Hampsten vs LeMond - 1991 thru 1994

[blackcat]

Re: Re:

I have never claimed he did anything absolutely unbelievable...however i think his results show his class as a rider..so...aprat from that...here before he was shot...

remember, the pool was so much smaller

Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Spain.


now the catchment is + ROW


tiny tiny pond, tiny tiny pond.

 

[gillan1969]

Re: Re:

I have never claimed he did anything absolutely unbelievable...however i think his results show his class as a rider..so...aprat from that...here before he was shot...

remember, the pool was so much smaller

Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Spain.


now the catchment is + ROW


tiny tiny pond, tiny tiny pond.

steady black cat...the italians are coming, the italians are coming...team cinzano

but yes point taken

that is however a solid and impessive palmares from feb - july

 

[blackcat]

Re: Re:

I have never claimed he did anything absolutely unbelievable...however i think his results show his class as a rider..so...aprat from that...here before he was shot...

remember, the pool was so much smaller

Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Spain.


now the catchment is + ROW


tiny tiny pond, tiny tiny pond.

steady black cat...the italians are coming, the italians are coming...team cinzano

but yes point taken

that is however a solid and impessive palmares from feb - july

EDIT

yep, I never draft, i never revise, i rarely edit

 

[sniper]

I never quite understood the 'consistency' argument.
Wasn't Merckx quite consistently at the top? Wasn't Voigt a very consistent rider?
Isn't Federer constantly at the top?
Messi? (age 12: transfer to barcelona)
Ronaldo?
The list of consistent dopers is long.
And so the "consistently at the top indicates clean" argument makes little sense to me.
If anything, afaict, being so constantly at the top of your game indicates rampant doping, especially in sports like tennis, soccer or any kind of endurance sport.

And if for some reason you insist on the consistency=clean argument, do recall Lemond wasn't very consistent in his post-shooting years when he focused mainly on the TdF. Now, one might claim "that's because of the shooting". Fair enough. But then what happens to the "Greg didn't improve relative to 84-86 so Greg wasn't using EPO" argument? Couldn't that lack of improvement have been a result of the shooting, too?
You can't have the cake and eat it.

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

I have never claimed he did anything absolutely unbelievable...however i think his results show his class as a rider..so...aprat from that...here before he was shot...

remember, the pool was so much smaller

Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Spain.


now the catchment is + ROW


tiny tiny pond, tiny tiny pond.

steady black cat...the italians are coming, the italians are coming...team cinzano

but yes point taken

that is however a solid and impessive palmares from feb - july

....so getting back to your long list of achievements you posted up-thread...so you proved he was a good to very good rider....but certainly not great...

Cheers

 

[blackcat]

Re:

I never quite understood the 'consistency' argument.
Wasn't Merckx quite consistently at the top? Wasn't Voigt a very consistent rider?
Isn't Federer constantly at the top?
Messi? (age 12: transfer to barcelona)
Ronaldo?
The list of consistent dopers is long.
And so the "consistently at the top indicates clean" argument makes little sense to me.
If anything, afaict, being so constantly at the top of your game indicates rampant doping, especially in sports like tennis, soccer or any kind of endurance sport.

And if for some reason you insist on the consistency=clean argument, do recall Lemond wasn't very consistent in his post-shooting years when he focused mainly on the TdF. Now, one might claim "that's because of the shooting". Fair enough. But then what happens to the "Greg didn't improve relative to 84-86 so Greg wasn't using EPO" argument? Couldn't that lack of improvement have been a result of the shooting, too?
You can't have the cake and eat it.

kloeden

can anyone please lend me an umlaut?

ta

#Hilde_Kloeden

 

[@NL_LeMondFans]

Re: Re:

the campervan was arguably not the best example.
but as i said it was just that, an example.
a bit lame to attack the wider point on the basis of an arguably unlucky example.
the point stands with or without campervan.

and do tell why hampsten ignores blood doping altogether as if it didn't exist.
in spite of his training stints with Eddie B at the OTC, him being teammates with practically all exposed blooddopers, some at the national team, others at 7-eleven.
I can think of a rather plausible reason why he would pretend it didn't exist.

