Zweistein said:
"EPO, testosterone and HGH are hormones that the body also produces, naturally. Intensive, long lasting endurance training and racing will lead to the situation that the body itself, naturally and "cleanly", has problems to keep a sufficient level of the hormones, endogenously."
I am sorry. I forgot EPO, steroids, and HGH were medicine. Using these products is natural.
You push the exact same argument that team managers and doping doctors use on young riders. It is medicine and you aren't healthy.
No, I just want to say there is not just black and white.
As I said, some stuff he used, like amphetamines, are really poison for the body. No doubt about that.
Concerning EPO, however, having had a HCT of 48 or 49 instead of your normal 42 (just an example) over few months a year, for 10 or 12 years, won´t make you die aged 40. It may even have helped you to better resist the health dangers which come from racing 100 days a year and ride 35.000 km a year.
Gaumont seems to have taken "too many and much PEDs to call it healthy", and he admitted to that. I, however, refuse to believe that this is the only reason why he now fell to coma and apparently died.
The news about him make me feel a little sad, to be honest. He lived just the normal, average pro cycling lifestyle, and the mentality of the Bindas and Coppis and Bartalis and Merckxs and Hinaults and Gaumonts was and is just the same as we find it in the peloton nowadays, and will find it in the future pro peloton.
We find the same mentalities amongst wrestlers and bodybuilders, also in soccer, tennis, athletics, triathlon and skiing. The peak comes early in life, between 20 and 38, circa. They just do it.
We know Gaumont for his Wevelgem victory, for his years at one of the most important teams in cycling, Cofidis. We´d never have heard from him without these years. Then, he´d just have been the 38 or 39 or 40 year old café bar owner from a 6000 inhabitant French village.
He knew that, and I´m sure, he didn´t regret much.
I have big respect for him, and for the hundreds of other former pros. Only few of them, like Pereiro, Jalabert, Moreau, Bugno, Kelly, Hinault, that means, the really successful ones, have remained in the spotlight, though this spotlight became and becomes weaker as time goes by. The average pros from former times, watercarriers, second and third categories top riders, have disappeared, don´t benefit financially any longer from having been pro, often have serious health related problems, and the memories of past times is all they still have.
This page mentioned up above, dopeology.com, is, IMHO, the greatest source one could have, it´s unique and the best I´ve ever seen, concerning doping in cycling. If you consider that it lists everything that became public from 1980 on, and then realize that only 5 or 10 percent or everything that happened, became public, you see that it´s such a big issue, just an elementary part of cycling.
In soccer, not even 1 percent becomes public, I´m sure. And they do as much EPO, GH, cortisone and so on as cyclists do. And no one knows, or wants to know.
Gaumont was neither a black sheep nor a "nutter, very gifted in manipulating people" (Millar). He was just a pro cyclist, and if he died now, a man that died early. Still, "if", then all I say is, "Rest in peace".
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