re: #1 Destro

The French were right and the American team cheated.

I don’t see any need to turn this into a nationalistic or anti-American thing.

Veteran NYTimes reporter George Vecsey sums it up.

Did he do “it”? Let’s put it this way (and I say this as somebody who covered some of his Tours de France, and knows and likes some of Armstrong): he was the best cyclist of his time, in maybe the dirtiest sport in existence.

A great champion like Greg LeMond could witness Armstrong barreling up some Alpine pass and insist that no human could possibly climb at that rate without doping. LeMond and some friends were righteous in their rage and suspicion. Yet other cyclists were testing positive even under the halfhearted efforts of the world cycling body.

Was Armstrong using some more potent drug, or using it more often? I doubt that. My guess is that cycling has been the ultimate level playing ground we all say we want for sports. It was also a lethal business, by the way: young Tour aspirants were falling off their machines, quite dead, because their altered blood was the thickness of tomato bisque.

The ones who really did not want to dope went away. Check out the recent essay “How to Get Doping Out of Sports,” by Jonathan Vaughters, in The New York Times Sunday Review.

The whole article is quite interesting, but one part I hadn’t seen elsewhere was particularly striking:

On the team bus, [Lance’s masseuse, Emma O’Reilly] claimed, she heard several top team officials fretting about a positive test by Armstrong for steroids. They were in a panic, saying: “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” Their solution was to get one of their compliant doctors to issue a [back-dated] prescription for a steroid-based ointment to combat saddle sores. If Armstrong had saddle sores, O’Reilly said, she would have known.

nyti.ms

Yeah, I know: hearsay etc. But how could the USADA put together a huge list of witnesses just based on people being “out to get Lance”? It doesn’t pass the smell test.