its not just the cost of a campervan...I'm making it up but lemond raced...i don't have the time to trawl through t'internet for his race program but from memory certainly before the shooting (82-86) he raced regularly and consistently at the level of a GT winner...that to me doesn't tally with blood doping...if he was he was caning it (which he would need to be doing to be so consistently good) I would doubt he could hide that from others...and if he couldn't hide it from others then others would be doing it as the results would speak for themselves...

as for hampsten...he may not have mentioned it because it was done in isolated cases and not very successfully and so it just wasn't on his radar
#
its not as though people didn't know about it...we knew about the olympics we knew about moser...i just think the level of sophistication was such that it was as likely to fail as it was to succeed and so not worth the hassle for most...or would be used for one off events e.g.hour record, 800m

...its kinda funny but that is the image we have of him don't we ....you know, one of the true greats...the rider with the best numbers....probably the best that ever rode numbers ....but if you actually look at his record you don't see complete dominance ( in fact he is not even a dominant time trial specialist where his numbers should really shine ), you see a good rider that has blips of superior riding....

...so no, have to disagree with you on the consistency and regularly points...

Cheers

not really an 'image'...i remember it...and he was up there...but then that's what GT winners used to be...up there in other races...I say up there as in not necessarily winning but being capable of being at the finale

it's only in today's world that riders are either super dominant or in Tenerife

and why would he be super dominant...he had fignon, hinault, anderson, kelly, roche, delgado, simon etc etc to race

there were a larger number of potential winners and racing was more unpredictable

....funny but I was "there" during that period and I don't remember anything like that and the facts back me up on that....LeMond was nowhere close to Merkx or even Hinault, who btw he called the best he had personally seen...I mean did he ever do anything absolutely unbelievable or spectacular...no...he and some aero bars of iffy legality made a splash once and the result played real good to the English speakers audience...and his rising to the occasion for World Championships....but apart from that ?....the Merikan with the most TDF wins ?...

Cheers

Just to name stage races :

1981 (1st year as a pro) : 3rd at Dauphiné Libéré
1982 : 1st Tour de l'Avenir with a 10 minutes lead
1983 : 1st at Dauphiné Libéré
1984 : 3rd at Dauphiné Libéré
1985 : 3rd at Giro
1986 : 4th at Giro

This is very consistent with someone having a potential for a GT win. If you read french magazines before the 1984 Tour de France (his first), they name Greg as their favorite with Hinault (4 wins) and Fignon (1 win) although he had never won or even finished a 3 weeks race. He was that good.

Greg was never super dominant. One of the reasons is that he didnt need to, nor wanted to. See his goals, as written by him in 1978 :

http://www.greglemondfan.com/Timeline.html

World championships, Olympic games, Tour de France.

Hinault and Merckx were in the Euro cycling tradition, they wanted to be "the Boss". Greg wanted to meet his goals. the only regrets he has ever expressed are the Olympics (but then it was an amateur sport and the US did boycott in 1980) and a win at Paris-Roubaix.

 

[@NL_LeMondFans]

Re:

I never quite understood the 'consistency' argument.
Wasn't Merckx quite consistently at the top? Wasn't Voigt a very consistent rider?
Isn't Federer constantly at the top?
Messi? (age 12: transfer to barcelona)
Ronaldo?
The list of consistent dopers is long.
And so the "consistently at the top indicates clean" argument makes little sense to me.
If anything, afaict, being so constantly at the top of your game indicates rampant doping, especially in sports like tennis, soccer or any kind of endurance sport.

And if for some reason you insist on the consistency=clean argument, do recall Lemond wasn't very consistent in his post-shooting years when he focused mainly on the TdF. Now, one might claim "that's because of the shooting". Fair enough. But then what happens to the "Greg didn't improve relative to 84-86 so Greg wasn't using EPO" argument? Couldn't that lack of improvement have been a result of the shooting, too?
You can't have the cake and eat it.

I kind of agree about consistency/inconsistency. There are many factors that can explain ups and downs : illness, injuries, motivation...

