Then there are those who’s abilities are naturally maxed out and never required doping to make money, break/set records, and/or change the game.
Guess this is why I don’t have any sports “heroes”…if you’re not naturally awesome and need to cheat in order to get to awesome…this spells failure to me.
Sure. Some people only see greatness if they are the best at what they do. Lance on cycling and Bonds/Clements on baseball come to mind. They were probably the more gifted athletes of their generation or what they did (cycling, batting, pitching) Yet, that was not enough and they had to take something to get better and be the best.
My point is. Been naturally awesome doesn’t mean people will not cheat.
True. I should amend my ideology – if you’re not naturally mentally and physically awesome and need to cheat in order to get to awesome…this spells failure to me.
“Take something”?!? 
In whatshisnut’s case it was faaaaaaar more than just “taking something”.
I really want to get to no Lance:
He’s an anchor on our sport, and it’s time to turn the page. I won’t be watching it.
It’s cheating the same as Lance cheated if you have a team doctor apply for a fake TUE so you can take a giant cortisone shot that you don’t need before the Tour so that you can get your body catabolic and shed body weight.
I’d bet money that Wiggins no longer gets shots to control allergies. He probably does fine now on some over the counter allergy pill or spray if he even has allergies.
Relegate him to folklore…like that guy who got DQ’d for hopping on a train to finish the race. You don’t remember his name, he gets no current media coverage, it doesn’t effect the sport today, but you know it happened.
Never said there wasn’t doping before EPO. But EPO was the first drug in cycling that gave such a big advantage that it was basically impossible to win a grand tour clean. Anabolic steroids did the same thing in explosive power sports in the 70s and 80s, but weren’t much use in cycling.
I doubt cycling is clean now, but am at least more optimistic that it’s clean enough that it’s possible to win clean.
Who has forgotten Maurice Garin?
Who?
I think the chance of that would have been slim. He would likely have won Liege, Amstel, and maybe Lombardy, and then races like San Sebastian (which he did in '95) and the Montreal World Cup. He never had a taste for Roubaix, and the tactical complexities of Flanders and San Remo would have put those out of reach (San Remo is only tactical for about 8 minutes on the Poggio, but to avoid a bunch sprint a puncheur has a knife-edge margin of error, and those kinds of one-day subtleties were never Armstrong’s thing – he won by bludgeoning).
Again, I think he would have been similar to Phil Anderson, although Anderson was much better at Flemish racing.
HA!
Sure. They take way more that “something”. And sometimes to are just applying “the cream” and “the clear”. Just ask Mr “My head can’t grow any bigger” Bonds.
Pretty surprising actually considering that I posted on this very forum that Bernal’s win didn’t even make the ESPN splash page here in the U.S. You had to dig to find any coverage on it which was frustrating as hell.
And by comparison to the Tour, the viewership numbers show why the documentary is on ESPN and the Tour, or any other race for that matter, isn’t. I understand the global views and attendance of the Tour is drastically higher, but that’s not what the tweet is about.
STAMFORD, Conn. – July 21, 2015 – With only five stages remaining in the world’s most prestigious and grueling cycling race, NBC Sports Group’s exclusive, live coverage of the 102nd Tour de France has garnered large viewership increases across all platforms.
Through Stage 15 this past Sunday, NBCSN has posted the best viewership for its live morning telecasts since 2010 (the last year Lance Armstrong rode in the Tour de France), averaging 336,000 viewers – up 18% compared to the same time frame last year (284,000). In the Adult 18-49 demographic, NBCSN’s live morning viewership is up 18% from last year (105,000 vs. 89,000). San Francisco leads local market ratings for the Tour de France on NBCSN (top 15 markets below).
STAMFORD – July 10, 2019 – NBC Sports’ coverage of the 106th Tour de France on NBCSN has delivered the most-watched start to the event since 2016, averaging 290,000 viewers – up 23% from last year (235,000) through Stage 4.
We will never know who the greatest rider of that generation was because of the cheating committed by him and all the others, that stole the chance away from honest, awesome riders.
People really need to recognise how bad this was, all the people it hurt, and stop pretending it doesnt matter because “he was great anyway”.
Im sorry, but this is false equivalence. All cheating is bad, all cheating is not equally bad.
a little bit of cheating is bad while a lot of it is very bad?
I mean, cheating IS cheating as you said.
Just because one was able to win 7 times and the other didn’t doesn’t mean one was worse than the other.
You can make an argument that Wiggins cheating is worse. He was using the excuse of having a real illness to get treatment. he got a TUA based on a LIE.
