched a broken Floyd at the end of the day ready for
retirement from the race.
Next day we watched him flying uphill in a lone break and I just can't
believe he was feeling normal hurt
and I can't believe he was on the same level playingfield as the
racers he'd dropped.

I thought that taking testosterone wouldn't have helped his recovery the
next day. Didn't he just 'bonk' the previous day? Stuffing loads of carbs
in after the stage would have got the muscles brimming with glycogen again.

in message <[email hidden]>, archierob

(') said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

OK, this is a question on many levels.

Firstly Vino. Vino is a flawed hero. But, watching him tearing apart the
team he was supposed to be riding for in 2005, we knew he was flawed.
Brilliant, mercurial, egocentric, courageous, manic, charismatic, foolish.
A man driven by complex drives; a big man in a sense which has nothing to
do with physical size. I wrote two days ago that I wouldn't be surprised
if Vino was doping, I wouldn't even be surprised if he'd been doping this
week, and I wouldn't think less of him if I learned he had. Well, he has,
and I don't. The fact that it was homologous not autologous suggests that
it wasn't planned for in advance - it was a spur of the moment thing, an
act of desperation. And that's very human, something I can relate to.
There is tragedy here, in a classical Greek sense: the flawed hero finally
destroyed by his flaws. But still a hero. We will be poorer - cycling will
be poorer - without him.

Secondly, cheating. Once upon a time in a universe far away, there was a
little cycling club with a group of good under-16 riders. One of them had
a very ambitious father. When the club ran time trials, the father
would 'train' on the same circuit as the time trial, and when he did this
the son would always record the best time. Then, one week, a neighbouring
club ran their time trial on the same course, and both father and son
raced. The son's time was four minutes slower than he'd been recording
when his father was 'training'.

Cheating happens at all levels and doesn't have to involve hypodermic
needles. Myself, I'm never going to win a race and I know I'm never going
to win a race; and I don't validate myself with the idea that I might win
a race. So I don't need to cheat. Does cheating (in races in which I race)
spoil it for me? No. I ride for the pleasure of riding, and for the
camaraderie. For those of us who never had the genetic endowments to make
us potential winners, cheating isn't a temptation, and racing can be
enjoyed simply for itself.

In the hypothetical little fairy story I told above, the other kids knew
the son was cheating, and I think it did spoil their enjoyment a bit -
because they could have won if he hadn't. But the child I felt sorry for
was the son himself.

Third, spectacle. The big professional races need to be understood as
spectacle, as morality play, as tournament. Rasmussen, the strange, the
driven - not as arrogant as Armstrong, not as attractive as Landis, but
ultimately as flawed as either. Sastre, the willing lieutenant left
exposed in the spotlight by the loss of his leader and lacking the last
ounce of drive to take his place. Ullrich, supremely gifted, riding
through his career in the shadow of someone more gifted (or better doped).
Basso (and Millar), the golden boys blessed by all the gods, who fell
because they lacked confidence in their own abilities. Yes, cheating
happens. But it is part of the drama.

Winning the Tour de France is a very big ambition. All across the world,
children are lying in bed dreaming that one day it could be them. This is
the great test in cycling, in the same way that single handed non-stop
circumnavigation is the great test in sailing. People are drawn to great
tests, and only the most gifted and the most driven will ever achieve
them. For the nearly men, the temptation to cheat must be overwhelming.

I have no simple solution to this. Ride because you enjoy it. Watch the
great riders because, doped or undoped, cheating or not, what they are
doing is epic, is magnificent, is extraordinary. But under that they're
still human, and humans have flaws, even heros.

Halfway through writing this, an old cycling friend phoned up to talk about
the news. And in talking about it with him, I realise that one thing would
still hurt me. I would really be hurt if we learned that Tom Boonen had
doped. And I'm not even a Boonen fan.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; in faecibus sapiens rheum propagabit

Simon Brooke said:

Rasmussen, the strange, the driven - not as arrogant as Armstrong, not as
attractive as Landis

Not as attractive as Landis?! That is the first time I have seen the
concept brought anywhere near the man.

Daniele

Simon Brooke said:

in message <[email hidden]>, archierob

(') said:

It is a passion - perhaps the one enduring passion of my life, I love
my bike, I love cycling - but should I love it? It has become a game
of cheats and chemists - my chemist is more gifted than yours, the
latest revelations in a tour that was supposed to restore all our
faith in its honesty is increasingly seemingly more fraudulent by the
day. Should I give up? Can this sport ever be honest, indeed can any
'sport'?

OK, this is a question on many levels.

Firstly Vino. Vino is a flawed hero. But, watching him tearing apart the
team he was supposed to be riding for in 2005, we knew he was flawed.
Brilliant, mercurial, egocentric, courageous, manic, charismatic, foolish.
A man driven by complex drives; a big man in a sense which has nothing to
do with physical size. I wrote two days ago that I wouldn't be surprised
if Vino was doping, I wouldn't even be surprised if he'd been doping this
week, and I wouldn't think less of him if I learned he had. Well, he has,
and I don't. The fact that it was homologous not autologous suggests that
it wasn't planned for in advance - it was a spur of the moment thing, an
act of desperation. And that's very human, something I can relate to.
There is tragedy here, in a classical Greek sense: the flawed hero finally
destroyed by his flaws. But still a hero. We will be poorer - cycling will
be poorer - without him.

I think you're right. What I'm most gutted by is basically not seeing
any more of Vino. It's also very sad when you see someone work that hard
and then suddenly their career is over. Accidents can do the same thing:
remember the year Beloki was giving Lance a very good run and then fell
off and broke his leg. Ditto Michael Rogers this year, and Stuart
O'Grady also got cut down in his prime.

It was disappointing last year at the start when there was no Lance,
Ullrich, Vinokourov or Basso but you always get a good Tour and there
are always some new heroes.

As for Vino I'm not sure he would have won it this year even without
that early accident. But he was great entertainment. Not the kind of
rider who saves something for the ride home.