I supported Lance Armstrong until...

[clotho2]

It occurs to me there may be some of you that like me supported armstrong until you educated yourself on the doping or more recently. There may be some who fought his fight until Wednesday or until you read The Secret Race. If you want to talk with us who have already gone through the disappointment, this is a good place to post, grieve, or rant.

As for me, and some of you have read my story before, I supported Team USA cycling and armstrong until he came out of retirement. I would daily tweet the results of the podium. I would cheer on my favorite riders, not just Americans. I thought The Manx Missile, Mark Cavendish was like Elliot Ness, untouchable. I cheered whnever Big George got lance up to the breakaway, *sorry, still hard to think about* I hated when Garmin reeled George back in and prevent him from winning in 2009. With every crash I hoped the guys I was rooting for weren't in it, and that nobody was seriously injured. It is a breath-taking race. However, it was and is drug ridden. Well seeing lance's performance on Ventoux was mystifying, and gave one pause. Did he just stop on the Mt instead of taking the win?

After the finale I got a tweet to read about doping in cling and lance armstrong. And I did... I found out for myself about doping in the peloton; about blood doping among the elite; about how the riders whine that TDF cannot be won without doping. It literally made me sick to where I had an Upper GI, and I cried all the time about how they had used us. they made us cheaters right along with them and they didn't seem to care.

I'm ****ed, royally ****ed! I've never been so used in my life. Thank God I chose other cancer orgs to donate to. At least I have that.

 

[Tinman]

Nice post Clotho2. There are probably millions like you. Trusting people who have been taken for a ride... Good on ya for sharing your story. And absolutely no need to feel "ashamed" as many people probably do.

The sport is not being destroyed by people who fight against doping. It is being destroyed by those who keep doping happening. Deceitful riders, teams and an incompetent and/or deceitful UCI.

What I want is to feel good again about the stuff you describe above, without that lingering feeling that I might be taken for a ride, yet again. Because if you have been taken for a ride once or twice it's hard to ever really "invest" and trust that what you see is real...

 

[auscyclefan94]

...he came out of birth canal! Only kidding! Nah, around 2008 I started to realise that he was a fraud.

 

[snackattack]

 

[Frosty]

Never really liked the guy but gave him the benefit of the doubt until the Simeone incident.

 

[trailrunner]

When he chased Simeoni down in 2004, I became suspicious of his doping. That just didn't make sense unless he was trying to hide something. When Landis came out, I saw the light. Up until then, I was more or less a believer.

Never did like the guy though. Always seemed like a humorless jerk. In retrospect, I completely underestimated what a complete, and destructive, a-hole he really was.

 

[snackattack]

I completely underestimated what a complete, and destructive, a-hole he really was.

 

[red_flanders]

I'd say until 2002, when I became crushingly bored with the Blue Train and the blatantly obvious doping.

 

[Pantani_lives]

I already suspected him in 1999. I hated him in 2000 after his conflict with Pantani. I saw through him as soon as I read that his doctor was Michele Ferrari. His last two Tour wins were one big hypocrite show to me.

 

[Carols]

I was a staunch supporter; having watched him from the earliest days. Actually cried when he got cancer!

The 2005 news of the EPO positives of his 1999 samples Opened My Eyes. I felt betrayed and foolish, then angry.

I've waited 7 years for his downfall! D Day finally arrived

 

[psycholist]

The Simeoni incident did it for me.

I can remember at the time feeling like a total mug and embarassed. I am sure many of his former supporters are going through this same emotion now. The fact I believed him makes me dislike him even more now, much like a former smoker dislikes smokers more than somebody who has never smoked.

 

[rhubroma]

Here's an interesting article, which Bala Verde posted in another thread:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/10/lance-armstrong-doping-charges.html

One thing I beg to differ with Specter's article (who lived in Rome for a spell during LA's Tour "streak," go figure), however, is that if they allowed doping this would bring everyone on a "level playing field." This is simply a base fallacy. Doping doesn't work that way.

