Quote:
Originally Posted by
gomestar 
yeah I feel bad too. Such a brutal end to a career. I remember 2006 (back when I was doing competitive racing for my college team) and bang, Puerto break open like a day before the tour was set to start and Ullrich and Basso are nixed, just like that. Shocked me.
Riis doped in that Tour victory, by admission. It is not a clean sport by any means.
Sadly, it's hard to name a clean sport nowadays. Credit to them for doing something about it and putting serious testing in place.
I don't follow the sport closely (pretty much tune in the the TdF each year), but it seems to me that a big part of the problem in cycling and other endurance sports is that doping would make it nearly impossible for clean athletes to compete. Baseball, to use one example, requires hand eye coordination, throwing ability, etc; skills not affected by performance enhancers. Gives a highly skilled clean guy a chance to compete. Granted there is strategy involved in cycling, but when your main requirement is the ability to pedal your ass off and doping directly enhances your ability to do that, it's tough to see how you can get to the top without doing it.
All that said, I'd like to believe that Lance is clean, but I'll never be 100% positive he has been. Did see an interesting tv program a while back about the technological advances his Discovery team had made and how much of an impact they had during the race.
