Well said chewie72. Thats what I have been trying to say all along and no one bloody listens to me. Just cos Lance was linked with Doctor Ferrari doesn't mean to say he must have doped too, Im sure Lance is a big boy and is able to make his own mind up on that one.
As for the others, well the words weak, lazy, cheating idiots spring to mind, they don't deserve to be called cyclists. Will be interesting to see who else will withdraw for strange reasons.

Editor:

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There will be many riders in the peloton on this new drug, and they will all be bricking it. Watch for loads more withdrawals from the race for little or no reason, as they leave the Tour and try and hide. All these Barloworld and Saunier Duval riders should be sought for out of competition tests, as well as the likes of Moreau. Lets see if they have nothing to hide.

As for Lance, he had many blood and strength enhancing drugs going through his system during his battle with cancer. In competition they would not be allowed but they helped him survive. The end result of the illness, treatment and recovery made a stronger body with a higher pain threshold and greater motivation. Of course we'll never know for sure, but I believe that these factors, along with sacrifice, hard work, a strong team and good tactics made Armstrong the winner he was. While Ullrich and the others were in nightclubs, Lance was training on the Cols and had a team of experts measuring every calorie he took in and preparing his body to peak in July. If you watch his races over again, look at how often he made real effort. His team softened the rivals before he got going, and all he did was hammer the time trials and target the last few kms of key mountain stages.

i wish other sports would come out and amit they hav doping in their sports as well cause its not fair that everyone thinks that all cyclist are on drugs because they are not and those few who are get caught

Lance was able to blow away rivals that were admitted dopers and not on TT but in the mountains and TT. So basically, it IS possible to win TDF just on mineral water. I wish someone told Landis and Ricco that...

I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10. How about 7... The number that no matter how hard you guys try will never go away.

doping has gone on for years,it will never dissapear,i can never see the sport being 100% clean,wherever there is competition,there will be cheating,that goes for all sport,not just cycling,it's down to the individual rider and where he stands on the moral front,it's great to see the new breed of 'clean team' with columbia and garmin/chipotle,hopefully these teams will show you can win clean and hopefully more teams will follow with there strong stance on doping,this won't happen overnight and it will be along time before i can stop thinking after every stage win...'i wonder if he's on something'.......

Listen guys , lets talk Lance Armstrong one more time. His victory over cancer was truly remarkable and his attention to detail in his preparation for the TDF impeccable , flipped through a few pages of his BIO .Personally I never liked Lance Armstrong & Postals/ Discovery , I always liked T-Mobile and dreamt that Jan Ullrich would do something in the mountains, but the Postals and alter that the Discovery racing teams were simply impressive .The Discovery train would destoy all the opponents before Lance even attacked them , totally awesome.

Now Doping .I never had reason to suspect Lance Armstrong, but please correct me here was one of his Dr not some Italian Doctor who had been implicated in a doping scandal .Did he not refuse to break ties with him despite pleas of possible gulit by association. That to me me if its true , casts sufficient doubt on the legitimacy of his TDF victories, especially for a multiple TDF winner from whom we would expect to set a good example in a sport plagued by doping. With what he has been through and what he achieved I hope he was clean , but then again !!!!

Talking about riders who never get caught, do you know how Ricco got caught? Listen, it is quite clever. Ricco used a 3rd generation of EPO that was put on the market in Europe during 2008 and in 2007 in the US for hospital use. This mollecule needs only one take every 6 weeks rather than once a week for the previous one. Moreover it was reputed undectebable in the urine because the mollecule was too big to go through the kidney filters. Here comes the clever bit. During the Giro 2008 the italian doping control detected something suspicious in Ricco's tests. They call the French labs who called on an international brainstorming. It resulted that what was detected what a residue of this new EPO. Then they kept the discovery secret and didn't tell anyone this EPO became detectable basicaly 2 weeks before the Tour. Then the tour started and all the young and pretty riders came happy to have a clean tour while others thought their new "drink" was undetectable. Big mistake.! Now we'll have more of them as all the guilty chaps are keeping evidence of it for 6 weeks. We'll all read more newspaper then ;)

Ricco clean??...hhmmmm maybe he is innocent and someone injected him in the night, and he knew nothing about it...yeah right.

I am sick & tired of reading all the comments you lot write about Lance & doping.For god sakes this is a guy who nearly died from cancer,& suffered with chemo,there is no way he would risk dying by putting more drugs in his body.Unlike his opponents he trained for the tour by riding the mountain stages in all weathers!!!He also has kids who have his name & wouldn't want them to be ridiculed.So stop casting aspersions on his tour wins

ricco is my hero and wathever happens in is carrer i will always like him...go ricco you are clean ........ricco

Lance Armstrong won SEVEN Tours de France. Man walked on the moon. DEAL WITH IT!

