German cyclists had a "quad off" in their rooms in the Olympic Village this weekend and wow, we've never seen thighs so big.
On the left is Andre Greipel, and on the right, the winner of the "quad off" is Robert Forstermann.
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Kristin Armstrong just won gold for USA in the women's cycling time trial.
Congrats to her, but what the heck are these thrones the medaling cyclists get to sit on while they wait for the rest of the pack to finish (via Paul Pabst)?
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Cyclist Bradley Wiggins hit the town last night after becoming the most successful British athlete in the history of the Olympics by winning his seventh medal.
Wiggins, who won medals in track cycling in Athens and Beijing, won the men's road time trial just a few weeks after winning the 2012 Tour de France. After all that hard work, Wiggins finally relaxed a bit
Well what a day, blind drunk at the minute and overwhelmed with all the messages, Thank You everyone it's been emotional X
— Bradley Wiggins (@bradwiggins) August 2, 2012
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Australia's Anna Meares won the gold medal in women's sprint cycling at the Velodrome today.
Sprint cycling consists of a best-of-three series of one-on-one races between two riders. Meares beat the UK's Victoria Pendleton 2-0 in the gold medal series. But in the first race, Pendleton actually won by just 0.001 seconds — the smallest possible margin that the sport allows, according to the AP. However, she was later disqualified for coming out of her sprint lane and the race was awarded to Meares. The Aussie won the next race easily to take gold.
This is the photo finish of that race (via Reddit). We can't tell at all who the winner is from this view (Meares is on the top):
But when we zoom it in, you can see Pendleton's wheel is more in the red than Meares':
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Track cycling at the Olympics has been surprisingly fun to watch.
But everyone in our office is wondering why the cyclists ride so painfully slow on their first laps.
The answer is simple. From Cyclingtips.com:
"Tactics are the key to this race, and many people wonder why it is so slow for the first two laps. The main reason is that unless you can surprise your opponent early, you will waste too much precious energy in starting your sprint from lap one. If the other guy is on your wheel, it’s all over."
So that's it. Cyclists just want to save their energy to sprint their last lap.
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Every four years we gather around our televisions to watch the awesome spectacle of the Olympic games.
We cheer for medal-winning stars as well as the athletes who barely made it and are there for the simple love of their sport and overall competition.
Unfortunately, things don't always go as planned for Olympic athletes, stars or otherwise.
The dream they've been working toward for so long can all come crashing down, literally, in one brief moment.
Then there are the weird collisions and falls that leave athletes and lookers-on alike gasping for air.
With the games winding down this weekend we've put together some of the more memorable and/or jaw dropping falls, crashes and collisions from London 2012.
Click here for the full effect→
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The Olympics are held up as this great event where everyone from all over the globe comes together to revel in the joys of sportsmanship and camaraderie.
The last two weeks certainly proved this to be true, but as the saying goes, "to the victor go the spoils."
And by "spoils" we mean getting to celebrate a win whichever way you please.
We've put together some of the greatest celebratory images from the summer games so you can relive what it was like for these athletes to win on the world's greatest stage.
Enjoy.
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If the USADA gets its way, Lance Armstrong will eventually be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005.
His titles officially go to the riders who finished second in those races.
But the problem is many of the cyclists who runner-up to Armstrong have been convicted or accused of doping over the last decade.
In his seven titles, five different riders finished second to Lance — Alex Zulle, Jan Ullrich (3x), Joseba Beloki, Andreas Kloden, and Ivan Basso.
Zulle admitted to doping as part of the 1998 Festina Affair — the first big cycling doping scandal. But when he finished second to Armstrong in 1999, he had already confessed to doping and Armstrong called him a "clean rider."
Ullrich was given a two-year ban by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in February of 2012 in connection with a doping scandal called Operation Puerto. His races from 2005 to his retirement in 2007 were also vacated.
Kloden was connected with a 2006 doping program in Freiburg, Germany. He eventually paid a €25,000 fine — which technically isn't an admission of guilt in German court. Yesterday, fittingly enough, the German National Anti-Doping Agency announced a preliminary investigation into Kloden and a few other riders on new doping suspicions.
Basso was also banned for two years in 2007 and 2008. According to the New York Times, he admitted that he “attempted doping,” but denied he ever actually succeeded.
