Lance Armstrong. The Cheat.
- Thread starter therealUT
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The riders I listed have never been linked or even accused of cheating. There are many more at the ProTour and Continental stages that don't cheat. Cyclists through all disciplines.
There were undoubtedly a lot of cheaters, but in no way was it a level playing field. He could have exposed the corruption and cheating, but instead he cheated himself and once outed he left a trail of destruction.
There were undoubtedly a lot of cheaters, but in no way was it a level playing field. He could have exposed the corruption and cheating, but instead he cheated himself and once outed he left a trail of destruction.
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If you're the sort of person who cares about sports at all -- not just rooting for your teams but the actual theater of sports -- you owe it to yourself to give the Tour a shot once. You can skip most of it, because most days are flat stages and irrelevant to the guys gunning for the yellow jersey. Out of three weeks, you can watch five days and read the ESPN summary the rest. But two or three times per Tour, the teammates and the extraneous stuff all falls away and the human drama of man against man in the most extreme physical conditions imaginable on the side of mountain is unbelievably compelling stuff. If you care about sports, you're missing out.
Not to mention the final few kms of a sprint stage are almost always spectacular. Mountain top finishes and attacks. The only boring stages are ITTs. Even TTTs are fun to watch. So much teamwork goes into winning a yellow jersey. The Spring Classics and cyclocross racing are also fun to watch. My favorite race to watch is Paris-Roubaix. It's insane.
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The sprints are interesting once you've seen enough to know who the guys are and the team dynamics and so on. The stuff in the mountains is what gets you hooked to begin with, when you don't know a damn thing about any of it. Here are three or four or five guys pedaling their asses off up an incredibly steep mountain, all in agony, and there goes one guy, and can the other guy respond? And eventually somebody can't. You don't have to know anything much about it to look at their faces and understand the drama.
The rest of (watching) pro cycling is fun and interesting, but it's not exactly stuff I would say that people are missing out on. Attacks on the Alpe d'Huez are something they're missing out on.
The rest of (watching) pro cycling is fun and interesting, but it's not exactly stuff I would say that people are missing out on. Attacks on the Alpe d'Huez are something they're missing out on.
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In a sport where you dope and win or don't dope and lose, what would you do. If you choose the later you better be independently wealthy because you won't have the first sponsor if you don't win and win consistently. The US Government should back off. It pisses me off that the "Postal Service" was actually sponsoring that team and then want's to piss and moan about being broke. I would put forth that over 90% of that sport is doping on the pro level and I really could care less. He was the best of the supermen and I still think he was awesome when he raced. Now, the thing that bothers me is that there is conjecture that his cancer was caused by his doping. To me that is the biggest issue.
Pacing, drafting, marking on climbs, going back to team car to get water and bringing it back to GC contenders, leading out sprints, attacking on climbs, getting into and controlling breakaways, or controlling the peloton when a break with another teammate is away and the rest want to catch, and generally just keeping the GC contender safe from crashing.
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More. They're there to win, too. If their team wins, they get a portion of the prize money. They get chances to win stages or to be designated as contenders for other races.
Domestiques are aides. They get the water or help pace a rider back to the peloton after a flat. Climbers pace the GC contender up mountains and do the dirty work of marking other GC contenders on the mountains. They also compete for the mountain classification points jersey. Sprinters get the flat stages. Everyone else, including the GC contenders, form a lead out train which sets up the sprint. Watching the lead outs form near the end of a stage is magnificent.
Then there's Thor Hushovd, who is one of the best sprinters. Sprinters generally finish last on mountain stages because they're not climbers and want to save their legs for sprints. However, Thor has solo'd to win multiple mountain stages of the TdF while also winning sprint stages and the green, sprinter's classification jersey.
Domestiques are aides. They get the water or help pace a rider back to the peloton after a flat. Climbers pace the GC contender up mountains and do the dirty work of marking other GC contenders on the mountains. They also compete for the mountain classification points jersey. Sprinters get the flat stages. Everyone else, including the GC contenders, form a lead out train which sets up the sprint. Watching the lead outs form near the end of a stage is magnificent.
Then there's Thor Hushovd, who is one of the best sprinters. Sprinters generally finish last on mountain stages because they're not climbers and want to save their legs for sprints. However, Thor has solo'd to win multiple mountain stages of the TdF while also winning sprint stages and the green, sprinter's classification jersey.
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