Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bike racing, blood transfusion, cycling, doping, EPO, fashionable eyeglasses, Floyd Landis, Hincapie, human shields, Lance Armstrong, oxygen-carrying capacity, Tom Danielson, Tour de France, turning over a new leaf, Tyler Hamilton, USADA, vande velde, warthogs, worker bees
It really is true.
There is no denying it now. Short of throwing it all away and doing something else, riders at the top of the sport had no real choice but to use powerful drugs which boost the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood. And no real choice but to lie about it. Caught in a trap. Some were more artful than others.
The demonization of riders is just the next step in the industrialization of the sport. Sure there are some clowns among them — Tyler Hamilton swore on the soul of his dead dog that he was clean, and Floyd de-floyded his loyal fans out of a lot of cash — but the real demon-weasels are higher up. The team directors, sponsors and owners, who depend entirely on doped riders for their livelihoods, all pretend to be pure as the driven snow when the truth sputters out, unceremoniously throwing rider after rider under the team bus (which was just moments ago parked on the side of the road for a blood transfusion session).
They are all doped. So now, the only ones we have to worry about are the ones who are swearing purity, setting up teams that are sworn to be special and clean and ‘turning over a new leaf,’ and other assorted nonsense. Yeah. Jonathon Vaughters. All your riders are doped. Stop talking. Just. Stop. Talking.
I’m sick of hard-working riders being used as human shields by these silver-tongued corporate warthogs in fashionable eyeglasses. Unfortunately, recent highly publicized crackdowns still pretend that the higher-ups are innocent, so they can’t possibly clean up the sport and make it safer for kids with talent. We will just get a new crop of dopers, and a new crop of dope.
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Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 
If you are saying they are all currently doping, then I have to respectfully disagree. I’m sure some are, as evident by some of the controversies in the last couple years (Contador, Schleck). The speed of the peloton is not as fast as a few years ago, and that is a good sign. I believe Vaughters that his team is mostly clean, although there are undoubtedly some riders still looking for an edge.
The bomb that dropped a couple days ago will do more to clean up the peloton than anything ever.
Comment by aaronwest October 13, 2012 @ 02:35The bomb that dropped was that everybody doped. It’s not the first time that bomb has dropped. The bomb drops and then magically the sport stays doped. This happens because everybody pretends that the front office guys are innocent and that flim-flam artists like Vaughters are sincere. There is no cleaning up of cycling happening here, not until they go after the directors and owners whose livelihoods and professional reputations depend on doped riders and riders continuing to dope.
Comment by roberthurst October 13, 2012 @ 15:39Think of it this way.
If most of the Euro peloton is doped, then using non-doped riders (let alone racing as one) would be professional suicide.
If only some of the peloton is doped, then doped riders become even more valuable.
When sport is industrialized, the illusion of fairness becomes much more important than fairness itself. This explains much of what has happened in cycling over the past two decades.
Comment by roberthurst October 13, 2012 @ 15:45