Beloki has not been connected to any doping scandal.
This isn't to say that what Armstrong allegedly did is okay. But the idea that stripping him of his titles will instantly reflect the "fair" result of those races isn't quite that simple.
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Last night, Lance Armstrong announced that he will not fight the doping charges brought against him by the US Anti-Doping Agency.
This will likely lead to Armstrong being banned for life from competitive sports and stripped of all his Tour de France titles.
(As Tony Manfred observes, the great irony is that those titles will now likely be given to cyclists who doped but who didn't get as aggressively investigated as Armstrong. So it is not as though all justice is being served).
Unfortunately for those who were hoping to finally hear the full story from Lance Armstrong about what did and didn't happen in the years in which he dominated cycling—including why, if he is telling the truth, he didn't dope when pretty much everyone he rode with did—the decision also made it less likely that we will ever hear that story.
But the head of the USADA, Travis Tygart, has some encouraging news on that front.
In an interview with Velonation, Tygart says that the evidence the agency has collected against Armstrong will eventually be released.
This will allow everyone who just wants to figure out what happened to examine the evidence themselves.
Although Armstrong's statement yesterday said that he will never address this issue publicly again, the release of the evidence might also give Armstrong an opportunity and incentive to tell his full story outside of a legal context—in an arena in which he does not face the risk of losing both his Tour De France titles and, perhaps, much of the money he earned from cycling if the arbitration ruling goes against him.
(Some of Armstrong's earnings were predicated on his racing clean. If he were to fight the doping charges and lose, he might be more exposed to future clawback lawsuits than if he merely declared the charges ridiculous and elected not to fight them, which is what he has done.)
I, personally, would like to review all the evidence the USADA has collected against Armstrong.
I would also like to hear his full story on what happened.
I want to do this not because I want to "tear down" a hero—Armstrong has been hugely inspiring to me—but because I just want to understand what happened.
Doping rules may not have been enforced in the years in which Armstrong raced, but I have to believe that many aspiring cyclists in that era chose not to dope and that this decision cost them their careers. Many of those who raced around Armstrong, meanwhile, have taken the brave and difficult step of admitting that they broke the rules. It would be unfair to both of these groups, as well as to competitive athletes everywhere, to suggest that it simply doesn't matter whether or not Armstrong doped. It does matter. And it's time the world got what appears to be the best answer to this question it is ever going to get.
SEE ALSO: LANCE ARMSTRONG QUITS: 7-Time Tour de France Winner Won't Fight Doping Allegations
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Visitors to the Republic and Democratic conventions may not agree on much, but they have one thing in common: access to these eye-opening "bus-cycles."
Provided by Freewheelin, a cycling initiative by health care company Humana, 20 of the "people-powered buses" will let convention-goers in Tampa and Charlotte pedal themselves from A to B.
The four-wheeled vehicles seat eight passengers, plus a driver. According to Freewheelin, going into the last day of the RNC, convention visitors have taken 725 rides, pedaled 308.4 miles, and burned 10,342.5 calories.
Freewheelin began as a bike-share program for Humana employees in Louisville, Kentucky. The program brought 1,000 bikes to the Republican and Democratic conventions in 2008.
[Via the Wall Street Journal]
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A new book by Lance Armstrong's former cycling teammate Tyler Hamilton has made its way into the hands of the press.
The book is called THE SECRET RACE: Inside The Hidden World Of The Tour De France. Doping, Cover-Ups, And Winning At All Costs.
David Walsh, a journalist at London's Sunday Times who wrote an early article about Armstrong's suspected doping, described the book this weekend.
Hamilton's book describes in vivid detail the sophisticated system that Hamilton says that Armstrong's U.S. Postal team used to stay ahead of the anti-doping authorities, a challenge that Hamilton says was easy, at least in the early years.
Hamilton's book says that Lance Armstrong not only took part in this cheating system, he ran the system.
In the 1998 Tour de France, for example, Hamilton says, the top riders on the team were supplied with blood-doping drug EPO throughout the race by a motorcycle courier who delivered it to the riders in white lunch bags. The courier also worked as a gardener for Armstrong at his house in Nice. Hamilton wasn't considered good enough to get hand-delivered EPO that year, but he wanted it.
