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Wiggins, Clinic respect?

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He is not wrong and it's refreshing to see someone cut through the crap.

I am a doping skeptic and don't generally subscribe to "guilty until proven innocent," but I think Wiggins doped to win the TdF, and I think he was smart enough to know exactly what LA did to win it. Some of his public statements indicate (to me) that he'd like to come clean, as it were. The fact that he's softening his stance on LA seems to fit that pattern. I.E., well, HE wasn't the devil incarnate, actually, so neither am I...
 
I think now he's knocked rowing in the Olympics on the head, he's just cracking on with what he's going to do for the rest of his career and more comfortable in the public eye it seems too. Began with his weekly podcast for Eurosport, his Icons book, now he's done live commentary for 6-Days, which in my opinion is the most concise and race-aware cycling commentary i've ever heard in cycling, so if that comes over to World Tour commentary I think that's probably where he is heading. There is rumour he is also working on a documentary investigation re. his Jiffy Bag, but that would be an obvious thing to now do I would think.
 
Re:

Bolder said:
He is not wrong and it's refreshing to see someone cut through the crap.

I am a doping skeptic and don't generally subscribe to "guilty until proven innocent," but I think Wiggins doped to win the TdF, and I think he was smart enough to know exactly what LA did to win it. Some of his public statements indicate (to me) that he'd like to come clean, as it were. The fact that he's softening his stance on LA seems to fit that pattern. I.E., well, HE wasn't the devil incarnate, actually, so neither am I...
Again Wiggo has Lance-Envy
Lance fessed up
Wiggo thinks he wants to...
 
Re: Re:

MartinGT said:
samhocking said:
I'll ask him for you as I'm going to the Wiggins QA A/ Evening With Wiggins next month in Kentish Town so might put that Q in the hat, it's a good one no matter what side of the fence you stand.

Can you ask him why he think's he was perfect and has a love in with him. Has he got over his nausea for him now?
If you'd read the book or even the source interview of the article, you would realise Wiggins was describing Armstrong as 'a perfect winner' because that's how Henri Desgrange described what the winner would need to be, in order to win his race 120 years ago.
 
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Puckfiend said:

It says something about the stupidity of Wiggins that he has released another book and put Armstrong et al up on a pedestal.

It shows that the wheel has come full circle from his original anti doping stance.

He is now a hypocrite of the highest degree, by lauding so many dopers. Might as well go knee deep in at this stage, if he survived Fancy Bears and parliament hearings reasonably unscathed in the eyes of many who simply don't care then he must feel bombproof.
 
Re: Re:

Angliru said:
Puckfiend said:

...and all the Sky cult are humming "La, la, la, la, la. I can't hear you!!
La, la, la, la, la." All while covering etheir eyes.

It won’t be much longer now.

PK and FL will soon saddle up and fade into the sunset ... following the wind blown tracks of DW, TT, TH, GL, BA and RR.

Oh, glory days.
 
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ontheroad said:
It says something about the stupidity of Wiggins that he has released another book and put Armstrong et al up on a pedestal.
Of all the cycling books published in the UK in the last decade, I think only one made it into the real best seller's list: Wiggins's third volume of autobiographies. So to suggest that this seventh volume is in some way stupid, well, I'm sorry, but the bottom line laughs that comment off the stage.
ontheroad said:
He is now a hypocrite of the highest degree, by lauding so many dopers.
My bookshelves are full of authors lauding dopers. Who doesn't love Coppi, who doesn't love Anquetil? Are we to air-brush from the history of the sport Pélissier? Are we to air-brush from the sport Géminiani? Are we who grew up watching the sport in the eighties, in the nineties, in the noughties, to forget what we saw and instead try and imagine some prelapsarian world with no doping?

Wiggins's problem does not appear to be 'lauding' dopers - it is not explaining how this fits with his past statements.
 
Wiggins on Armstrong:
Legend has it that Henri Desgrange, the ‘Father of the Tour’, envisaged a ‘perfect winner’. He was of the idea that the ideal Tour de France would have one finisher, a type of super-athlete who would not only defeat his opponents, but also whatever nature might throw at him.

It was an extreme version of cycling, and a very French one. It also explains why Tour de France winners tended to be masochistic, obsessive and, on occasion, borderline sociopathic.
In the same way Wiggins has in interviews since the book launch said that Armstrong is not an icon, but is iconic (despite his inclusion in a book called 'Icons') some want to get all Jesuitical on this and argue that Wiggins doesn't say that Armstrong was that 'perfect winner' his version of the myth Desgrange is supposed to have believed in says he is.

What Wiggns actually says of Armstrong is this:
He was the archetypal Tour de France cyclist, and he was precisely the sort of winner Desgrange had in mind 120 years ago.
Is that opinion valid? Not, Peter Cossins would say, if you rely on the myth of the ideal Tour:
t6r0g6.jpg

But looking at Desgrange in reality, not with myths, I think you could support the opinion that he would have approved of Armstrong, when he was winning. Desgrange was nothing if not a pragmatist. But, once Armstrong fell from grace and disgraced the Tour, Desgrange would not have approved of the Texan. And Desgrange's history with riders who brought disgrace on the Tour supports that opinion.

Does this invalidate Armstrong's inclusion in Wiggins's book? No. He was and is an icon, a representative symbol both of the sport in general and Gen-EPO in particular.

So what is the problem? It is that Wiggins wants to claim 'Icons' is written from the perspective of a 13-year-old kid from Kilburn and that kid knew naught of the dark side of the sport. That 13-year-old kid from Kilburn is not the man who denounced dopers whenever the British media invited a comment, nor is that 13-year-old kid from Kilburn now besties with the cream of Gen-EPO.

Read 'Icons' though and you will see Wiggins happily letting other parts of that 13-year-old kid from Kilburn's future intrude on the story. But not the evolution of his views on doping. And that disingenious gambit is what makes Wiggins a hypocritcal little ***. But, having read his six other volumes of autobiography, we didn't need this seventh volume to know that.
 
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samhocking said:
A 5 year old article from a rider who retired in 2001 the year Wiggins began his pro career talking about riders injected corticosteroids to race Grand Prix Cholet-Pays de la Loire? Not even sure Wiggins raced it in 2005 with C.A.?

are we not putting 2 and 2 together?

"Another time he recalls being “angry” when approached by a British cycling manager who wanted his charge introduced to a “good” doctor in Belgium."
 
Re: Re:

gillan1969 said:
samhocking said:
A 5 year old article from a rider who retired in 2001 the year Wiggins began his pro career talking about riders injected corticosteroids to race Grand Prix Cholet-Pays de la Loire? Not even sure Wiggins raced it in 2005 with C.A.?

are we not putting 2 and 2 together?

"Another time he recalls being “angry” when approached by a British cycling manager who wanted his charge introduced to a “good” doctor in Belgium."

Despite the suspiciones like yourself slappin the old abacasus till all hours ... ya can't make your sum stick. :lol:
 
To me, the article relates as much to Dr Chris Mertens and Van Avermaet's taking Diprophos (Corticosteroid) under TUE / Vaminolact Masking agents as it does to Wiggins TUE for Triamcinolone under Hargreaves for allergies. I don't see any link with evidence of anything to either rider. We already know corticosteroids were used like this, not sure what this adds to that.
 

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