The other testing is a good step; and hopefully they'll find an answer to the doping problems in the sport. I think the Pantani death was really a wake-up call for cycling as a whole.

Hopefully, the mitigating factors that KSigRC mentioned will also be taken into account when they assess his samples. If he's guilty, fine, but it should by no means be on a technicality.

The perception at least is that Armstrong has been targeted by the European media; first the reports in the London papers, the book that alleged doping, and now the newspaper reports out of France. Cycling on a whole has been under a microscope, and the perception at least seems that Armstrong is under even more of one. Winning the Tour de France as often as he has (and yes, I realize there are many more cycling events around the world), especially after being sick, has caused more questions with every title.

Hopefully the answer comes out, whatever it may be.

I think you need to realize that Bobby rarely says anything that should be taken completely seriously. He is just a joking guy who likes to try to lighten the tense moods in situations like this. I find it hard to believe that Bobby would actually care enough about this situation to post seriously.

Bobby, I don't mean to speak for you but I took your post as almost completely joking and I think everyone else should too. ;)

There was an SI article about this today.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200....ap/index.html

Thanks...didn't need a Bobby translator, but his comments weren't really adding anything of substance to the discussion anyhow.

I had this whole arguement typed but I have decided to just delete it.

Your comments (which I feel are attacks on my opinion) aren't going to change my opinion.

So how about we agree to disagree?

I am going to admit that I went overboard in blaming all the French! My bad...

But how many times can you say that Lance was using drugs, and have us believe you? Like I said, the man has passed so many tests, that I have to side that he didn't boost his performance.


Plus, can you really trust a sample sitting on ice (or whatever way the "saved" it. Why were they saving it in the first place?!?!?) for six years???

Move on. He is retired...Let him live with the six titles under his belt and find someone else to complain about. (Like baseball steroid users!)

Um.... I wasn't trying to translate. But you obviously didn't understand that he was just kidding around. It doesn't have to add substance to the discussion... It's just funny. Relax. :)

OMGIVENEVERBENTOFRANCEBUTTHEYDON'TLIKEDUBYASOITHIN KALLFRENCHPEOPLEARE BAD.

Insularity. GC has it in spades.

I read an article about the allegations, and I think they're bogus--especially since he took EPO during his treatment. The mere fact that after being sick, he is able to compete at all is a success story.

Oh those darn French...now they are sticking up for Lance...Oh!! I forgot they ALL hate him right? http://msn.foxsports.com/cycling/story/4815616

:cool:

whoa whoa. what part of my post where I said, " I THINK It's just a joke more than anything" did you miss?

Go untie your panties.

There is no substance to this discussion? Ofcourse I didn't add any substance to the discussion. I don't care to. If I really did state my opinion, it just be exactly as how you feel. I feel the French shouldn't be catagorized as a whole. But I am making fun of the situation.

You don't have to find it funny. You don't have to. As Bobby Brown would say, that is your perogative. You may love to get into discussions about Lance Armstrong and the French. I can really care less. When I want to make light of a situation I will do so. Don't be calling me out for something petty and stupid when I blatantly said I was joking earlier.

I will take the same approach as you.


How dare you make fun of a situation like this. You know very well that hate should not be used in a topic of discussion. Don't you know that hate is a bit extreme?

Bobby, I think you are hilarious, and I find whatever you write to be a lot more interesting than some crap about Lance Armstrong. In fact, I probably wouldn't have even read this thread except I saw that you had posted in it, and I figured you would say something amusing, so I read it. You're freakin hilarious, and anyone that fails to see the humor in your posts should go out and buy themselves a soul.

And I would like to pre-emptively strike any litigation on this matter.

Just thought I would bump this thread up since I saw this article.

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/4854364

UCI: No doping evidence against Lance
Associated Press
Posted: 1 hour ago

AIGLE, Switzerland (AP) - Cycling's governing body said Friday it had received no evidence of doping by Lance Armstrong and criticized world doping authorities and a French sports newspaper for making allegations against the seven-time Tour de France champion.
"The UCI has not to date received any official information or document" from anti-doping authorities or the laboratory reportedly involved in the testing of urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France, the cycling federation said.

