I move this to the appropriate thread.
I don't think Armstrong was a donkey, just that he clearly benefited in an extraordinary way from the pharmacological products.
One point to remember is that doping also has a "therapeutic" aspect (in the Italian lexicon this is emphatically clear, curarsi, literally to "take care of oneself" from the verb curare , to cure (a disease) or look after yourself in the sense of helping the body heal, recover, feel healthy, etc. In fact an Italian cyclist doesn't go to his doctor to "dope," but to "look after himself" and "be cared for": curarsi. Here one encounters a physiological justification of doping, as an enshrined therapeutic precept. Indeed Fuentes said as much in his own defense, that he was not harming the athletes who sought his services, but actually taking care of their health. Ferrari et all would have felt the same way. The brutality of cycling at the professional level, according to them, requires such treatments, in order to replenish and maintain the rider's diminished bio-levels inflicted upon the body by the exhausting and agonizing training and racing regiment, during which the body is pushed to physiological extremes. So argues the doping specialists.
Given this philosophy, it is easy to comprehend how many a rider who may have gone into a doping program with uneasiness of mind and a guilty conscience, is easily persuaded by the medical experts that in fact what he does is not only ethically unproblematic, but even vital to his good health!
In this justification framework it is easy to see also how the market takes over in establishing the value and costs of treatment, and a corporate mentality establishes a kind of managerial hierarchy, for which the CEO rider/s with the highest salary, in being monitored, assisted and treated by the best medic, collects the biggest year end bonus. For Lance that was 7 straight Tour de France's. Furthermore, he himself said his Tours weren't won during the race but all the discipline and rigor and quantity-quality miles he put into his training regime before the event. Having the best doping program out there, the Texan gave himself the possibility to train the way he did, in ruthless and maniacal fashion to become the sport's premier workout demon: although it would have otherwise been impossible to recuperate without Ferrari's expertise, methods and "help." Thus probably, and I'm sure he thought this to be the case at the time, Ferrari allowed Lance to literally out-train his rivals. Armstrong's entire mission was to make himself invincible and he rather did for 7 years. Bruyneel in an interview said as much, recalling how Lance's pre-game power output and resistance, which they had trained and built up to perfection on the Ferrari system, meant that he had fair certainty that without bad luck, crash or illness, Armstrong was a shoe in at the start of the Tour for overall victory. Now some of this was certainly willpower, some physiology, but the part that put him beyond the others (hence the critical one), wasn't these two, but Ferrari's incomparable methods. He simply bought that, though, for which his achievement, if not his entire credibility, becomes extinguished: for herein lies the fraud. It wasn't a level playing field, this is the greatest myth to dispel at once. He played the dirty game better through money and stacking the odds in his favor, which is noteworthy but certainly not admirable, while taking his fans and all of cycling for a ride.
I don't think consequently Ulrich, or any of his other rivals, had that quality of a program, and thus couldn't match Lance in the preparation phase and so couldn't match him on the roads of France in July either. That's how he won I believe. They were all on solid programs and trying to learn Lance's little secrets, and making headway (like Basso especially till he got popped), but without a Ferrari (or the natural class of a Contador, who also doped of course), they remained slightly off the back.
It was a remarkable achievement. Too bad it was all fabricated on a fraud, a fraud, not because the others were clean riders, but because Lance used the power of sheer bucks to buy his superiority and in the process made a mockery of fair-play even among the dopers. Then he intimidated and bullied Lemond and anybody who called him to task on it. Which is naturally reprehensible.