Friday, July 27, 2007

Le Tour de France


I'm torn about all these dopers getting caught. Don't get me wrong, I think the tour would be much better au natural, but how much of the peloton is actually dope-less? I'd like to think that it's a high percentage, but if you are not competing without the EPO (or whatever it is), what other options do you have? It would take some pretty high morals to be clean if the majority of your peers are not, in fact, clean.


Also, how slow will the TDF be next year after they get all the dopers? Which brings me to my question of whether or not all the dopers can be caught. The testing seems like a fairly inexact science. For example, with Lance, his 'A' sample came up clean, but the 'B' sample had something in it. And sometimes, the 'A' sample will be positive, but the 'B' sample will be clean. I won't claim any sort of understanding behind the science, but it seems like a bit of a witch-hunt at times. That and I'm sure that there are some creative dopers that will figure out how to get around the testing.

2 comments:

Sam said...

it's my opinion that all of these guys are doping in some fashion or another. I've wrestled with the same ideas and decided that there's not too much that can be done. The way it's going now, where suspicion = conviction a la salem witch trials is good and bad in my opinion. You have to be above reproach to even have a shot. However, right now, the people doing the right thing in policing their own team (like rasmussen's team) pay the ultimate price. If you don't think contador is drugging it up, you're insane IMHO. 24 year old dudes completing and staying strong at the end of a grand tour where they did 30+ hrs of riding at race pace/ week? It's near impossible to build the kind of base to make that possible and not be drugging.

However, they're all doping right? I think so, so why not just let them go. They'll always be ahead of the testers anyway, because there's motivation and $$ to cheat. I don't know dude. It's frustrating that such a cool event is not even interesting to so many people now due to the drugs

MICHELLE CULLUM said...

i like how steve worked the word "doper " into that post. its funny that we use that word for cycling and most olympic sports, but our "american" sports are more "steroid"al. is there any reason for this, or is doping just the more international/euro-english word to use for it? i know that is what all the irish and indians call it. Cricket is doping too.
here, in certain circles dope means cool. Ie: That's dope G.