Allegations that EPO was found in Armstrong's 1999 urine samples were first reported by the French sports daily L'Equipe last month.

Armstrong has angrily denied the charges, saying he was the victim of a "witch hunt." He questioned the validity of testing samples frozen six years ago, and how the samples were handled.

UCI said it was still gathering information and had asked the World Anti-Doping Agency and the French laboratory for more background. It also wanted to know who commissioned the research and who agreed to make it public.

"How could this be done without the riders' consent?" the UCI said.

It also asked WADA to say if it allowed the results to be disseminated, which UCI says is a "breach of WADA's anti-doping code."

"We have substantial concerns about the impact of this matter on the integrity of the overall drug testing regime of the Olympic movement, and in particular the questions it raises over the trustworthiness of some of the sports and political authorities active in the anti-doping fight," the UCI said.

UCI president Hein Verbruggen has asked for harsh sanctions against dopers and suggested Armstrong should face sanctions if here were shown to be guilty.

He also told Friday's Le Figaro that Armstrong had proposed before the Tour that all of his urine samples be kept for tests over the next 10 years.

UCI said it was still "awaiting plausible answers" to its requests to WADA and the laboratory.

"We deplore the fact that the long-established and entrenched confidentiality principle could be violated in such a flagrant way without any respect for fair play and the rider's privacy," it said.

UCI singled out WADA president Dick Pound for making "public statements about the likely guilt of an athlete on the basis of a newspaper article and without all the facts being known."

It also criticized the article in L'Equipe as "targeting a particular athlete."

L'Equipe said it would react of UCI's criticism in Saturday editions. Tour de France organizers had no immediate reaction, spokesman Matthieu Desplats said.

Claude Droussent, the editor of L'Equipe, denied his newspaper targeted Armstrong because he is American, and said it would have treated a French rider the same.

Armstrong retired after winning his seventh straight Tour title in July, but said this week he is considering a comeback. He plans to attend the Discovery Channel team training camp this winter.

Let's re-cap:

1) The legality allowing any lab to test those samples at this time is questionable and most likely illegal due to privacy concerns.

2) There were supposedly 2 samples (A and B) and only one sample was tested?

3) The results have not been linked to Armstrong at this point. It's simply a picture and some words.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007171

The Wall Street Journal

THE SPORTING LIFE

Lance Boiled
Why are the French getting all worked up over a six-year-old bike race?

BY GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Sunday, August 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Nothing says more about different countries and the relations between them than sports. You can learn at least as much about America by watching the World Series as attending a Republican or Democratic convention, and for the past century, no cultural phenomenon has been more central to French life than the Tour de France. That lies behind the bitter row which has erupted, with accusations--a remarkably long time after the event--that Lance Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs in the 1999 Tour, the first of his barely believable sequence of seven victories. For the French, we are talking about something more than a bike race. The Tour is part of national culture.

So it is bad enough that no French rider has won it in 20 years; for an American of all people to have dominated is intolerable. And as if to illustrate the continuing rift between the countries, Mr. Armstrong was out biking only days ago with his friend and fellow Texan, George W. Bush.

Although the tour is wonderful event, from the very beginning the cyclists have dosed themselves with narcotics. In the early days they drank lashings of alcohol, not in truth performance-enhancing, though it does dull the senses. So does cocaine, the drug of choice in the 1920s and '30s, succeeded by amphetamines in the '50s and '60s. Cocaine gives a lift, amphetamines hold fatigue at bay; both are dangerous. In 1967 cycling suffered a moral shock when Tom Simpson, the first Englishman to have worn the yellow jersey, collapsed and died on the stage up Mont Ventoux, chock-full of amphetamines. Until then, this had been the open secret of cycling, as even the greatest riders admitted. After his retirement from the Tour, two-time champion *****o Coppi was asked if he had used dope. "Only when necessary." When was that? "Almost all the time." And five-time winner Jacques Anquetil suggested that no normal human being could ride the race unaided: "Do they expect us to ride the Tour on mineral water?"
After the horror of 1967, cycling began to make a real effort to clean up its act. And yet by unhappy timing, this coincided with the arrival of anabolic steroids and EPO (erythropoietin). For the first time there were drugs which did enhance performance, measurably so, but are even more dangerous. Like steroids, EPO is a synthetic version of a natural metabolic product, which is one reason they were for so long difficult to detect. And it is much more insidious. By enhancing the red blood cells it increases energy: The startlingly fast times in some stages of the Tour in recent years do not have any obvious innocent explanation. At the same time, by thickening the blood, EPO makes it harder to circulate. Its arrival as a clandestine drug is all too easily and grimly dated by the fact that between 1987 and 1990, 20 Belgian and Dutch cyclists died from otherwise inexplicable nocturnal heart attacks. There has been a continuing death toll ever since.

