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Dirtiest Rider

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I think Ricco takes this one for how shamelessly and compulsively he doped.

Dopes, gets banned, comes back, almost kills himself with a bad bag less than a year later, gets banned again, effectively for the rest of his career, gets caught buying dope again two years into his ban.

That man is a professional doper. Cycling was his side hustle.
Ricco was the real Ciclismo baby
 
unless you literally kill yourself with drugs in the middle of a race, you could have been dirtier. That means nobody beats Tom Simpson

From Wiki:

Simpson fell ill with diarrhoea during the Tour's tenth stage. He was under pressure from his personal manager to continue in the race, though members of his team encouraged him to quit. Near the summit of Mont Ventoux, Simpson fell off his bike but was able to get back on it. After riding a short distance farther, he collapsed. He was pronounced dead after being airlifted to a hospital. The post-mortem examination found that Simpson had taken amphetamine and alcohol, a diuretic combination which proved fatal when combined with the heat, the hard climb of the Ventoux, and the stomach complaint.

In poor Tom's day they hadn't discovered how to dope safely. Plenty of riders walking around today who were dirtier than poor Tom Simpson.
 
I think Ricco takes this one for how shamelessly and compulsively he doped.

Dopes, gets banned, comes back, almost kills himself with a bad bag less than a year later, gets banned again, effectively for the rest of his career, gets caught buying dope again two years into his ban.

That man is a professional doper. Cycling was his side hustle.
This. Ricco is the pinnacle of "italian mafia" and since he left the sport we no longer had a true italian doper.
 
From Wiki:



In poor Tom's day they hadn't discovered how to dope safely. Plenty of riders walking around today who were dirtier than poor Tom Simpson.
I think one aspect of dirtiness is safety/health. In body building, a "dirty bulk" is where you eat lots of cookies and put on a lot of fat very quickly, as opposed to a "clean bulk" of slowly gaining weight by eating avocados and whey protein in slight excess.

I mean, alcohol is dirty by any definition of the word. Are you saying he was less dirty because one of the banned drugs he was using was not performance-enhancing? The guys who get really into doping act like drug addicts. Abusing drugs without even caring whether it improves your performance seems worse/dirtier than doing just enough to win a bike race.

I will also say that by my reckoning, il Pirata was dirtier than Lance, because he took more drugs than his body/mind could handle. Lance is surprisingly well-adjusted and healthy at this point in his life, given all that crap he put his body and public image through.
 
I will also say that by my reckoning, il Pirata was dirtier than Lance, because he took more drugs than his body/mind could handle. Lance is surprisingly well-adjusted and healthy at this point in his life, given all that crap he put his body and public image through.
I don't mix recreational drugs (what got Marco) with PEDs. To me dirty means PEDs. Armstrong was a perfectionist - that includes use of PEDs. So I think he was dirtier than Pantani.

Its quite difficult to know, but riders like Evgeni Berzin and Bjarne Riis seemed as dirty as possible. Berzin beat Pantani at the 1994 Giro. Riis was likely jacked on EPO in 1993 when he was cannon fodder. But the creature which showed up at the 96 Tour was something else.
 
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I don't mix recreational drugs (what got Marco) with PEDs. To me dirty means PEDs. Armstrong was a perfectionist - that includes use of PEDs. So I think he was dirtier than Pantani.

Its quite difficult to know, but riders like Evgeni Berzin and Bjarne Riis seemed as dirty as possible. Berzin beat Pantani at the 1994 Giro. Riis was likely jacked on EPO in 1993 when he was cannon fodder. But the creature which showed up at the 96 Tour was something else.

I think had he not ridden as a domestique, Ullrich could have beaten Riis in 96. IMO.
 
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