Dear Wiggo said:
, it just looks like Lemond and Hampsten are weak, or lazy, or overweight.
According to Hamilton in his book, Hamspten was measuring power on climbs, and climbed with the same power and power to weight in his final year as when winning grand tour: but the peloton was running away from him to the point the team car containing Weisel - did something unprecedented - it gave up in disgust, overtook him to watch the action ahead. Interesting anecdote from Hamilton.
So it cannot be put down to lazy or fat. If power is the same winning a grand tour one year, and the peloton runs away another.
For all that, Hamspten and Lemond had an easier decision than newcomers: so "being whiter than white" was at least an option for them. They had won grand tours between them and had fulfilled most of their dreams, so when the sport turned sour, they could close the door quietly - there was little point in them "rocking the boat" - getting or giving bad publicity in a sport that they still hoped to earn a living from in other ways than riding.
It seems to me - Guys like hamilton were robbed of a career, just as much of a victim as others . Don't dope, and you cannot compete: dope and you are cheating, and risk what ultimately happened. What kind of decision is that?
Failure to recognise the fact that most of the teams and riders were doping by Heinz ("head in the sand") Verbruggen, and Pat ("blame the latest scapegoat, and sweep the rest under the carpet") Mcquaid and Christian ("this year we are clean!, honest!") Prudhomme, is the essential reason the problem was never treated seriously enough.
I blame the banking regulators for what was allowed to happen to banking on their watch too.
It is an interesting analogy that "Sir Mervyn (fiddled whilst rome burned) King" still has his job at Bank of England despite doing nothing to detect or eradicate the banking abuses which all happened on his watch, including all the big bank scams of the consumer.
When jorg Jaksche says all six teams he was connected with across his career were systematically doping , it puts it all into context. It also makes scapegoating such as Bruyneel a relatively pointless exercise.