• The Cycling News forum is looking to add some volunteer moderators with Red Rick's recent retirement. If you're interested in helping keep our discussions on track, send a direct message to @SHaines here on the forum, or use the Contact Us form to message the Community Team.

    In the meanwhile, please use the Report option if you see a post that doesn't fit within the forum rules.

    Thanks!

Doping Quotes - All Sports

6wvSPcT.jpg



“If you hadn’t taken it you would have been slaughtered. You didn’t do it to cheat. You did it to survive. To fight the battle with the same arms as everyone else.”

—Paul Kimmage


“The Tour de France was no ordinary race. It made superhuman demands on the human body. Riding six hours a day for twenty-three days was not possible without vitamin supplements, mineral supplements, chemicals to clean out a tired liver, medication to take the hardness out of rock-hard leg muscle.”

—Paul Kimmage


“Why haven’t they made every possible effort to eliminate this cancer? It’s as if the riders are entirely disposable, wheel them in for the show and then discard them. It’s time to put a stop to the massacre … I was disgusted …. I blamed the system. The race organisers, the directeurs sportifs, the sponsors – the men in power who knew what was going on but turned a blind eye to it. And when his career ended the system would spit him out as a penniless ex-pro.”

—Paul Kimmage


“People know in cycling that it's not possible to win the Tour de France without it. It's three weeks, 3,000 km and you climb Mount Everest four times. That's just not possible.”

—Bernhard Kohl


“It's impossible to win the Tour de France without doping because the Tour is an endurance event where oxygen is decisive. To take one example, EPO will not help a sprinter to win a 100m but it will be decisive for a 10,000m runner. It's obvious.”

—Lance Armstrong


“I was not a doper, I told myself – I just injected myself to recover and needed pills to sleep.”

—David Millar


“In the pack you never use the word doping but medical help.”

—Richard Virenque


“It was a matter of survival, just keeping up, not getting dropped, having my place in the peloton.”

—Frankie Andreu


“You don’t understand, this is the only way I can even finish the Tour.”

—Frankie Andreu


“It felt like I’m trying to survive and there’s a little raft and I can stop treading water and hoist myself up on that.”

—Jonathon Vaughters


“My alternative would have been to drive the bicycle in the garage and stop the career."

—Bo Hamburger


“Everybody knew that the whole peloton was taking drugs and I had a choice. Either I buckle and go with the trend or I pack it in and go back to my old job as painter.”

—Alex Zulle


“It became obvious that if I wanted to stay competitive and be selected to do all the big races, I had to participate in a team-doping program.”

—Stephen Hodge


“Because of my career and the team I ended-up on, if I wasn’t willing to do that, I wasn’t going to be there.”

—Floyd Landis


“The pressure not to let myself and my team down saw to it that I took refuge in EPO.”

—Tom Lotz


“There was no dissenting voice. Doping was a way of life and a way of riding. It was easy to be influenced, doping was widespread. They should have told me to be patient and to stay clear of doping, but that wasn’t the case.”

—Thomas Dekker


“You can’t ride the Tour de France on mineral water.”

—Jacques Anquetil


“You’d have to be an imbecile or hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.”

—Jacques Anquetil


“Leave me in peace, everybody takes dope.”

—Jacques Anquetil


“For 50 years bike racers have been taking stimulants. Obviously we can do without them in a race, but then we will pedal 15 miles an hour. Since we are constantly asked to go faster and to make even greater efforts, we are obliged to take stimulants.”

—Jacques Anquetil


“I know from the way they ride the next day that they are taking dope. I don’t want to have to take it – I have too much respect for my body – but if I don’t win a big event soon, I shall have to start taking it.”

—Tom Simpson


“But without EPO you can ride only ten stages at a very high level. Afterwards the fire is out.”

—Rolf Jarmann


“Well it’s hard to imagine the endurance demanded by the Tour de France – 21 days, 2000 miles and a vicious vertical climb totalling some 50,000 feet in all. This ordeal is one reason that cycling became a dirty sport.”

—Tyler Hamilton


“My experiences during that first week made me question whether it was even possible to compete in a race like that without doping.”

—Michael Barry


“They said that I was a rotten apple, but I now believe that the whole tree is rotten … When you train a lot your haematocrit goes down, so how is it possible for someone to go to the Dauphiné or the Giro with a level of 52%. How do they get it up to this level? With EPO. But it’s the UCI’s fault. Because they could sort it out very easily. They could take that cyclist to Lausanne, get him to spend a year training and see what happens. He won’t end up at 52%, but at 38%. He won’t even be able to get out of bed. But it’s all a farce. The only ones who are getting rich are some of the doctors, and not the cyclists … I have a witness who said that one doctor was asking for six million pesetas to use his preparation methods. Will they be asking for six million for just aspirin and mineral salts?”

