Thats what I said the first time I ever saw Peter North! *rimshot*

I, for one, was shocked I tell you! Shocked!

It's almost as if their own success is worth more to them than hundreds of other lives.

Nah, not if you're a liberal. However, I'm sure if a conservative reads this, he will call me a tree-hugging freak 8)

No, I read them and no he did not discredit my posts. A witch hunt is a witch hunt regardless of whether the person is guilty. The shockingly low standards they hold themselves to when it's no longer convenient to look the other way is just as mindblowing to me now as it was then.

If Simon is to be believed, the Europeans decided that he was guilty before there was any actual evidence. I mean, wasn't that whole Monde story, well later than 10 years ago.

Face it, the whole thing was a witch hunt which happened to have targeted somebody that was guilty. But, you can't utilize post hoc reasoning to suggest that the process was any less tainted by the desire of the Cycling profession to show that they're not as dirty as people think. The profession is so tainted by drug abuse that you can pretty much hound anybody you like and probably get the evidence you want.

Quick word about American/French relations :
Media on our side of the atlantic tends to depict everything the US say about France with 'a bad light'. I think that french bashing is as good newspaper-material in the US (and united kingdom of course) as the other way around here. Everytime there is a subject where France and USA are opposed ... it finishes with epic proportions in the newspapers (Armstrong, DSK, Irak War ...)

Edit : I almost forgot, the french articles about the dreamliner are some piece of art .... because some parts of the electric system are made by Thales, there is some passive-agressive tone.

I personally think sports as a general rule are a joke, especially so here in aus. The media play these people up as national heroes and glorify them as if they're doing something worthwhile, there is not nearly as much praise say for scientists or the like, who invent things and make discoveries of far, far greater consequence than a bunch of meatheads running around in circles. There's even a (government-funded) "Institute of Sports" over here, which uses tax-payer dollars to develop "athletes", a huge joke and waste of money.

Sports fans have rocks for brains.

I love to watch sports. It's one of the few honest and (questionably) real programs on TV.
I am however under no illusion that all sports are without doping. The only reason cycling comes up so much is that it's the best controlled and most rigidly checked sport available. You have the bloodpassport, out of competition checks, whereabouts and a check for the top x and a random selection of racers every race. In cycling you can get suspended for having 0.000000006 mg of a substance in your blood (I didn't check my zeroes) of a substance that is not performance enhancing but could be used as a masking agent. In NFL you get a 6 games suspension if you supply non-human urine during the doping control. How is that even possible? In cycling they make you undress while peeing and the doping controller will watch you pee in a cup in frontal view (often these controllers are female) In football (soccer), you can take growth hormones for 7 years and be fine (Messi, anyone know him?). The entire Spanish soccer team that won the world cup is part of the Fuentes investigation and trust me they not mentioned for the fun of it. In Tennis journalists get ruined if they try and bring up doping allegations but Nadal is also part of the Fuentes investigation.

People should not focus so much on cycling a sport of dopers. It is done across the entire field of sports where stamina or power are required. Probably also in sports where control of muscles / concentration and reaction times are required. If you want to be the best and win, in any sports and can get a 13% performance enhancement through f.i. EPO or AICAR or whatever (compare the amount of Watt output per kg of bodyweight between now and 1990 in cycling and it's dropped from 6 to 5.3 W/kg last year) you'd be stupid not to. If one of your competitors uses it you're already without a chance to win.

I am definitely in favor of rigorous controls / checks in sports and I think the biological passport is the best addition in the latests years. Lets hope they introduce it across all sports and not just cycling and track and field. And for all other sports, use cycling as your example on how to check on doping. Because trust me if they do, we'll hear stories of doping across the entire board. And last, make the discipline the same across all sports. It can't be so that in one sport you get a 2 or 4 year ban or even lifetime for substance x, and in another it's laughed and and it's all ok. Won't do it again, honest.

Better rocks for brains than shit for brains. :D

In the States there would be a lot of good people in prison or dead if it wasn't for state funded athletic programs.
Ditto for the arts. You can't judge the validity of something because you prefer one over the other or you are bettet than one than the other.

Go Blues!

A little relevant sidenote - (in)famous Norwegian saying after a Norwegian comic, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Inge_Torkelsen ]Per Inge Torkelsen[/url]:

"Give the youth a bottle of liquor before they are lost to athletics"

Continue with the regular program.

If I was in the Netherlands I'd be a huge sports fan...specifically your women's field hocky team! Yeah baby! Yeah!

I personally blame hero worship for part of this mess (not the doping itself, but the aftermath).

If Lance Armstrong had been portrayed as a man rather than a larger than life figure, this whole incident wouldn't have been blown so out of proportion.

Stop expecting over-achievers to be everything.

Everybody has their flaws, nobody is perfect.

Those guys are athletes.

That means that they have good genes, extraordinary work ethics and, hopefully, love their sport.

That's it.

For the rest, they are just as fallible as the rest of us.

I think it was unfair that Lance was worshiped to the extent he was before this incident and I think it's unfair that he is vilified to the extent he is afterwards.

The guys was stripped of his titles.

Justice served.

Let's move along and if you see the guy somewhere, be civilized and don't give him shit because of this.