Lance Armstrong... greatest doper there was or ever will be

lance-ar­mstrong-id-have-won-the-tour-de-france-i­f-everyone-was-clean

This sort of bullshit takes an awful lot for granted. Disregarding the question of how good an "unimproved" Armstrong might have been, it is premised on a set of assumptions for which there is no reasonable foundation:

1. Everybody alongside Armstrong on the Tour start line was doped
   
2. They were all doping as effectively as Armstrong
   
3. They were all as responsive to doping as Armstrong
   
4. Nobody was missing from the start line because they refused to dope and therefore didn't get selected to race.
   
5. Lance's team would have had the same resources as they accrued by getting away with cheating for years
   
   

The only way we would get a true idea of who would have lined up on July 3rd 1999 at Le Puy du Fou would be for cycling to have been demonstrably entirely free from doping since 1979, since the selection, and self-selection, of athletes would have been influenced by doping or the absence thereof for two decades before the flag dropped on that prologue. I'm quite certain that we would have seen different riders, in different teams, with different levels of resource. Oh, and Boardman would have won the prologue, since he ended up 16s or less behind a string of dopers 🙂