That being said, my view is that, on the top of his form, Greg was always very good, from a very young age, until he dropped slightly in 1991, then dramatically in the 1992 TDF. It's not as if he had been a nobody and rose to fame (Froome) or was very good and then "mutant" good (Armstrong, Indurain). All suspicious, if not plain guilty of doping, in my eyes. Greg just always was very good.

Which leads you to try and find out if he doped from a very young age, no ? You seem to focus on that lately.

 

[sniper]

Re: Re:

I never quite understood the 'consistency' argument.
Wasn't Merckx quite consistently at the top? Wasn't Voigt a very consistent rider?
Isn't Federer constantly at the top?
Messi? (age 12: transfer to barcelona)
Ronaldo?
The list of consistent dopers is long.
And so the "consistently at the top indicates clean" argument makes little sense to me.
If anything, afaict, being so constantly at the top of your game indicates rampant doping, especially in sports like tennis, soccer or any kind of endurance sport.

And if for some reason you insist on the consistency=clean argument, do recall Lemond wasn't very consistent in his post-shooting years when he focused mainly on the TdF. Now, one might claim "that's because of the shooting". Fair enough. But then what happens to the "Greg didn't improve relative to 84-86 so Greg wasn't using EPO" argument? Couldn't that lack of improvement have been a result of the shooting, too?
You can't have the cake and eat it.

I kind of agree about consistency/inconsistency. There are many factors that can explain ups and downs : illness, injuries, motivation...

That being said, my view is that, on the top of his form, Greg was always very good, from a very young age, until he dropped slightly in 1991, then dramatically in the 1992 TDF. It's not as if he had been a nobody and rose to fame (Froome) or was very good and then "mutant" good (Armstrong, Indurain). All suspicious, if not plain guilty of doping, in my eyes. Greg just always was very good.

Which leads you to try and find out if he doped from a very young age, no ? You seem to focus on that lately.

i'm intrigued by the assumption that he would be clean, amidst tons of evidence that nearly all GT winners before and after him doped, and amidst tons of evidence that many of the world's topathletes (Messi, Nadal, Lance, to name just three) start doping at a very young age.
As you know, doping youngsters was particularly common in the period in which Lemond made his breakthrough.
As I posted extensively, it was the period when the US were *explicitly* trying to close the gap with communist countries in the area of sports and sports preparation. In those countries, doping juniors, as you know, was common practice.
If you see Shasby & Hagerman's 1975 study positing a need for "cardio-respiratory conditioning" on adolescents citing Ekblom 1972, and with the purpose of "identifying outstanding athletes", well you get the picture. Fraysse's recruitment of Eddie B, and the motivation behind it, it's all there on Eddie's wikipedia, and I've posted it multiple times. Eddie B, in turn, was always explicitly focused on working with juniors. Even Lemond writes about that in his biography (the one coauthored by Gordis).
US juniors cyclists were blood doping at the 74 worlds in Poland.
etc.
So yes, I'm fascinated as to why that historical evidence is all ignored when it comes to Lemond (and Hampsten and Heiden)

 

[@NL_LeMondFans]

Re: Re:

i'm intrigued by the assumption that he would be clean, amidst tons of evidence that nearly all GT winners before and after him doped, and amidst tons of evidence that many of the world's topathletes (Messi, Nadal, Lance, to name just three) start doping at a very young age.

Maybe because, I have been, all my life, absolutely handicapped with the gene of cheating, I tend to think there are other people like me. I'm not saying I'm perfect. I'm saying that when there are rules, I always find it incredibly hard or plain impossible (or stupid) to break them. And if I did I'd feel guilty. Or I'd manage to get caught, on a subconscious level.

I know most pro athletes dope/doped. But I also know SOME PEOPLE DO NOT !!! It's impossible for you to think someone didn't dope, I feel the exact opposite : it's impossible for me to think there was, at least, a few clean guys. Odds are bad, but 100% odds very rarely occur, when it comes to human behaviour, in my experience.

I'm not even claiming Greg was absolutely clean. I can't prove it. So, I'm not even trying. What I'm saying is that I believe he was, based on what I know and what I sense about him. To me, his story adds up. It's just my opinion.

