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

Tim, I find the undercurrent of blaming LeMond for his own abuse fairly troubling here. In terms of his competitive history, LeMond of course is anything but a 'loser'. What has come out, of course, is that he was sexually abused when he was a child, which is one of the worst things that can happen to anyone. This does not have any bearing on his criticism of the kind of doping, in particular, that started in the early Nineties.

It must have been said already in this thread but I couldn't find it--because those were different times, and because with EPO doping leapt to a new plane. The methods that people used earlier were effective but not anywhere near as effective as EPO doping or other blood doping methods. (And Andy will be able to put that much better, as he knows much more about it.)

Not all of them, of course--what happens to you as a child is largely before the 'age of responsibility'. However, I think he has accepted responsibility for the troubles in his own nuclear family, which were caused by his past history, and has worked hard on repairing the damage.

Be careful trying to reduce these cases, as Armstrong habitually does, to personal and procedural issues--e.g., attacking people and insisting that the only thing that could possibly be of any relevance are legal processes, not the 'meat' of what is being said, from which he tries to distract. I accept, of course, that things need to be proven, and I can't work out what and how much has been proven as I don't know what to trust, but the allegations seem to me to be pretty consistent and getting added to over time.

(For the record, as I've said before, in the context of elite sport, which I don't rate very highly, I think doping isn't particularly shameful as such, but a fairly logical consequence of the extremes of elite sport--the secrecy and lack of truthfulness is of course a different matter.)

re my post about moral high horses :p