Annoying old doping themes that serve little purpose

[Beech Mtn]

These are stories that are ancient history, been beaten to death, where the truth came out long ago, or where the truth is so universally acknowledged, and the doper so long retired, that it coming out wouldn't help anything anymore anyway. Thus, dopers or doping stories that once were newsworthy or may have had an impact on the sport, but now just make you roll your eyes whenever they are mentioned.

Mine, in no particular order:

1. I don't care who trains with Lance. The power he once had is gone. Everyone knows what he is/was. Who cares?

2. This notion that Bjarne Riis should never be allowed in the sport. Yeah, him running a team still affects current cycling, but given the state of the sport (Hi, Sky; Vino; etc), I don't care. I'd rather see the bureaucrats at UCI, WADA, IOC, and other sporting feds be investigated instead.

3. Anything to do with Operación Puerto. (I take it back if they ever name Jens.)

4. Rapidly approaching the same opinion with regard to anything Istvan Varjas says.

5. That old chart from the UCI with everybody ranked from 0-10 on a suspicion index, or need for testing index, or whatever it was claimed to be. The rankings were so odd, but people took it like gospel. Plus Popo never going down for anything made it even more of a joke.

 

[sniper]

Agree with 1, 2, 3.

4. with Varjas it's really wait and see for me.
No reason yet to think it won't be interesting.
He said "Festina".
We'll soon know whether he's full of *** or not.
Some more or less reputed cycling folks seem to think he knows what he's talking about.
Ger Gilroy, Greg Lemond, Davide Cassani spring to mind.
Journalists also run to him and print what he says. Investigative journos usually do check their sources, so on the basis of that evidence it would seem that he does have credibility in certain circles.

But if the upcoming documentary doesn't deliver, Varjas will indeed be fully deserving of lables such as "quack" and/or "charlatan".


5. I never saw anybody taking it as gospel.
But were the rankings really odd?
There is an easy rule of thumb for interpreting that index:
The higher the score, the more meaningful.
So while a 9 or a 10 is highly suspicious and means something like "probably doping", a 0 or a 1 means very little other than that said rider did not trigger (m)any alarms during the season. In otehr words, a 0 or a 1 doesn't mean "probably clean".
One of the most striking things about the index is that Brailsford seems to have used it as a shopping list.

 

[hrotha]

Yeah, I don't think you understand what the "suspicion index" was or how it worked.

Related to your #1, I'm quite tired with the notion that a clean rider wouldn't associate with or express admiration of a doper under any circumstances, and that they would ostracize dopers. This despite the fact that the people who put forth this notion are usually very vocal about the "bad dopers" narrative. I'm anti-doping. I'm a fan of many dopers. That's how these things work. It's not rational.

Very much agreed about Varjas of course.

 

[mikez]

If you take this away from the clinic there isn't a whole lot left, especially Lance Armstrong.

 

[Irondan]

6. Greg Lemond...

 

[Night Rider]

1. I don't care who trains with Lance. The power he once had is gone. Everyone knows what he is/was. Who cares?

Betsy, Mike, Greg and Walsh. That's probably all.

 

[sniper]

Re:

6. Greg Lemond...

Weird.

How on earth is Lemonds doping a theme that 'serves little purpose' (as per the thread titel)? What purpose does, say, Evans doping serve that Lemonds doping does not?

You dont really want to turn this place into a Lemond-is-clean echochamber do you?

 

[sniper]

Why Fuentes and Varjas are neither old nor annoying:

The sheer poetry of the thought of Cance getting screwed by both in one and the same month...

https://twitter.com/oufeh/status/824359946930294785