And I absolutely HATE, I mean HATE the fact that when you tell a group of people you're into cycling, there's a wise as* who says "every cyclist is a doper". Not many things make me want to punch someone in the face. this does. I find it so stupid and lazy, as a statement.

As you know,

I don't know about the US. I know about East Germany.

doping youngsters was particularly common in the period in which Lemond made his breakthrough.
As I posted extensively, it was the period when the US were *explicitly* trying to close the gap with communist countries in the area of sports and sports preparation. In those countries, doping juniors, as you know, was common practice.
If you see Shasby & Hagerman's 1975 study positing a need for "cardio-respiratory conditioning" on adolescents citing Ekblom 1972, and with the purpose of "identifying outstanding athletes", well you get the picture. Fraysse's recruitment of Eddie B, and the motivation behind it, it's all there on Eddie's wikipedia, and I've posted it multiple times. Eddie B, in turn, was always explicitly focused on working with juniors. Even Lemond writes about that in his biography (the one coauthored by Gordis).
US juniors cyclists were blood doping at the 74 worlds in Poland.
etc.
So yes, I'm fascinated as to why that historical evidence is all ignored when it comes to Lemond (and Hampsten and Heiden)

Historical evidence is that Greg met a lot of dopers or dope enablers. It doesn't prove they did with him what they did with others. It doesn't prove they were doing the same thing with everyone, that everyone was on the same program. On the contrary, I believe it is very rare to see people so affirmative about the fact that someone was clean as it's the case with Greg. You won't find anyone claiming Hinault was clean, for instance, not even himself. When asked if he doped, Hinault's answer was "I drink coffee". But, from what I've seen, there are people that were around him at the time, that are really sure Greg didn't dope and admire him even more for that.

I totally understand it's evidence enough for you, it's just not evidence enough for me. To me, Greg is special. In a great many ways.

 

[poupou]

In the old days, riders had to enter in mostly all races. So the dominant riders ould stay ahead on others who cannot prepare for a targeted race.

 

[blackcat]

I think the entire mien greg has confected, may be summarised by the quote from shakespeare's macbeth

the lady doth protest too much, methinks

#limitedhangout

 

[Tonton]

Re:

In the old days, riders had to enter in mostly all races. So the dominant riders ould stay ahead on others who cannot prepare for a targeted race.

I'm not so sure that dominant riders had that big of an advantage: Merckx was racing year-round. Hinault, same thing. It's not until LeMond got a big fat contract that top-riders finally got paid. And with that came the opportunity to take weeks off, prepare, scout, rehearse.

 

[blutto]

Re: Re:

In the old days, riders had to enter in mostly all races. So the dominant riders ould stay ahead on others who cannot prepare for a targeted race.

I'm not so sure that dominant riders had that big of an advantage: Merckx was racing year-round. Hinault, same thing. It's not until LeMond got a big fat contract that top-riders finally got paid. And with that came the opportunity to take weeks off, prepare, scout, rehearse.

....funny you should say that but I remember my very first introduction to Eddie Merckx which was thru a headline in Time magazine....it said that this guy Merckx made more money than the king of Belgium...now not sure whether that was bad reporting or hyperbole or actually true but I'm sure Merckx did pretty well....

Cheers

 

[the delgados]

Re: Re:

In the old days, riders had to enter in mostly all races. So the dominant riders ould stay ahead on others who cannot prepare for a targeted race.

I'm not so sure that dominant riders had that big of an advantage: Merckx was racing year-round. Hinault, same thing. It's not until LeMond got a big fat contract that top-riders finally got paid. And with that came the opportunity to take weeks off, prepare, scout, rehearse.

....funny you should say that but I remember my very first introduction to Eddie Merckx which was thru a headline in Time magazine....it said that this guy Merckx made more money than the king of Belgium...now not sure whether that was bad reporting or hyperbole or actually true but I'm sure Merckx did pretty well....

Cheers

Eddy M was not scrounging for peanuts.
A lot of what we read is written from a North American perspective.

