OT: Oh yeah, Lance Armstrong said stuff of mild importance tonight.
Well, technically Monday, but you all know what I mean. Here is one of those fancy internet linky-ma-jiggers to an ESPN article with a few highlights of the interview. I was pretty blown away with how openly he confirmed just about everything she threw at him. He couldn't help himself with his little jab at the USADA for their report on his '09-'10 tour, but overall he seemed to put the onus on himself. I still think he's a big fat jerkface, but, at least now he admitted as much. Thoughts from the MGoCommunity? I will also accept answers such as "WOOOOO BIG 10 ROAD WIN LOLPHERS" because obviously.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:17 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 2:21 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 5:18 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 12:20 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 12:30 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 12:32 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 12:52 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 7:48 AM ^
Let's assume Marge was better looking in this case, too.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:56 AM ^
Heroes don't do that.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:17 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 1:35 AM ^
What has Lance Armstrong done to show he's a better person than anyone else? Is it that he's a cancer survivor? His athletic success, even assuming the doping didn't do anything, just for the sake of argument? Are you basing him being a good person on inspirational messages and marketing campaigns, regardless of how truthful he was?
I'm honestly confused why Lance Armstrong is better than any of the many good people on this blog or in my every day life.
January 18th, 2013 at 8:11 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 6:36 AM ^
My god, man. Get off his nut. The guy is a flaming douche. He ruined the lives of people close to him, knowing full well they were right.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:46 AM ^
/Godwin'd
January 18th, 2013 at 12:28 AM ^
which is why nobody cares about the "cheating", not to mention when you have people in the Olympics competing with bionic limbs the whole steroid/doping issue doesn't seem like a big deal.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:37 AM ^
So far, halfway through, he has admitted most things that are known to be true. He has been forthcoming, and admitted that he was not a nice person. Sometimes he seemed a bit flippant about it.
One problem is that I think people are looking at this as an apology, and while he does sort of apologize, he seems to treat this only as an interview. This is particularly noticeable in the bizarre way he discussed his treatment of the Andreus, whom he treated evilly and knows it. Maybe it's because he knows that "apologizing" on tv for that is pointless, I don't know.
Crucial issue: he claims he was clean for his comeback. I don't believe that at all, and in an interview where he is otherwise confessing to absolutely everything, I can't figure it out. No way he was clean.
January 18th, 2013 at 3:00 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 7:47 AM ^
It was 3 a.m.....husband is away for the week golfing....home alone with my kids.....hearing noises in the house. And if it is redundant, you totally need to change it!
January 18th, 2013 at 12:44 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 1:43 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 8:16 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 8:37 AM ^
It's not about the doping. Prior to the biological passport, it has to be assumed that any athlete in a WADA sport that had an advantage to gain was doping; in non-WADA sports without meaningful testing programs or sanctions (football, soccer, baseball) I presume that doping and PEDs remain rife. Among cheaters, LA comes across as just particularly professional and efficient.
But that doesn't mean we can't villify him for trying to personally destroy everyone that left his fold. He remains an amazing athlete, but he is a loathesome human being.*
January 18th, 2013 at 9:40 AM ^
While it is likely that Lemond took some sort of doping products during his carrer EPO and the oxygen boosting drugs were not availible until the twilight of his carrer. I would not be supprised at all to find that Lemond used amphetamens or cortizone which were rampent in pro cycling at that time but the evidence seems to point to him not having engaged in blood doping or EPO use. His carrer may well have ended early because of the introduction of EPO in the early 90's when he went from winning the tour in 1990 to being blown off the road in 91-94 by then unknow riders who later were acknowlaged to be using EPO.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:42 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 11:53 AM ^
I agree that Lemond was most likely clean (guy had an obscene VO2 max and other distance athlete measurables). However, I believe that health issues relating to the hunting accident also accelerated his decline. I know he had success after that happened, but I still think it was a major contributor.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:50 PM ^
I guess only he could answer that. It would have made sense to speculate that back then, but we now know that EPO invaded the Peloton in a big way in the early 90s and completely changed the landscape. Other riders of the day have spoken about how things completely changed, and it seems reasonable to think that Lemond was overtaken not so much by declining form but by a group of competitors that were, quite literally, playing by different rules.
The name nobody every brings up is Miguel Indurain, who won five Tours in a row; he eclipsed Lemond, and by the time he stopped winning, the guys at the front of the pack were juiced to the gills and have admitted it. The first person to win after him, Bjarne Riis, has publically confessed to doping to win his Tour, and is known to have doped for some time before that.
Indurain is the bridge between riders thought to be mostly clean (Lemond and his contemporaries like Fignon) and an era known to be completely dirty.
Given what we know about the people he was beating, and what we know about Pedro Delgado, a teammate of Indurain's who was the team leader prior to Indurain's rise (Delgado is a known cheater, and while I don't have the information in front of me I *think* I recall that he blood doped, which is pretty effective), there is every reason to suspect that Indurain was a doper as well. He simply hasn't been grilled about it.
It is not unreasonable to wonder if there has been a single clean winner of the Tour since Lemond won. Now, a few of the winners since Lance retired (Carlos Sastre, Cadel Evans) may well be clean, but we don't know that; we do know, for sure, that every winner between 1996 and 2005 was juiced, we know that Alberto Contador juiced, and we can strongly suspect Oscar Perreiro (the guy who was awarded the win after Floyd Landis was DQ'd) and Andy Schleck are dirty.
I love cycling, but it is a dirty sport.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:10 AM ^
had the ball to come clean.
January 18th, 2013 at 2:15 AM ^
So he basically said that he did every doping trick in the book, before and during his Tour runs.
Not surprising, and as I said before, it's not the doping that pisses me off, but how arrogant he was in his lies, and how he tried ruining the lives of the people that accused him of doing what he just admitted to,
January 18th, 2013 at 7:52 AM ^
that is exactly it. He crushed people's lives in a ruthless defense of his lies.
He is scum.
January 18th, 2013 at 3:04 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 6:31 AM ^
January 18th, 2013 at 8:18 AM ^
"mild" importance is a pretty apt categorization...possibly an overstatement
January 18th, 2013 at 2:40 PM ^
I hadn't known this until today (because I never really paid attention to cycling) but it turns out that there is a small Michigan connection. I just read this over at CNNSI.com by Austin Murphy:
Betsy Andreu was an inconvenient woman. At a time when a fawning media competed to compose paeans to Lance Armstrong (for years, I was at the forefront of that too-credulous crowd), she struck a discordant note. If we were enterprising enough to search for it, she told us, we would find that there was more to Armstrong's story than met the eye. It really wasn't about the bike.
The wife of former Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreu, she is a whip-smart graduate of the University of Michigan. She is well-spoken, often funny and occasionally profane, such as when the subject of her nemesis arises.
Standing up for truth, now that deserves a Go Blue!
January 18th, 2013 at 3:59 PM ^
Ha! I was just about to post the U-Mich connection but it looks like I was beaten to the punch.
Let this be a lesson to not mess with an aggreived Wolverine. ESPECIALLY not a mother Wolverine. This is how a real, non-sociopath person acts, Lance. (Also, at the risk of neg-votes, she's kinda hot too!)