[kscherer]

Uh, oh!

Well, I guess we all knew it was coming, so no big surprise. And not to keep drumming this crap up, but I think this is an appropriate decision. There seems to be ample evidence that he doped, and now he must pay the price.

Bummer that he is the first ever to be stripped of the title due to doping.

Well, if you want to play…

[Eugene]

If you have no chance to win otherwise, you lose nothing by taking steroids...It'll never stop.

[Dorian Gray]

Yeah, look at the mindset of these people. Scary.

Landis was one of the literally scores of people who have brought cycling into disrepute in the last few years, and ultimately caused sponsors (essential to a sport with no ticket gates) to pull out of the sport en masse. Good riddance to him and his ilk, I say. Cyclists who sacrifice their sport on the altar of their ambition are a curse on the entire sporting world.

It pains me to see how I believed him at the time.

[bmorley]

I don't know if there will ever be a way to know for certain, but having followed this case a bit and seen how incompetent the LNDD lab was, it seems more a political decision than a just one. I am not personally convinced that he doped. Never made sense since steroids aren't that helpful in the short term, from my understanding, and cyclists generally aren't out to build mass. Also, according to Allen Lim (the exercise physiologist who worked with Landis) the Stage 17 ride was not out of line with his capability and how he had trained. The UCI and WADA/USADA are out for blood these days, pun not intended . Doping is certainly a problem in cycling, but the athletes are given next to no consideration and are essentially guilty until proven innocent.

A site that I found that had a lot of good information is trust but verify. They do have a slighty pro-Landis slant but provided a fairly non-biased reporting of events.

[beardedmacuser]

Originally Posted by bmorley and seen how incompetent the LNDD lab was, it seems more a political decision than a just one.

I don't want to get stuck into a debate about whether Landis doped or not (we've been there before), but this was absolutely a political decision, against which Landis had no chance of defending himself whether he was guilty or not.

Speaking as a molecular pharmacologist myself, If I had tried to present the evidence from Landis' test to a scientific audience I'd have been ripped apart (and rightly so). The tests were performed unbelievably shockingly badly and are absolutely one hundred percent meaningless. We have (rather naive CSI-fueled) misconceptions about such labs; picturing them as state-of-the-art facilities (with bizarrely moody lighting on TV) staffed by genius scientists doing their best to uphold a rigorous scientific ethos. In reality, the tests are probably performed by someone who scraped a crappy degree at some crappy university before taking a poorly paid job with little tuition and support in a testing lab. I just can't conceive how the tests could have been performed so badly unless the staff didn't know what they were doing or didn't care, or both.

Originally Posted by bmorley The UCI and WADA/USADA are out for blood these days, pun not intended .

Absolutely. The UCI did not like Landis winning the Tour. Another American outwith their culture coming to steal their race.

As I've said before, we'll never know if Landis doped or not, and as cycling continues to enforce its testing regime we should expect a few false-positives every now and then. No doubt deeply distressing for those athletes whose life is unfairly ruined, but it's a price we have to pay for trying to clean-up the sport.

I guess it's a question of whether cycling should try and clean-up the sport or whether it should ignore doping and (as with most other sports; athletics, tennis, soccer, etc etc)?

The French and especially L'Équipe (my god L'Équipe makes the Daily Mail seem the most balanced, informed and enlightened newspaper ever; it really makes me angry that people buy and read L'Équipe) will be celebrating this verdict. It's as close as they've got to finding Armstrong doped! No doubt they're working on proving (L'Équipe-style of course) that because Landis (may have) doped therefore Armstrong did too! Come-on Lance; you're still only 36, come out of retirement and win one more Tour just to piss off the French!*




* nothing against the French as a country or people (I love going on holiday to France), but I mean the bigoted French cycling establishment and journalists.

[Moogs]

PWNED.

Good for the tour. If they hadn't stripped him of the title, they would lose all credibility. What little there is left. Sadly though I think Eugene is correct. Cycling is the type of sport that encourages this type of behavior, because of it's mostly individual nature, because no matter how good you are, you're nobody until you win the big race (so the threat of becoming nobody is not a threat at all), etc.