Without doubt EPO use was rife in the 1990s, and Mr. Armstrong has been regularly accused of doping. On July 21, 2002, I watched him climb Mont Ventoux, past the memorial where Simpson fell. High above on the lunar landscape of that Provencal peak was a compatriot holding the Stars and Stripes, and I thought of another Armstrong making a step for man 33 years to the day before. But that Yank was outnumbered by the French fans all around us screaming "Dopé!" at the champion. It didn't seem to them contradictory to cheer Richard Virenque, the great villain of the 1998 "Tour de Farce" when the Festina team car was found packed with drugs and needles.

Although the Festina scandal blew the lid off the extent of doping, the fact that no rider tested positive that year was an indictment of how far behind the testers were in their duel with the dopers. Samples taken in those days from cyclists were sometimes frozen and stored, and scientists have gone back to the older samples to see how new testing works on them. That might be justifiable in terms of intellectual curiosity, but only if the results are kept confidential. As it is, there is something fishy, even distasteful, about the way this story has been broken. Yet again Mr. Armstrong has repeated his denial that he has ever used drugs, adding that "the witch hunt continues." For once that overused expression is valid: Even l'Equipe, the Paris sports paper which broke the story, admits the evidence "cannot be regarded as a positive test in the strict regulatory sense." As in a witchcraft trial, the charge cannot be proved judicially; yet Mr. Armstrong cannot refute it.

In any case, since the new testing of old samples could never be used for formal disciplinary purposes, as everyone knew, why weren't those old samples examined anonymously? If the lab simply wanted to show how its methods had improved, why was it necessary to reveal anyone's identity? Above all, if the frozen samples of seven riders from 1999 have tested positive, as we are told, why has only one name been leaked?

It may not help that Mr. Armstrong remains, despite his efforts, a chilly personality. Some sportsmen are lovable and indeed loved, far beyond their native shores. When Jack Nicklaus walked up the 18th fairway at St. Andrews for the last time six weeks ago, the whole course--all of Britain--was swept with intense affection. By contrast, Mr. Armstrong has "a voice like ice cubes," as one French journalist puts it, and I have to admit that he reminds me of what Daniel O'Connell said about Sir Robert Peel: He has a smile like moonlight playing on a gravestone. And it helps even less that he has triumphed in what is far more than a mere bike race. In my country we have come to terms with fact no Englishman has won Wimbledon since well before I was born, but then Wimbledon is not watched by 15 million people en plein air, it has not been hymned in terrible popular songs, it has not been intellectually deconstructed "as epic" in the way the Tour was by Barthes.
There may or may not be dirty tricks going on, but the French have never really come to terms with their eclipse in their own great race. More generally, France is going through a grave crisis of confidence, which takes political and economic expression--and sporting as well, with the French showing no sign of regaining their eminence in the Tour. Maybe life would be easier for them, and for all of us, if les bleus could win the soccer World Cup again next year.

Mr. Wheatcroft is author of "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France 1903-2000" (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

-Rudey

Question:

Did Lance Armstrong have his testicles removed, due to his cancer? (either 1 or both?)

One of my friends theorizes that he kept winning, due to his not having any testicles, and therefore, he is more "comfortable" in his bike seat. (I can't imagine the "boys" getting squashed on a bikeseat for 500+ miles is particularly comfortable).

Anyone know for sure?
THXKBYE