If this charge holds, Lance may have to forfeit seven Tour De France titles.
I’ve long-maintained that either (a) he is as clean as an Eagle Scout, or (b) he is the most proficient cheater in the history of sports.
That said, the anti-doping regulators have become very advanced over the years. It used to be common knowledge that the Eastern Bloc athletes were doped with steroids, but were able to chemically deceive the drug tests.
Today, cheating the system has become quite difficult. And because many samples are stored for years, being able to cheat today is no guarantee that you won’t get caught a few more years down the road, as technology improves.
Disclosure: I have no axe to grind with Armstrong, and hope he is innocent.
But if he’s guilty, he needs to face the same music that others have had to face.
gosh, i do hope he’s innocent. i remember watching him ride and win those races – it was awesome.
however, if he’s guilty, may his whole system crash and the full extent be revealed.
you know … if he is guilty … and he went to that extreme to beat the testing system and won for all those years … the level of deceit is deep. that would be really really bad, cause not only would it affect him (and it should), it would affect every honest and successful athlete out there. i’ll have to not think about this till the verdict is in b/c it will really make me angry.
In a sport like cycling, they are already tainted with doping scandals. If Lance is guilty, then it would bring the last remaining curtain down on that sport.
This type of practice–specifically doping–is very prevalent in endurance sports, especially when prestigious awards and dollar amounts are on the line. Cross-country skiing, long-distance cycling, triathlons, anything that requires a large degree of endurance.
There are other sports–especially track and field, and weightlifting–where this also happens, but cycling is probably the worst culprit.
How does any of this change? No easy answers. On one hand, a large exodus of sponsors would cause a drop in the monies available in the sport. But even that won’t stop cheaters: this goes back decades, even before the big dollars were in cycling.
Ultimately, detection technology will have to get to where the regulators are a step ahead of the would-be cheaters.
At the Olympics, they do a relatively solid job screening athletes. Are they perfect? No. But they are a LOT better now than they were 4 decades ago. They HAVE made it a LOT harder to cheat. And the penalties are steeper today than they were two decades ago.