—Jesús Manzano


“Of course. But the winner will not be clean. Not even any of the contestants will be clean. There is no doubt, the difference between 10.0 seconds and 9.7 seconds is the drugs.”

—Angel Heredia, referring to the Men's 100 Metre Final at the 2008 Beijing Olympics


“Correct. 400 meters in 44 seconds? Unthinkable. 71 meters with a discus? No way. You might be able to run 100 metres in 9.8 seconds once with a tailwind. But ten times a year under 10 seconds, in the rain or heat? Only with doping.”

—Angel Heredia


“I said years ago, and people raised their eyes - you can't win the Tour de France without drugs, it's been dirty since it's inception. Not too many people are raising their eyebrows about that statement anymore.”

—Charles E. Yesalis, MPH, ScD - Prof. Emeritus, Health Policy Admin. / Sports Science Pennsylvania State University


“You can tell when someone has been on steroids … A guy bulks up, has a new body and never gets tired ... You see these guys or girls who come onto the tour talking about their new training programs and their diets where they eat this or that new thing … but they’ll never tell you about the drugs they took.”

—John McEnroe


“EPO is the problem, I have pretty strong suspicions that guys are using it on the tour. I see guys who are out there week in and week out without taking rests. EPO can help you when it's the fifth set and you've been playing for four-and-a-half hours.”

—Jim Courier


“The reality is that if I were running now, and had the performances I had in my past, I would expect them to say something. I wouldn't even be offended at the question. So when people ask me about Bolt, I say he could be the greatest athlete of all-time. But for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don't question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you're a fool. Period.”

—Carl Lewis


“I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs whether banned or unbanned, on or off the list, at any time. In fact, I underwent hundreds of tests during my career and all were negative.”

—Stephen Roche


“One cannot but arrive at the conclusion that Dr Grazzi was effectively involved in the direct dispensing of EPO to Bontempi, Chiappucci, Chiesa, Roche and Sorensen.”

—Judge Franca Oliva


“To the cynics and sceptics, I say, I am sorry that they can't live a dream, or believe in miracles, as there are no secrets to my success. Vive le Tour.”

—Lance Armstrong


“One speed bag later, I was back in the safe zone. It's a team sport.”

—Tyler Hamilton


“EPO is not dangerous. Its abuse is. It is also dangerous to drink ten litres of orange juice.”

—Dr Michele Ferrari


“I believe that the limits of sports medicine amount to stopping an athlete from digging into his body's resources, and replenishing a body from which professional sport demands so much.”

—Dr Francois Bellocq, Sport et Dopage - Le Grande Hypocrisie


“Doping is at our daily livelihood. When I played for Palmeiras, I was forced to take dope, and a colleague told me that this practice also existed at his club Pernambuco.”

—Edvaldo Jizídio Neto (Vavá ), Brazilian international soccer player


“At that time it was regarded a means of cultivating sharpness among the players ... We were embroiled in a war and the use of cocaine was considered as a way to keep us spiritually sharp. At that moment I did not understand, because I lived outside of reality. Professional football is not a reality."

—Vic Washington


“It is not difficult to accuse me of doping, just look at my buttocks, they look like a colander."

—Jacques Anquetil


“If Lance is clean, it is the greatest comeback in the history of sports. If he isn't, it would be the greatest fraud."

—Greg Lemond


“I know it is possible to win the Tour without taking anything."

—Greg Lemond


“Those who say they have never taken anything are liars, all riders have doped at one time."

—Roger Pingeon


“Every afternoon we took lots of tablets: iron, magnesium, vitamin B, vitamin E, a couple of hormones. Apart from the tablets it was raining with syringes, Professor Heinz Liesen injected more than three thousand of them. They contained everything that's possible: plant extracts for strengthening the immune system, high doses of vitamin C and B12, extract of bee honey to support the heart and circulatory system, extract of calf blood (Actovegin) for the effects at high altitude and tablets vitamin E ... I refused to swallow those damn sleeping pills, there were some amateur players who fell down on the field, they called it heart failure, but there was more, I thought, that can not be true! What is happening here? That was my motivation to write this book."

—Harald Schumacher, West German Goalkeeper


For every game I smoked two joints and drank three or four beers. Then I went to the stadium, I swallowed amphetamines and painkillers, I drank a cup of coffee, I chewed some tobacco, I smoked a cigarette, got up and started the game. And that every game again. Every game I played I was high, I was addicted to everything that you can become addicted to. I played outfield and sometimes it seemed like the stars were flying out of the sky."

—Bernie Carbo, American baseball player


The UCI is only considering how it can get more money, instead of going into the fight against doping. We cyclists are the first victims, the UCI abuses us and treats us like sheep or dogs, only to earn more money."

Luc Leblanc


In sports, probably many more drugs are used than one would think. The general public would be shocked, if they know everything."

Don Catlin, American Professor of Pharmacology
 
Last edited:

TRENDING THREADS