The following year, before the 1999 race, Hamilton says he was hanging out with Armstrong in Armstrong's villa in Nice and asked Armstrong whether he had any EPO. Armstrong pointed to the refrigerator. Hamilton checked the refrigerator and found the EPO.
In 2000, Hamilton says, he and Armstrong and a third U.S. Postal rider named Kevin Livingston flew to Spain to have blood drawn before the race. This blood was later delivered to the riders' hotel rooms during the Tour and infused back into them before the crucial (and grueling) 11th Stage. In this case, Hamilton says, Armstrong was next to him when he got the transfusion.
As to the risk of getting caught--and all those drug tests that Armstrong cites to prove his innocence--Hamilton has this to say:
The tests are easy to beat. We’re way, way ahead of the tests. They’ve got their doctors and we’ve got ours, and ours are better. Better paid, for sure.”
Along with Floyd Landis, another former Armstrong teammate, Hamilton was later busted for doping, stripped of victories, and given a suspension. So the dwindling number of people who still believe that Armstrong raced cleaned will likely dismiss Hamilton's book with the same obstinate explanation with which all evidence against Armstrong has been dismissed--as a vendetta launched by a proven liar.
But given the amount of evidence that has been produced against Armstrong in recent years, it's no surprise that the US Anti-Doping Agency decided to go after him aggressively. And they were right to do so. Not because tearing down inspiring heroes is good for anyone (least of all the heroes). But because the world deserves to know and understand the truth. And because it's only fair, now that so many other riders in the era have finally come clean. And because many other promising cyclists likely made decisions not to cheat, and, in so doing, threw away their dreams.
A few weeks ago, before Lance Armstrong announced that he was not going to fight the USADA's charges, another former teammate of Armstrong's, Jonathan Vaughters, came clean in the New York Times. No one paid much attention to Vaughters' article--by then, most people had likely concluded that doping was just a fact of life in cycling in Armstrong's era. But Vaughters' explanation of why the riders cheated, and why so many riders vehemently stood behind the lie that went along with it, is one of the most compelling explanations I've ever read.
Doping, Vaughters explained, provided only a small performance advantage--a 2% improvement. But in the world of professional sports, a 2% advantage is huge:
In elite athletics, 2 percent of time or power or strength is an eternity. It is the difference in time between running 100 meters in 9.8 seconds and 10 seconds. In swimming it’s between first and ninth place in the 100-meter breaststroke. And in the Tour de France, 2 percent is the difference between first and 100th place in overall time.
Vaughters, like Armstrong, Hamilton, and other professional cyclists, had spent years getting to the top. Everyone almost at the top knew that everyone at the top was doping. So not taking advantage of that extra 2% to be competitive meant throwing away your dreams:
I wasn’t hellbent on cheating; I hated it, but I was ambitious, a trait we, as a society, generally admire. I had worked for more than half my life for one thing. But when you’re ambitious in a world where rules aren’t enforced, it’s like fudging your income taxes in a world where the government doesn’t audit. Think of what you would do if there were no Internal Revenue Service.
So, inevitably, Vaughters came to the choice that all the top riders in that era appear to have come to: Give up without ever quite achieving your dream because everyone you're trying to beat is cheating--or decide to cheat, too. And lie.
People who end up living their dreams are not those who are lucky and gifted, but those who are stubborn, resolute and willing to sacrifice. Now, imagine you’ve paid the dues, you’ve done the work, you’ve got the talent, and your resolve is solid as concrete. At that point, the dream is 98 percent complete but there is that last little bit you need to become great.
THEN, just short of finally living your childhood dream, you are told, either straight out or implicitly, by some coaches, mentors, even the boss, that you aren’t going to make it, unless you cheat. Unless you choose to dope. Doping can be that last 2 percent. It would keep your dream alive, at least in the eyes of those who couldn’t see your heart. However, you’d have to lie. Lie to your mother, your friends, your fans. Lie to the world. This has been the harsh reality laid out before many of the most talented, hardest working and biggest dreaming athletes.