 

[sniper]

...
...actually the campervan is a great example...lets say a team had a blood doping program but it doesn't what that news broadcast one would think it not prudent to do the transfusing in the main lobby of the hotel, much better to do it in the relative privacy of a hotel room...now if for arguments sake you were on a drug program that included blood doping on a team whose directorship is firmly against all doping it would require a private space in which to operate the program away from the team, like say a camper...it also reduces the number of loose ends if and when denial is required ( read....want to keep a secret, keep it in house...)

....just a thought...

Cheers

To briefly get back to the example of the (camper)van:

Anno 1980:
Mr. Robert Beeten (Sports Medicine Coordinator at Olympic House, the United States Olympic Committee’s Headquarters) with an update on the sports medicine program of the US Olympic Training Centers:

The development of our biomechanics laboratory has long been an important concern of Dr. Irving I. Dardik, Chairman of the Olympic Council on Sports Medicine. Now in the final stage of completion, it will soon be a sophisticated laboratory capable of allowing many significant contributions to be made. Again, the assistance of corporate donations and the efforts of professionals within this highly specialized field have made
this a near reality.
The latest addition to our sports medicine program is the mobile fitness laboratory. When this van takes to the road this year, athletes and coaches will be able to apply its physiologic testing facilities and use its biomechanical analysis equipment.

http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/8/3/214.citation

 

[sniper]

Lemond about why he quit cycling.
http://www.lemonde.fr/sport/article/2009/07/08/l-annee-ou-l-epo-a-change-le-velo-par-greg-lemond_1216520_3242.html#ens_id=1210866

Nothing about myopathy.
Instead complaining about how he suddenly lost 13 minutes to Indurain in 1991 and saw donkeys turn into race-horses.
Maybe he's referring to Hampsten there who came 4th in the 1992 TDF and won Romandie earlier that year when Lemond suddenly couldn't even finish races anymore...

 

[blutto]

Re:

Lemond about why he quit cycling.
http://www.lemonde.fr/sport/article/2009/07/08/l-annee-ou-l-epo-a-change-le-velo-par-greg-lemond_1216520_3242.html#ens_id=1210866

Nothing about myopathy.
Instead complaining about how he suddenly lost 13 minutes to Indurain in 1991 and saw donkeys turn into race-horses.
Maybe he's referring to Hampsten there who came 4th in the 1992 TDF and won Romandie earlier that year when Lemond suddenly couldn't even finish races anymore...

....yeah note the date of the interview....different day, different excuse....strange ain't it ?....or not ?....

Cheers

 

[blutto]

Re:

...
...actually the campervan is a great example...lets say a team had a blood doping program but it doesn't what that news broadcast one would think it not prudent to do the transfusing in the main lobby of the hotel, much better to do it in the relative privacy of a hotel room...now if for arguments sake you were on a drug program that included blood doping on a team whose directorship is firmly against all doping it would require a private space in which to operate the program away from the team, like say a camper...it also reduces the number of loose ends if and when denial is required ( read....want to keep a secret, keep it in house...)

....just a thought...

Cheers

To briefly get back to the example of the (camper)van:

Anno 1980:
Mr. Robert Beeten (Sports Medicine Coordinator at Olympic House, the United States Olympic Committee’s Headquarters) with an update on the sports medicine program of the US Olympic Training Centers:

The development of our biomechanics laboratory has long been an important concern of Dr. Irving I. Dardik, Chairman of the Olympic Council on Sports Medicine. Now in the final stage of completion, it will soon be a sophisticated laboratory capable of allowing many significant contributions to be made. Again, the assistance of corporate donations and the efforts of professionals within this highly specialized field have made
this a near reality.
The latest addition to our sports medicine program is the mobile fitness laboratory. When this van takes to the road this year, athletes and coaches will be able to apply its physiologic testing facilities and use its biomechanical analysis equipment.

http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/8/3/214.citation

....these mobile labs were one of the things that were used extensively by the sports medicine programs that drove the old Eastern Bloc sports programs....was told the following story....the Eastern Bloc system ( and it was a system with several commonalities in protocol across the various nation states..) was a big believer in the importance of recovery and they could deduce from blood samples how trained, overtrained, or undertrained an athlete was...so to keep the athlete on a razors edge between max workload and overtraining they took a lot of samples....they could in fact come up to a rider during a ride, take a sample, take it back to the follow vehicle and test the sample, and then tell the ride to increase workload, decrease workload, or get off the bike and have a massage...

