Another Icon Falls....

[jerryfmcompushaft]

Kinda sad

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USADA announced today that Lance Armstrong has chosen not to move forward with the independent arbitration process and as a result has received a lifetime period of ineligibility and disqualification of all competitive results from August 1, 1998 through the present," USADA said in a statement.

That conclusion was inevitable once Armstrong, whose stirring victories after his comeback from cancer helped him transcend sports, chose not to pursue arbitration in the drug case brought against him. That was his last option in his bitter fight with USADA and his decision set the stage for the titles to be stripped and his name to be all but wiped from the record books of the sport he once ruled.

[Deleted]

There have been so many athletes who I thought were steroid free turn out to be just the opposite. I refuse to believe that Armstrong took illegal drugs, although it is appearing more and more that he did. For now, I'm going to accept his story that the USASA beat him down to the point where he decided no mas.

I often wonder what would have happened had I ever been offered PEDs as a youngster and young adult. I was a pretty good athlete but always wanted to be better. I never amounted to much other than being really good, never professional and suspect that had I known about PEDs I would have tried them. That said, however, I never to this day have taken any kind of PED, steroid (other than that nasty stuff for when you get poinson ivy), marijuana, cocaine - any drug - so maybe I wouldn't have after all.

[Sir John]

This was debated some time ago over here, and one of our top cycling coaches voiced the opinion that Armstrongs performances were so outstanding, that he HAD to be on drugs.

Cycling and weight lifting are both notorious for drugs, and they get caught out regularly.

In the world of sporting achievement the athletes are so finely tuned and trained that winning margins are usually very fine, so when someone does something so clearly greater than all the rest it makes you wonder.

100m sprints are usually won by inches not yards and when they are, it smells. This goes for most winners such as Ben Johnson, that Jones woman in Sydney, and even Usain Bolt.

IMHO, the ONLY way to stop drugs in sport is to take away the incentive of it. ALL place-getters tested, all positives earn a lifetime ban, all monies refunded, and all records expunged.

Otherwise it is just a contest between chemists, not athletes.

JMO

SJ

[mcnoch]

At that time doping was rampant. That is the problem now with giving his first places to other guys who are known or even convicted to have doped themselves. But the functionaries should keep their mouth shut, they were more interested in good media reports than in keeping the sport clean and the completion fair. The big teams needed to show results to justify the big sums of advertising money. Too much media attention, demanding spectacular results is causing a too big pressure to look away in using illegal means to provide these results. When the doping becomes to visible the media hype turns into the opposite (which is again a big story for the press). Later on the media attention is gone and the sport is fair again, until the Hype starts again one day. We have seen that with many sports now. Sometimes I feel sorry for the athletes in such a phase, they are cheating the public, but they are cheated themselves about their real successes. They always know that they were cheating and so that they are not the real winner the public things they are. To know that is always a bitter taste in one mouth and so even the victory Champaign is not tasting, as it is undeserved.

[jerryfmcompushaft]

One solution would be to have everybody doping. Level the playing field - is that not fair?

[Deleted]

I saw a graphic last night that of the seven years that Armstrong won, only ONE of the three racers who finished in second or third place each year has not been associated with drugs and he finished in third place that particular year. That sport is rife with drugs despite every attempt to get rid of them. It would be best to just start all over with clear cut definitions of what would be the penalty for drug use, perhaps even to include prison time, although that may be a bit extreme. Without some teeth in the rules, everyone will try to skirt the issue.