Quote:
Originally Posted by Weitz
I think the difference between Lance and the baseball guys is not everyone in baseball was cheating.
The part of the Doc where he is listing guys from different countries where they cheated but 1 would still be working with no problems and another was a pariah, was a great segment I thought.
I really enjoyed the Doc.
Now this weekends 30 for 30 is going to be awesome too..'Long Gone Summer' about Sosa and McGuire and that era.
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The real difference between baseball and cycling is baseball, while turning a blind eye didn't actually insist on doping as the only way you get to take part in the sport, people seem to forget why we found out about Armstrong, because the Festina (I think) team drug van got caught by the Belgium police taking the backroads to avoid the occasional customs checks as it drove into France, the subsequent scandal revealed that doping in cycling was done on a team basis, not individuals, and was fully approved of by the sports organizers, they had to be dragged into testing kicking and screaming, they clearly tipped off the teams to circumvent testing.
The closest analogy to a pro cyclist doping would be an East German weightlifter in the 70's, you wanted to ride a bike in the Tour you doped (probably still have too to be frank) it is a sport that has always embraced drug use by riders teams and has always been enabled by a governing body that did not want drug use curtailed.
I do not believe there has ever, in over a century, been a clean winner of the Tour, to this day, as Jacques Anquetil said (5 times Tour winner in the late 50's and 60's) 'leave me alone, everybody dopes'