First of all not everyone responds the same way. Some athletes receive more performance enhancing benefits than others. This to me seems a plausible explanation to LA's meteoric rise after cancer to becoming a Tour contender, whereas prior to his illness he was nowhere near the top of the peloton in this regard. Phil Anderson remarked as a teammate of LA's prior to cancer that he didn't think LA was even capable of winning a grand tour, because he couldn't "time trial, or climb." While even though he was juiced on a host of drugs before he got sick (and the heavy doses of HGH and steroids probably gave him the disease in the first place – in fact, he told Hincapie that after cancer he stopped using HGH), he evidently hadn't perfected the most sophisticated system ever until subsequent to his initial come-back.

At any rate the second point is even more fundamental: namely, that modern doping has become an arms race in a world driven by unscrupulous business concerns. And to win the arms race one requires boat loads of money. LA didn't pay Ferrari to the acrued amount of 1 million euros for nothing, but to have the best in the business constantly monitoring his personal progress and supplying the means of enhanced success. At the same time, US Postal was a munificent font of funds, in part supplied by US tax payers, which not every team was able to generate. To compete in the arms race, therefore, let alone become the superpower, has little to do with natural ability (of which there were surely a number of riders with at least LA's natural talent, if not more), so much as it does in becoming the right guy for which the business interests surrounding sport, which naturally involved the UCI, chooses to most heavily invest. LA was the story if the century. Sure he worked hard, but any number in his position with the same unscrupulous will to succeed, and with that kind of backing, would have worked pretty freekin hard too.

As far as his cancer foundation is concerned and all the supposed good he's done for the sick (also addressed in the article); as I have previously mentioned, it's appalling, repulsive and grotesque that he has used the cancer community as a shield for his doping and fraudulent colossal earnings. The fact also remains that for all the money he has raised to fight the disease, no cure is in sight, not even in the distant future. While he has also commercialized on the sick with his Livestrong.org, but that's another story. So we can allow cancer research to be funded through other channels as in the past, with possibly more public funding by the government (instead of on the military).

In any case frankly the cancer community would be bettered served, just in terms of image alone, by anyone but the Armstrong farce. I mean, how farcical is it for someone who got the disease by taking too much steroids and human growth hormone, to then come back as a survivor and claim that he is devoting his entire existence to winning the hardest sporting event in the world in their name? Moreover, when claiming emphatically to be a paladin of clean sport, while secretly continuing with the same doping charade that had always been his method to success? Nay, by the most "sophisticated doping" regime sport has ever seen according to USADA!

What Armstrong could and should have done, was confess to his doping habits at the time of his adverse cancer diagnosis. To then accept his sanction, with possible reductions or a waiver for having voluntarily come clean and in compensation for the UCI not having alerted him of his dangerously high hormone levels before his cancer reached such a frightully advanced stage. A different man could have manned up and decided to dedicate his comeback to fighting cancer through cleaning up his sport. For this Armstrong has not been the poster boy of the "fight against cancer," but that of "how to get cancer" because of steroid and human growth hormone abuse. Imagine, thus, how things could have been different if LA had used his testimony and cancer foundation to fight doping in sport and against a type of excessive lifestyle that certainly plays a contributing role to contracting the disease? Other than Livestrong! Instead LA became the Al Capone of cycling, the supreme annihilator of integrity and the utmost perpetrator of omertà. While he never backed down from going after anyone who challenged his false script, even ruining several without compunction just to perpetuate the myth and keep the profits rolling.

Lastly Armstrong doesn't offer the cancer community hope, but false illusions. He was just really freakin lucky. Within the cancer population those whose disease had reached the same advanced stage would have died in the majority; though a small percentage, like himself, would have survived. This has nothing to do with his athletic ability, nor is it because of some perceived indomitable will, but chance. Fortune. Luck. In the end the Armstrong story is merely about fraud, hypocrisy and is ultimately destructive. Lance could have given up on winning 7 Tours, but saved his honor. He could have made millions less, but earned infinitely more approval and respectability (while still accruing big earnings). He could have been a true paladin of clean sport and voice for fighting the disease, but has only demonstrated a malignity and unscrupulousness of colossal proportions.