If all of the riders in the Armstrong era had cheated--not just the top riders, but all the riders who almost made it to the top but walked away without cheating--then those who say Armstrong never should have been investigated would have more of a leg to stand on. But as Vaughters observes, some of the riders in that era did not cheat. Faced with the choice above, some of them chose instead to walk away. And however unfair the Armstrong investigation appears to some, this unfairness pales before the unfairness that ended the careers of many upcoming cyclists who chose to keep playing by the rules.
This is why the Armstrong investigation matters. And it's why it was the right thing to do, despite what Armstrong and his defenders say about it.
If, by some chance, Armstrong didn't do what the evidence now strongly suggests he did, he should write his own book. Based on everything else that has been said so far, this book would need to describe and explain a world in which almost all of the world's top cyclists were cheating--and all of Armstrong's teammates were cheating, with his full knowledge of their cheating--and in which he himself did not cheat.
That would be quite a story. And it would be a story that this Lance Armstrong fan, for one, would be very eager to read
But the story would have to ring true. And making it ring true, in the face of all the evidence that has already been released--not to mention the full USADA evidence, which will soon be released--will probably be a tougher challenge than any that Armstrong has faced to date.
If Armstrong has been telling the truth all this time, there would be no downside to his writing a book like that. And there might be a lot of upside (lots of people might believe him).
In the absence of a story like that, however, it's probably time for even Armstrong's most vocal defenders to acknowledge that the USADA did the right thing.
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London could be home to an aerial network of bike highways by 2015.
Architect Sam Martin calls his idea to build elevated tracks around the city as corridors for pedal powered transportation "SkyCycle." And London Mayor Boris Johnson likes the idea.
The network, still early in the conceptual phase, would be made of steel and glass. It would not be enclosed, despite the renderings.
Like a conventional highway, it would have entrances and exits at regular intervals, and riders would pay a toll of around £1 to enter.
Martin, the director of Exterior Architecture, says building SkyCycle would cost "tens of millions of pounds," the Daily Mail reported, and would take about two years. But he argues that with corporate sponsorship, construction would be feasible.
Martin's argument that "you can't realistically build more cycle lanes on ground level" is dubious, but the idea of opting for dedicated cycling roads over separated lanes has worked in other cities.
Minneapolis is home to the popular Midtown Greenway, an old depressed railroad corridor converted into a road for cyclists and pedestrians that crosses the city.
SkyCycle, however, would require new infrastructure: "It is much more expensive and ambitious," Martin told the Daily Mail.
A spokesperson from Johnson's office called SkyCycle "an exciting idea that his team are looking into."
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An incredible car accident ended with a crashed SUV at the bottom of a 50-foot pit in Brooklyn yesterday morning.
A woman driving a blue Toyota Highlander allegedly hit a cyclist while making a U-turn, NBC New York reported. Apparently, she then drove onto the sidewalk, through a wooden fence, and into the inactive construction pit.
The SUV flipped and landed on its roof. The woman walked away from the crash and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, as was the cyclist, according to NBC New York. Amazingly, neither suffered life-threatening injuries.
No charges were filed, according to the AP.
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The USADA will release its doping evidence against Lance Armstrong later today, and we will finally learn the specifics of what the Tour de France winner is alleged to have done.
But not everyone is as gung-ho to prosecute Lance as the USADA is.
Malcolm Gladwell was on the BS Report podcast with Bill Simmons last week, and he took the stance that Armstrong was simply better at doing what everyone else in cycling was doing at the time.
Gladwell argued that we should think about cycling the same way we think about auto racing — where teams should be rewarded for using science and bending the rules to their breaking point to succeed.
"When you look at what Lance is alleged to have done. Basically he was better than everyone else at using PEDs," Gladwell said. "He was the guy who sat down and was rigorous and focused and thoughtful and intelligent and cutting edge in how to use them, and apply them and make himself better. Like, I don't know, so is that a bad thing?"
Many people have pointed out that most the guys who will inherit Armstrong's vacated Tour de France titles have also been a part of doping scandals in recent years. But hearing it in the signature Gladwell-ian style is still pretty great.
Here's the full transcript of what he said:
"Here's my thing about Lance, and that is, our paradigm is wrong for biking. What if we thought about bicycling as just the equivalent of auto racing. It's Formula 1.
