red_flanders said:
Honest response. I didn't see all those on TV. I saw the 84 Tour, but was in the US in 86. Nevertheless, the differences are stark. In the case of Indurain and Armstrong, it was years of domination and I found it terribly boring. That Fignon, Hinault and eventually Lemond traded wins was what made it great. Like the Lakers and the Celtics. Froome may become like Armstrong and Indurain, maybe not. In all three cases it was and is absolutely clear that what they are doing is/was not possible without doping. It's akin to watching Bonds, Sosa and McGwire turn the home run record into comedy.
One never got the sense of that from watching Hinault, Fignon or Lemond. Certainly everyone in the US was more naive then, so this is a major difference as well.
I suppose my point is only that 'impressions' can be unreliable, no matter how convinced we are of them.
My dad was an intense Sean Kelly fan. And he hated, I mean, hated Greg Lemond- brash, American, cocky...and my father was convinced...CONVINCED..he was on dope. And nothing would disuade him from that view. Hell, he might still believe it. And he thought Kelly was ...relatively...clean. He wasn't so stupid as to think he was a saint.
I watch cycling on and off with him from the early eighties at latest, but didn't really truly fall in love until La Plagne 87. A sham, as it turned out. But I was hooked.
My dad stopped watching cycling when he stopped riding casually - golf i his thing now, and he's a damn good oldie player, as it happens. Wished he found it decades earlier; he has a knack.
But not unconnected, he loathed Armstrong, from the word go. And that rubbed off on me - i was going through the classic hating all things american phase - apart oddly from the miami dolphins - more to the point, i didn't believe what i was watching - but not because of what armstrong actually did, but because, frankly, of Festina, and late for the bassons, simeoni stuff - that to me was RED FLAG ALERT ALERT!!! Clean riders don't bully other clean riders. But the performances alone?
I hadn't hated indurain, though i didn't like him either. I hadn't hated Pantani, or Ulrich, or god forgive me, even Riis. During the early nineties, as i read around, I knew the sport stank a bit, but probably not the sheer level of drowning in epo and then blood.
OF course, it would be great to say I 'saw through it all'. But I didn't. I had doubts, suspicions, i was reasonably clued in. Still am. Still do. But I know how much of the certainty of my dad, and then me, was driven by whether we 'liked' the rider - how hard it was to allow for the possiblity of being wrong. Not just that in fact e.g. Roche was a cheat. But also that e.g. Lemond wasn't.
It's Festina time again, really, at the moment. And everyone wants to be the smart kid who spots the new Emperor is naked. "you won't fool me again, Nah!"
Which is the reaction of the dumped adolesecent boyfriend down the decades. Embarresment at our 'stupidity', followed by anger with the 'cheat', followed by cycnism about the whole business, and an overdose of sarcasm.
Understandable, human...but ultimately just a wall. I choose to wait and try to keep an open mind. Your mileage may vary.