....national coaches in the West dreamed about systems like that but couldn't acquire them because there was no money....but if money were available all kinds of training magic could happen...

Cheers

 

[sniper]

Re: Re:

...

....these mobile labs were one of the things that were used extensively by the sports medicine programs that drove the old Eastern Bloc sports programs....was told the following story....the Eastern Bloc system ( and it was a system with several commonalities in protocol across the various nation states..) was a big believer in the importance of recovery and they could deduce from blood samples how trained, overtrained, or undertrained an athlete was...so to keep the athlete on a razors edge between max workload and overtraining they took a lot of samples....they could in fact come up to a rider during a ride, take a sample, take it back to the follow vehicle and test the sample, and then tell the ride to increase workload, decrease workload, or get off the bike and have a massage...

'cardio-vascular conditioning', you mean?
Anyway, interesting background.


On the topic of taking blood samples, from what I'm reading about the early years of the OTCs in Squaw Valley and Colorado Springs, taking such samples would have been an almost daily practice. Or at least weekly.
If you combine that with the several documented cases of Lemond receiving shots/injections, Lemond's self-alleged "needle adversity" (which he brought up in the Kimmage interview when asked about the iron shots) just seems a little bit of a bad joke.

blutto:
....national coaches in the West dreamed about systems like that but couldn't acquire them because there was no money....but if money were available all kinds of training magic could happen...

Yep. Guys like Dardik (as head of USOC's Medical Committee) and Hagerman (e.g. in his 1976 article on "cardiorespiratory conditioning of adolescents") were making those recommendations very explicitly.
As longjumper Willye White said after the 76 Montreal games:

... "If the U.S.O.C. lets Dardik operate, there’s no telling how far we could go" ...

And I guess that's where the "Amateur Sports Act" and sponsors like 7-Eleven enter the plot.

 

[sniper]

From 1988:

“Blood boosting in sports gained impetus in 1972 when Dr. Bjoern Ekblom of Stockholm’s Institute of Gymnastics and Sports announced tests showing that the method produced a 25-percent increase in endurance. A later Canadian study found “a 35 percent increase in treadmill running time to exhaustion”. Although it was the Americans who got caught after the 1984 Games, American officials claim they’re not the only ones. “Boosting is fairly widely practiced in Europe, especially among young cyclists and Nordic skiers”, says Kenneth Casey Clarke, the USOC medical director.

https://books.google.pl/books?id=QDYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&dq=%22the+rotarian%22+1988+blood&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM48yVl9nMAhWJkywKHW53CwoQ6AEIIDAB#v=onepage&q=%22the%20rotarian%22%201988%20blood&f=false

Hampsten begs to differ :

According to Andy Hampsten, a cyclist who raced in the 1980s and ’90s, riders were only using amphetamines and anabolics, and both had drawbacks
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/08/lance-armstrong-s-teammate-tells-all-the-secret-race-by-tyler-hamilton.html

 

[sniper]

...
Point taken.
Again, I'm a nobody who does not profess to know if Lemond and/or Hampsten took doping products.
I'm just here to read and add a few off the cuff stuff statements here and there.
To answer your question: I recall reading the Velonews interview a few years ago; so yeah, well past his Giro win.

There's more than enough to do the math on Lemond and Hampsten, but i would agree with Gillian that advising kids to stay out of the sport doesn't mean much either way.

In fact, personally, if he had said something like that when he was still a procyclist, or shortly after retiring, I would have taken that as a strong antidoping statement.

By contrast: Eddy Merckx had no qualms sending his son into procycling. Similarly, Phinney and Carpenter-Phinney, two 1984 medal winners both of whom were part of OTC setup from the very beginning (Phinney, like Lemond, under the guidance of Eddie B. already in 1978) encouraged their son Taylor to go into cycling, and had no qualms when he hooked up with Lance. And honestly, if you look at Davis and Connie's (sportive) history, it's fairly straightforward mathematics.