"What is Formula 1? It's the combination of a car, so an instrument. A driver, and the driver's skill. And science. So Formula 1 teams compete on these three levels simultaneously. We compete to see who has the fastest driver, we compete to see who has the best car, and we also compete in our ability to innovate within the rules, to use science to further the performance of our driver within those constraints.
"So, what if we thought about Lance and competitive cycling as auto racing. It's on three levels: you got a bike, you got a driver, and you got science. When you look at what Lance is alleged to have done, basically he was better than everyone else at using PEDs. He was the guy who sat down and was rigorous and focused and thoughtful and intelligent and cutting edge in how to use them, and apply them and make himself better. Like, I don't know, so is that a bad thing? He's being rewarded for being the best at his game. It was an element in the competition, and he used that element better than anyone else.
"Why don't we just make that a part of the definition of what it means to be a great bicyclist?"
Listen to the entire podcast here >
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The USADA's evidence against Lance Armstrong is out.
The report is a 202-page edited version of the USADA's "Reasoned Decision" which includes the evidence against Armstrong, and we've embedded it below.
In the report, the USADA calls its evidence against Armstrong "beyond strong; it is as strong as, or stronger than, that presented in any case brought by USADA over the initial twelve years of USADA’s existence."
It alleges that he was a key part of a sophisticated doping conspiracy "designed in large part to benefit Armstrong," and that he took various performance-enhancing drugs during all of his Tour de France victories.
We'll break down the specifics by year.
1998
The report starts with a 1998 race in Spain where Armstrong's teammate Jonathan Vaughters alleges that Armstrong injected himself with EPO in front of him and was open about his performance enhancing drug use.
In all, seven witnesses testified about performance-enhancing drug use on Armstrong's US Postal Service team, including four riders and a team employee admitting to using EPO, testosterone, human growth hormone and cortisone.
1999
In 1999, the report alleges that Armstrong's US Postal Service team ousted the team doctor Pedro Celaya because he "had not been aggressive enough for Armstrong in providing banned products." That year, Armstrong allegedly "got serious" with Italian doping doctor Michele Ferrari.
In one instance, the wife of USPS rider Frankie Andreau says she, Armstrong, and Armstrong's wife met Ferrari on the side of the road outside Milan, and Armstrong met with Ferrari alone for an hour.
Tyler Hamilton, Armstrong's training partner in 1999, told the USADA that Ferrari injected him with EPO that year.
During the 1999 Tour de France, Armstrong tested positive for a cortisone that he didn't have medical authorization to use. A cover-up allegedly ensued:
"Emma O’Reilly was in the room giving Armstrong a massage when Armstrong and team officials fabricated a story to cover the positive test. Armstrong and the team officials agreed to have Dr. del Moral backdate a prescription for cortisone cream for Armstrong which they would claim had been prescribed in advance of the Tour to treat a saddle sore. O’Reilly understood from Armstrong, however, that the positive had not come from a topical cream but had really come about from a cortisone injection Armstrong received around the time of the Route du Sud a few weeks earlier. After the meeting between Armstrong and the team officials concluded, Armstrong told O’Reilly, 'Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down.'"
The report alleges that the team was delivered EPO during the 1999 Tour by a skilled, drug-smuggling motorcyclist that they called "Motoman." Tyler Hamilton says riders took testosterone via a olive-oil based solution that was sprayed in their mouths in 1999 as well.
2000
When they started testing for EPO in 2000, the team moved on to blood doping, Hamilton alleges. He says he, Armstrong, and Livingston went to Valencia, Spain and had blood extracted and later re-infused to boost their performance.
Armstrong's teammate George Hincapie alleges that Armstrong also used testosterone in 2000, and dropped out of an unnamed race in Spain after Hincapie warned him that there would be drug testing.
Hamilton says the riders were re-infused with blood during the 2000 Tour at a hotel room, and they joked about whose body was absorbing the blood the fastest.
2001
Michele Ferrari visited the USPS camp at the beginning of 2001, and his services were offered to any rider who wanted them for $15,000, says rider George Hincapie.
Also in 2001, Vaughters went out on a bike ride with Armstrong where Lance "demonstrated a detailed knowledge of the EPO test" and told him how to skirt a positive test. He added that he had sources in the testing world who told him how it works.