 

[Big Doopie]

gave him the benefit of the doubt until 2001. when the link to ferrari was made public that was it for me. i knew what ferrari meant.

btw -- i swear i read an article in l'equipe near the end of the 1999 tour where armstrong is asked about ferrari and that he admits he went to him once but decided that "it wasn't for him".

 

[Sarcastic Wet Trout]

I was a casual cycling fan throughout the oughts and gave Armstrong the benefit of the doubt. Thought Hamilton's and Landis' denials were bogus from the start and assumed there was significant doping in the peleton at this point. The USADA's sanction got me interested in the topic, so I read From Lance to Landis and then Landis' interviews online and concluded Lance was a doper. Reading Racing in the Dark, The Death of Marco Pantani, and The Secret Race confirmed it.

 

[krebs303]

I was in denial until this forum opened up. Little by little it finally soaked in.
Now I even like the French again

 

[cineteq]

How farcical is it for someone who got the disease by taking too much steroids and human growth hormone, to then come back as a survivor and claim that he is devoting his entire existence to winning the hardest sporting event in the world in their name?

Great post! +1

I posted this yesterday in another thread, very relevant to this one. This comment was taken from Armstrong's FB page. I guess this guy was a fan until this very week:

"I took my Livestrong bracelet off today.....I'm really bothered by all the comments on here that claim he is a hero....he's not..the kids that suffer with cancer everyday are the true heroes. He used his celebrity status to help in the fight against cancer, that I will give him but the truth is hes a cheat and no role model for youth. I am disturbed that people on here seem to want to "ok" with him doping as others were doing it too. I wonder if these were the same Americans who believed right away that the chinese swimmer was on drugs and wanted her thrown out. It just seems to be a double standard when it comes to an American. Lance you have let down so many!"

 

[rhubroma]

Great post! +1...

Since this is applicable here, I put another assessment of the man from the thread on the "must read" article on Simeoni and Armstrong. And it speaks volumes of the persona (LA's of course):

Simeoni faced a criminal conviction in Italy, had he not told the truth about his doping relationship with Dr. Ferrari. He talked about that relationship and only that relationship, i.e. he never mentioned Lance.

Lance then, because of his identical and even more intimate relationship with Ferrari, went after Simeoni publicly, caused him to become a persona non grata within his profession and ultimately drove him into premature retirement, with all the economic consequences that this entails. The only thing Lance didn't do to maintain the omertà, Mafioso law of the peloton, was to have him fatto fuori ("taken out") by a hit man!

Look Filippo is no saint, though he has never claimed himself to be; however, Lance behaved in the worst way and only in measure can't be equated with those types of human detritus that are the bosses of the mafia clans.

To lose sight of this and to place the blame on the victimized, is to side with the darkest forces in our society, which on the larger scale generate those organized crime institutions that are a contributing reason to why we can't claim, as a species, to have yet reached a state of civility.

 

[FoxxyBrown1111]

What Armstrong could and should have done, was confess to his doping habits at the time of his adverse cancer diagnosis.

Yeah. Like Lyle Alzado did. That would have made him human. But to dope on after you know you got the sickness b/c of it, that is unprecedented in the history of mankind.
That shows either
a.) He is no human in the meaning of having a soul & heart*, or
b.) he never got cancer.
There is no space for an in between.

* I am no doc, but i guess he is the blueprint not of a sociopath, but psychopath. Psycho.-Studies can be made of him. If he wasn´t a cyclist, he would have been a "wonderful/perfect" dictator or the 2nd coming of Madoff, or Bundy.

 

[trailrunner]

I was a staunch supporter; having watched him from the earliest days. Actually cried when he got cancer!

I remember that. I had starting to get into cycling in the mid 1990s while recovering from a running injury. I did a ton of mountain biking, including doing a race in 1996 in Maryland with an up-and-coming kid called Floyd Landis. At the time, I was a casual observer of the road racing scene. I remember reading about his cancer and how sad that was. I got burned out on mountain biking and turned roadie about the time Armstrong made his comeback in 98 and 99.