Stealing a sweet from a sweet shop is a crime, carrying out the activities of a serial killer over decades is also a crime - I can tell that some bad things are worse than others.
Because other people have done bad things does not mean Lance’s bad behaviour is lessened in severity - as I posted previously, contributing to a culture of cheating prevents honest people participating and is thereby worse than a single instance of cheating.
People dont like dealing with grey, but life isnt black and white.
This line of argument usually leads into the “spirit of the rule” discussions, which I dont have any time for. Within the rules is ok, outside the rules is cheating.
So in the “unpopular take” category, I DO see him as a role model. We live in this world where we like to pretend that people are just beyond redemption. Like you can do something (were not talking rape, murder etc here, there’s no coming back from those) that puts you into the category of pariah for life. Lets be honest, Lance ripped off other millionaires, and major corporations, all of whom profited IMMENSELY from his actions.
But I know that when his kids came home from school and told him that people were calling him a liar and a cheat, and they defended him, it opened up a wound inside him that is not easy to heal. So how, how does someone find peace with that? How do they come to grips with the damage and pain that their actions have caused? His own kids were getting in fights defending him for things that he really did do. Well, he came clean. He told everything, to everyone, on a stage that most of us will never remotely be close to. The entire world watched him admit to heinous actions that he lied about for many many years even to those who were closest to him.
Maybe role model isn’t the right, word, but I am inspired by his ability to face those demons, and come back. Also like Tiger, like Jordan, he’s been to the edge, and he stood and looked down (to steal a line from Van Halen). He came to grips with it, and ultimately, he moved on. There are those among us (even on this forum) who can’t move on from orders of magnitude smaller things.
None of us are angels, none of us are flawless perfect beings and not one of us could pick up Thor’s hammer, or carry CPT America’s shield. We all have things in our past we’d rather forget, even if it’s just something like making a snide remark to a nun in catholic school (guilty) or stealing a piece of candy at a convenience store (also guilty).
Redemption is no small thing, and in a diverse world, he will never find it with everyone, there are those who apparently can’t move on from Lance’s actions, and to use Lance’s own quotes, I’d say he’s probably sorry that it’s that way. @JoeX for instance has made up his mind about LA, and that’s his right. That being said, my point is if Lance can move on from his past, pretty much anyone can. (except @JoeX 
some people arent comfortable with a “grey area” I guess)
I had a period where I hated the guy, I hated him for duping me, for duping my daughter, and all the rest of us in the cycling community. I hated Floyd, I hated Tyler, I hated Julich, and Levi just the same. But then I realized I was letting their actions ruin this sport that I love, and I had to find some kind of peace, and I found it when Lance came out and said he did it all and he was sorry. Whether his apology was genuine or not was irrelevant to how I felt about the whole thing. Somewhere along the way I realized that he was a human being, and if I were being true to myself, he deserved my compassion, not my anger.
And here we are.
Agree and disagree. For a season, I paid a pal to make out my training schedules. We were in different parts of the country, but I knew him virtually and – a couple of times – in person for several years. He was a top level pro at 19, less than three years after taking up the sport. He has found a life outside of cycling now, and he’s moved away from what was once our internet (and sometimes real life) circle. The guy was a huge talent who tried to ride clean at Domo-Farm Frites and was let go. He tried to stay clean at Saeco until they wore him down and he doped for the Giro. From him, yes, I got some first-hand accounts of the Euro scene and the doping and how screwed up the whole thing was.
If he had been racing against an 80s-doped peloton, I have no doubt he would he would have developed into a fine one-week stage racer. I know of some of some other guys who were, perhaps, “robbed” by the era. They chose not to dope, or did and despised the choice, and they came back to the states and moved on.
I have no problem with saying that Armstrong was the greatest rider of his generation. Seven Tours. Against guys who were doing the same dope. The record establishes who were the best or the best of rocket fuel era. Doesn’t make it right, doesn’t perhaps make it fair, but for about twenty years, Tours and Monuments were won with hematocrits in the 60s, and then with as much dope as they could manage without tripping up the tests. Even the guys who never tested positive.
It was a bad era. Dreams got ruined, and lives got ruined. We’ll see about the long-term effects on their heart and organ health as a result of using EPO, testosterone, and HGH to push their bodies far past their natural limits, for years. It’s in the past. Hopefully we see a better future.
I think they’ll be fine, look at guys like Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards, surely the chemical cocktails they survived on for 50 plus years were more damaging.