Think people should really start to move on from the Lance debate. None of us will ever know if he doped or not for sure, and no amount of going over it will change that. Obviously his relentless hour upon hour of climbing the mountins prior to the tour so he had the advantage on his rivals had nothing to do with his newly aquired climbing skills, or the fact that Cancer, chemo and surgery may have had something to do with his huge weight loss, or his excellent team, or the massive amount of technology and science boffins avaliable to him all year round helping prepare for the tours...the list goes on, but people are quick to forget this as it's easier to say he cheats. Personally I like to think he was clean, he certainly had enough tests to prove it. Yes the other Postal boys tested + after leaving, possibly due to the fact they struggled after being in the Postal fold and people expected so much, no excuse as they were all stupid for doping, that goes without saying.
Everyone in cycling has links with someone that doped somewhere along the line, but I like to think that each has their own mind to choose whether to or not, you got to be bloody stupid to choose to cheat and to risk your career and credability. No one held a gun to Ricco's head and told him to dope, so I hope he gets everything he deserves along with the rest of the dirty cheaters, I just cant believe they are still prepared to risk it, just to gain a bit of glory...what happened to real training and being fit enough for the sport without drugs? Surely when they are lapping it up on the podium they must feel guilty, I don't know how they can do it...like someone else said earlier, their families must be so proud of their lying cheating offspring.

@proffitt99

get it right, Lance has failed a dope test for cortical steroids... that he got a post dated TUE for, so he got a reprieve for it... you want to know who HAS never failed a dope test? David Millar, Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani has never fail a dope test (they found a syringe with Insulin Pantani's room but he never failed a test)... so Lance is in great company... even Ricco didn't fail a test until this week... do you think he wasn't using dope in the Giro? stop being so naive! passing dope test is not a guarantee or like some badge of being clean. if the riders above that we know have doped like Millar who fully admitted he did can pass all of their test you don't think that someone with the connections and money of a Lance Armstrong can? get a clue!

Well said profitt99, as I have said before start holding the teams acountable for the actions of thier riders. I know if I trained my whole life for the chance to ride in the tour and some idiot ruined it for me by taking drugs I would probably take him out and give him a beating he would never forget.

Anyone who can comment on Lance Armstrong and drug offences is not a true cycling fan and would only use his biography to prop a door open.
Armstrong was one of the most tested riders of all time and never failed a test. People should get there facts stright before posting or just stick to current events like this years TDF.

Why is my BAN THE CHEATERS FOR LIFE post being attributed to someone else?

David Nelson

alexmn and wmbbarber are makeing clearer statements as to the issue of dopeing. There is definantly a cronological order of cheating that has been taking place for 105 years. A quick list from the past 40+ years is Anquetil, Merkx, Hinault?, Lemond?, Indurain, Ullrich, Riis, Armstrong, Landis and now Ricco. I guess the issue I have with people focusing on Armstrong is that they become blinded to the history of cheating and dopeing. Lance is not the begining of dopeing nor the end solution. Ricco is another example that history has repeated itself. In the begining, riders hitched a ride on trains and lied about it, today riders inject EPO and lie about it. There are 3 constants through all 105 years; 1.) L'Auto/L'Equipe 2.) Tour de France and 3.) Individuals wanting to win. Lets add a fourth, money. The reason I added money is because L'Auto started the Tour de France for the sole purpose of selling more newspapers. These 4 constants need to change before the cheating will change. I ask this question, what will sell more newspapers? 1) Evans and Menchov staring at each other over the Mountains or 2) Ricco putting in a steller performance and then testing positive for EPO, followed by getting removed from the Tour. Are people now buying newspapers to see who's in the lead of GC or who is the lattest to test positive? Right or wrong, there's my hypothosis.

This is all about the respect the riders have for thier jobs. Lets not forget its the hardest sport in the world and right now it's each riders cup final. Why are they risking it. In my view, each team should get all riders on employment contracts that tie them into (if found positive) repaying all the team expense outlaid during their employment, for instance, if Valverde was caught, and say he's on a 3 year deal at £1.5m ( or euros), then he should pay atleast £4.5m back to the team..then add the Bike, Kit, Endorsements, Image deals etc... Massive pressure to stay clean. Take what Chelsea have just done to Mutu, and taken him for £9m, but put that into perspective, his offence was Cocaine, recreational drugs, not the real hard cheating going on here. (Gerolsteiner should do Schumacher also). This is all about the image of cycling not the egomania of an individual. Once a real world governing body establish, or if not, maybe the IOC, there should be a disrepute charge formed also for those sort of recreational blips, similar to football.
In the real world, if we were prosecuted for a drink drive offence, or worked on machinery, high on drugs; the likelihood is we'd lose our jobs when our employers found out. Surely simple things like this is a starting point not the soft, gentlemens agreements that the UCI think will work, get the teams to start playing hardball!