 

[Fausto's Schnauzer]

Even Road Bike Action is coming around

The US-based magazine Road Bike Action has stood in defense of the Supreme Nozzle all along. It's somewhat understandable; the magazine's head Zap Espinoza recently lost his wife to cancer. During her illness the S.N. reached out to Zap and rode an event in her support. During this whole thing the website has either ignored developments or disputed them...until now.

http://www.roadbikeaction.com/Latest-News/content/69/6061/Tyler-Hamilton-Feels-Sorry-For-Lance.html

This piece is merely quotes from Tyler's CNN interview with Anderson Cooper and there are no comments or editorializing from the unnamed author, but hey, it's a notable step from the last cycling publication to still support the S.N.

 

[Briant_Gumble]

Yeah. Like Lyle Alzado did. That would have made him human. But to dope on after you know you got the sickness b/c of it, that is unprecedented in the history of mankind.
That shows either
a.) He is no human in the meaning of having a soul & heart*, or
b.) he never got cancer.
There is no space for an in between.

* I am no doc, but i guess he is the blueprint not of a sociopath, but psychopath. Psycho.-Studies can be made of him. If he wasn´t a cyclist, he would have been a "wonderful/perfect" dictator or the 2nd coming of Madoff, or Bundy.

I don't think his cancer was fraudulent that would be a bit crazy.

Dwayne Chambers admitted to using HGH, Testosterone, epitestosterone, EPO, THG, Insulin Lispro, Modafinil, Liothyronine.

By comparison Armstrong's doping post cancer was conservative and under strict supervision by Ferrari and not some bodybuilding coach with tons of clients.

 

[FoxxyBrown1111]

I don't think his cancer was fraudulent that would be a bit crazy.

It´s crazy. The craziest. But you know what? It happened already. A german cyclist found a doc to fake a cancer sickness just that he can take dope products. It was in "radsportnews.com" a few years ago. If i´d remember the year i could have given the link.
In a world where evil dictators use childs as soldiers, it´s possible that LA faked his sickness too. We all fully know that he has that needed pathological malfunction in his brain to do such silly things...

 

[richwagmn]

It was years ago when I first learned of Betsy Andreu's run in with Lance. I couldn't figure out any reason why Betsy would lie about what she heard. And Lance's brutal treatment of her confirmed my suspicions.

However, I honestly didn't know how dirty pro-cycling was until I read Tyler's book. And I thought very few were doping today because of how easily they could be caught.

 

[trailrunner]

I don't think his cancer was fraudulent that would be a bit crazy.

One of his post-cancer girlfriends would noticed if his cancer had been faked.

 

[rhubroma]

The US-based magazine Road Bike Action has stood in defense of the Supreme Nozzle all along. It's somewhat understandable; the magazine's head Zap Espinoza recently lost his wife to cancer. During her illness the S.N. reached out to Zap and rode an event in her support. During this whole thing the website has either ignored developments or disputed them...until now.

http://www.roadbikeaction.com/Latest-News/content/69/6061/Tyler-Hamilton-Feels-Sorry-For-Lance.html

This piece is merely quotes from Tyler's CNN interview with Anderson Cooper and there are no comments or editorializing from the unnamed author, but hey, it's a notable step from the last cycling publication to still support the S.N.

The article emphasizes the inconsequential (and debatable) point of "people will forgive him." Which people? Those that aren't bothered by these revelations have nothing to forgive. Whereas those that are, whether the embattled in the know for years, or the not too swift ones who have only recently admitted to the undeniable truth; can only extend their forgiveness if Armstrong first asks to be forgiven. Isn’t that how it works?

How is it that such inane journalism gets foisted on the American cycling community? It's as if the site wants to make reality what it envisions should be the fortuitous outcome of this sordid case, to excuse it’s ridiculous and idiotic positions through a "happy ending." Well I say fock off! Speak for yourselves.