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Jul 2018
7:59pm, 9 Jul 2018
13,223 posts
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BAzoaxE
So basically everyone who wins now is cheating because so many in the past were caught cheating. You cant dish out bans based on that.
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Jul 2018
9:13pm, 9 Jul 2018
950 posts
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SailorSteve
Indeed you can’t Baz, and rightly so.
However if someone keeps winning an event that has historically been positively riddled with cheating I simply don’t buy it. The TdF is just too damned hard.
I hope CF wins because it may be the only way to guarantee the scrutiny that could possibly satisfy us all.
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Jul 2018
10:04pm, 9 Jul 2018
5,207 posts
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larkim
Another nothing article. Belief and faith. Inability to see the evidence that things have changed.
We're not going to see eye to eye. I'm naive and a fanboy, I'll stay that way 
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Jul 2018
10:44pm, 9 Jul 2018
13,016 posts
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Chrisull
Kimmage was of course an ex-rider who experienced doping first hand. There's no evidence anything has changed. Show me where it has?
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Jul 2018
10:49am, 10 Jul 2018
5,209 posts
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larkim
Having just read Kimmage's Rough Ride book, I agree he's well placed to be a commentator, certainly far better than me! But his first hand experience is of a different era, the EPO / blood doping era effectively came after him (certainly in his first hand experience, though he does talk about cortisone etc, even mentioned Kenacort) so the world has moved on a lot since then.
What's changed? Everything! If the bust of Lance did nothing else, it seems to me that what it did was finally put the dopers on the outside, not the inside. I could be completely wrong about this, but now it feels to me (without evidence, i accept!) that if you were in a hotel room before a non-GT race and your teammate asked you to help them out with prepping their syringe, or if you had any special pills, etc as described in Kimmage's day, the rider would be reporting that straight away.
If things were the same, we'd still be seeing Tour leaders dumped with police raids on hotels and coaches etc. The generation of riders today aren't ones steeped in the days of Kimmage et al when doping was just part of the game. And whether or not anti-doping is that great, it is certainly a league apart from where it was in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But as I've posted before, I'm aware that my position on this is almost as much evidence lacking as the position which says "history says they all doped, so they must still be doping".
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Jul 2018
9:06am, 11 Jul 2018
26,304 posts
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Derby Tup
Look at the times for the classic cols- in the bad old (good old ;)) days Pantini etc set times like the East German women did at athletics
Now I’m not bothered whether cyclists dope or not. tbh I assume they all do because, hell, they always have. I’ve not looked at climb times but read somewhere in the past that post ‘98 the times (and average speeds - another great marker) got more real / believable but have gone mad again. I’m not trawling through geeky stats but to me saying such and such is clean is about at rational as saying the earths flat. There were always clean riders. Some didn’t dope through choice. Sometimes the drugs didn’t work. It was very rare the clean riders won. It was (and is) virtually impossible. About as likely as a fat bloke winning a marathon
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Jul 2018
9:19am, 11 Jul 2018
5,215 posts
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larkim
I don't accept the premise that it is virtually impossible to win clean. Even if you are a doper, you are beating some people who are clean, whether they are in second, third, thirtieth etc place. So at some point there is a clean victor. To beat that clean victor you need to be one second better than them, and unless that clean victor is the epitome of the finest human ever created with perfect tactics and perfect team organisation, they are by definition beatable.
Winning clean is not impossible. Fair enough if you take the view that "they're all at it". But you've got to accept then that the "favourites" of Geraint Thomas, Peter Sagan, Cavendish, are as equally at it as those who are less well liked.
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Jul 2018
9:52am, 11 Jul 2018
26,305 posts
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Derby Tup
I’m not informed enough to know what the ‘endurance drugs’ that help GC prospects have on pure sprinters like Cav. Ben Johnson was on different gear to what the Kenyans take. Certainly the mountain stages are not easy for many sprinters. They’re only really there for the ‘money shot’ at the end
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Jul 2018
10:04am, 11 Jul 2018
5,216 posts
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larkim
Try cycling for four and a half hours and then putting in a sprint at the end - GT sprinting isn't like being a 100m sprinter, otherwise Chris Hoy would have been riding the Tour, they are more akin to Mo Farah than they are Ben Johnson.
Just because they can't climb well doesn't mean that being a GT sprint specialist isn't an endurance activity.
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Jul 2018
10:07am, 11 Jul 2018
26,667 posts
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SPR
If they're all at it, where does it stop/ start, are we all at it?
If you do pro road cycling you're still an endurance athlete even if you're not a GC contender in mountains.
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