The point being: sending your kids into procycling is not something a person would do if he/she'd seen the doping culture and were disgusted by that culture.
Now, claiming they [i.e. the Phinneys, Merckx] hadn't seen the doping happening is close to impossible. (Only Lemond gets away with such a ludicrous claim.)
Rather, I would argue they were perfectly embedded in the culture, and weren't at all disgusted by it; they most probably thought it was a fair part of the game. Sports science and all. Merely 'catching up' with the bloc-countries.

Anecdote:
Inga Thompson, someone who had said "thanks but no thanks" to Eddie B.'s blood boosting program and who was subsequently ousted by the same Eddie B., once wrote an editorial discouraging kids to go into cycling. Connie Carpenter-Phinney then wrote her a personal letter asking her to withdraw the editorial. Inga wrote back, saying, sorry, can't do. And she never heard from Connie again.

So again, if Hampsten had discouraged kids to go into cycling while he was still an active part of the peloton, I would personally have taken that as a strong statement. But yeah, as Gillian points out, he only said this some years ago, when all eyes were on Lance and USPS and 'the PR memo' clearly was for everybody to publicly distance themselves from doping as much as possible.
Lemond and Hampsten are paradigm examples: not a single credible antidoping sound in the 80s/90s, yet suddenly sounding terribly antidoping in the 2000s.
Then again, even guys like Sutton and Yates started sounding antidoping in the 2000s.


Anticipating the reaction "but Connie and Davis also refused blood doping". Well, I strongly doubt they ever did.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/greg-lemonds-fantasy-cycling-camp/
It's very simple: if you support clean sport, you wouldn't go anywhere near the "Father of American doping", as both Inga Thompson and Andy Bohlman have called Eddie.

edit: Inga's blog from 2014 is well worth a read. You find it in full here:
http://www.theouterline.com/perspectives-on-doping-in-pro-cycling-2-inga-thompson-5/
Here's the link to her earlier editorial/opinion piece where she discourages people to let their children anywhere near professional sports:
http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/12/analysis/opinion-thompson-says-cleaning-house-is-the-only-way-forward_267849

Think about that. Would you hand your son or daughter over to a program if you knew the people overseeing them were ex-drug addicts doing cocaine, meth or heroin? That’s how I feel about handing my son over to the grassroots programs or big teams coached by ex-dopers.

What counts now is the sport we should be able to offer our children. No parent that loves their child will hand them over to semi-repentant dopers.

That's bang on the money.
One could say "sure, but that's from 2012, too". True. Yet, no journo had ever really bothered to ask Inga Thompson anything before that. Unlike Greg and (to a lesser extent) Andy. The both of them have always had their podium throughout the 80s and 90s to talk about doping in interviews if they had wanted to. Yet they never said anything of substance. On the contrary, they've been pretending it didn't exist or didn't provide an edge in the time when they rode. It's nothing short of rewriting 80s cycling history.

That said, I would still stress that the real damning evidence of their doping lies elsewhere, not so much in their interviews. The interviews merely complement the picture. Very much like Sky: the key evidence of doping lies not in their words; but their words do complement the picture.

 

[staubsauger]

That discouragement was as well in reference to pressure to perform, payment, education for a life after cycling and fun with your job / life. Not singly regarding doping. I just read those interviews in the last 2 weeks!

Hampsten actually comes over as a very wise and friendly guy with some interesting points in those interviews and articles. He strikes my as a typically social Green with his organic farmer projects, Linda being a healthy food cook etc.

That ain't really tells anything about him being a doper or not. If we make a difference between real big doping and “only“ medicine abuse with pills, cortsisone etc I tend to believe he might've been quite clean compared to other.

Also his more consistence decrease in performance with the rise of Epo usage at the early 90's looks more believable than the sudden fall down of Breukink and Lemond. But what does that even say in the end!? Yeah, nothing!-

 

[sniper]

Re:

That discouragement was as well in reference to pressure to perform, payment, education for a life after cycling and fun with your job / life. Not singly regarding doping. I just read those interviews in the last 2 weeks!

