Industrialized Cyclist Notepad

Lance, instead of going all righteous scorched earth on the corrupt UCI and the peloton weasels who all claim to have magically sworn off EPO at the same time, joined his former friends in trying to convince the world that cycling suddenly flipped a 180 in 2005-2006 and entered a fresh n’ clean era of high integrity racing. Matt Beaudin at VeloNews doesn’t get it either:

Lance Armstrong this week fessed up to doping during his seven Tour de France wins, but it’s the things he didn’t say, the things he may have lied about still, that may haunt him yet…..

It was reported in the run-up to the interview that Armstrong considered outing friends and giving up the Union Cycliste Internationale. He did no such thing, and offered little meaningful assistance to a sport that’s suffering from an image problem, in large part due to the culture over which he presided, and helped further with aggressive pursuit of anyone even hinting at talking.

Over nearly three hours and two evenings, the fallen Tour de France star said more in a few words (all yeses, admitting to doping, and doping in every Tour win) than he had in a decade, but he left many scratching their heads, particularly at the notion that his comeback in 2009, during which he finished third at the Tour de France, was ridden on bread and water when blood data said otherwise.

“The last time I crossed that line was 2005,” Armstrong told Winfrey. On night two of a two-part interview, Armstrong said that in conversations with his former wife, Kristin, she made him promise not to use performance enhancing drugs if he were to return to the peloton.

“She said to me, ‘you can do it, under one condition: That you never cross that line again.’ And I said, ‘you got a deal.’ And I never would have betrayed that with her,” he said. “It’s a serious — it was a serious ask, it was a serious commitment.”

That commitment, however, has been refuted by math. In the 2009 Tour, Armstrong’s samples showed fewer red blood cells over a three-week stage race than would normally occur, indicating he was injecting supplemental blood.

Scientists noted that Armstrong’s blood has a less than one a million chance of naturally appearing in such a fashion. Nearly 40 samples were taken over the course of Armstrong’s comeback, providing a baseline for a biological passport.

“The sport was very clean,” Armstrong told Winfrey, citing the very biological passport that ensnared him. “I didn’t expect to get third. I expected to win, like I always expected. And at the end, I said to myself, ‘I just got beat by two guys who were better.’”

If he’s lying, the question is why. …

via Velonews.com: Zip the lips: After hours of TV, too many Armstrong questions remain.