Hampsten actually comes over as a very wise and friendly guy with some interesting points in those interviews and articles. He strikes my as a typically social Green with his organic farmer projects, Linda being a healthy food cook etc.

That ain't really tells anything about him being a doper or not. If we make a difference between real big doping and “only“ medicine abuse with pills, cortsisone etc I tend to believe he might've been quite clean compared to other.

Also his more consistence decrease in performance with the rise of Epo usage at the early 90's looks more believable than the sudden fall down of Breukink and Lemond. But what does that even say in the end!? Yeah, nothing!-

Agree with the first two paragraphs of your post. Not so much with the other two.

If we make a difference between real big doping and “only“ medicine abuse with pills, cortsisone etc, I don't think we should be looking at GT winners. We know doping makes all the difference. And, believe me, it made all the difference in the 80s, too. So if you're looking for small time dopers, I would recommend you start looking at guys with a small palmares. Not the Hampstens or Lemonds of this world.

Now, Hampsten won the Giro in 1988. That was not only one of toughest Giros ever ridden (according to some the toughest), it was also a year that we know for fact blood transfusions were used in GTs. Blood transfusions were used before that in cycling as well. Yet, in interviews, Hampsten has never spoken of them. There's one interview where he says the only drugs used in the 80s were amphetamines and steroids, and that both didn't really help riders. That's a double lie right there.

Furthermore, Hampsten had some of his best results in in 1992 and 93. Remember that the year 1991 has been baptized by Lemond (and many others) as the year EPO really took a stronghold on the peloton.
Hampsten also bulked up noticeably in 1992, but I won't go there.

Hampsten's carreer-long collaboration with Max Testa also speaks for itself. There is a good reason why Testa is still in the game. And it's got nothing to do with saddle sore.
Throughout his carreer Hampsten lived and trained right there with Testa in Como and surroundings where we know for fact Motorola riders jacked up on EPO collectively in 1995.

On a tinfoil hat note:
I've been reading a bit about HGH these days.
Something I was previously unaware of is that in fact HGH was experimented with already in the late 70s and made a breakthrough in prosports in the early-mid 80s.
The interesting thing is that one side effect of the rise of HGH was athletes starting to suffer all kinds of problems with their jaws and teeth. Allegedly there was a sudden spike in the number of athletes wearing braces. Didn't Hampsten wear braces?

 

[Oldermanish]

Re: Re:

Furthermore, Hampsten had some of his best results in in 1992 and 93. Remember that the year 1991 has been baptized by Lemond (and many others) as the year EPO really took a stronghold on the peloton.
Hampsten also bulked up noticeably in 1992, but I won't go there.

Hampsten's carreer-long collaboration with Max Testa also speaks for itself. There is a good reason why Testa is still in the game. And it's got nothing to do with saddle sore.
Throughout his carreer Hampsten lived and trained right there with Testa in Como and surroundings where we know for fact Motorola riders jacked up on EPO collectively in 1995.

On a tinfoil hat note:
I've been reading a bit about HGH these days.
Something I was previously unaware of is that in fact HGH was experimented with already in the late 70s and made a breakthrough in prosports in the early-mid 80s.
The interesting thing is that one side effect of the rise of HGH was athletes starting to suffer all kinds of problems with their jaws and teeth. Allegedly there was a sudden spike in the number of athletes wearing braces. Didn't Hampsten wear braces?[/quote]

Having been around him and his family much of what you imply is complete shite. Really. He had an overbite as a teen and finally got braces...If you want to see evidence of HGH abuse you'd go right to the East German and Russian federation riders and examine cranial growth after puberty. Oh, hey...there's also Virenque.

As for Testa, Ochowicz, Heiden; that much is obvious but the association doesn't extend to all riders under their care including: Brian Walton, Roy Knickman who were scrupulously clean and didn't stick around that long. The rules definitely changed in the Lance era where the organization removed options. You were either on the bus or out of the bus.