At the 2001 Tour du Suisse, Armstrong allegedly told his teammates that he had tested positive for EPO, but Armstrong had a conversation with UCI and told his teammates "everything was going to be okay."
Floyd Landis alleges that Armstrong told him he made a "financial agreement" with UCI to keep the test hidden.
2002
In 2002, the report says Armstrong become good friends and training partners with Floyd Landis. Landis alleges that they both shared doping advice and drugs.
"Armstrong also describes how much he enjoyed Landis’ boyish antics, gregarious personality and love for the American rock band ZZ Top."
Landis had keys to his apartment.
The USADA says it has evidence that $150,000 went from Armstrong to Ferrari during 2002, even though Ferrari was under investigation for doping.
After the 2002 Tour de France, Christan Vande Velde alleges that Armstrong threatened to kick him off the team if he didn't step up his doping program:
"Armstrong told Vande Velde that if he wanted to continue to ride for the Postal Service team he 'would have to use what Dr. Ferrari had been telling [Vande Velde] to use and would have to follow Dr. Ferrari’s program to the letter.'
"Vande Velde said, '[T]he conversation left me with no question that I was in the doghouse and that the only way forward with Armstrong’s team was to get fully on Dr. Ferrari’s doping program.'"
Vande Velde obliged.
2003
Armstrong paid Ferrari $475,000 in 2003, according to records.
Landis was hurt during 2003, but when Armstrong went out of town he asked him to stay at his apartment and keep an eye on his blood-doping equipment. "Landis agreed to babysit the blood," the report says.
Both Landis and Hincapie say Armstrong blood-doped in 2003, and every other Tour de France from 2001 to 2005.
Landis says Armstrong gave him a box of six pre-measured syringes of EPO after he got two liters of blood taken out in 2003.
2004
Armstrong allegedly continued to work with Ferrari, and on the day before the 2004 Tour de France he wired him $100,000, according to records.
Landis alleges that he saw Armstrong on a massage table with a testosterone patch on his shoulder.
During the 2004 Tour, both Landis and Hincapie allege that the entire team got blood transfusions after a stage of the race on the team bus.
In late 2004, Dr. Ferrari was convicted of sporting fraud for advising a group of Italian riders about EPO and other drugs. Armstrong publicly broke off his relationship with him.
2005
More of the same. Hincapie alleges that Armstrong gave him EPO following his seventh-straight Tour de France win.
Also in 2005, the USADA says Armstrong's supposedly-finished relationship with Dr. Ferrari was "business as usual." The two met in Italy, and Armstrong wired him $100,000 according to records.
2009
The USADA says Armstrong retained a professional relationship with Ferrari by soliciting advise from him through his son Stefano. Here's an example of an e-mail exchange ("Schumi" is Ferrari):
On November 4, 2009, Stefano inquires, “Schumi asks if you’d like [t]o continue the cooperation for next year too – if so, then it [w]ould be good to start thinking about some specifics already (gym + [s]ome bike).”
On November 15, 2009, Armstrong is looking ahead to the next year’s Tour, and he writes: “Yes, let’s continue . . . what we have started. I’m curious to know what Schumi [t]hinks for 2010 and what we need to do differently in terms of training. . .”
Stefano responds, “Great! Schumi says it’s obviously a [T]our for light climbers.. . .”
The USADA says the chances that Armstrong's blood levels during the 2009 Tour occurred naturally were "less than one in a million."
Here's how he avoided positive tests, according to the USADA:
1. Avoid the testers
Tyler Hamilton says they would take the EPO injects at night and never answer the door when the testers came by. Teams commonly have lookouts to inform a rider when a tester was approaching, according to an independent review of the 2010 Tour.
The report says the USPS team also seemed to have inside info on when the tests would come.
2. Using undetectable drugs
From 1998-2005, they couldn't test for blood doping or HGH. In addition, EPO is hard to test for and wasn't even testable until 2000. Testosterone is notoriously hard to detect as well.
3. Next-level methods
The USADA says the team had an understanding of how testing worked, and used methods that would result in negative tests. These included things like testosterone patches and injecting EPO directly into the vein.
The report says the team "literally smuggled" saline solution into camp in 1998 to water-down test results.
Here's the money paragraph from the intro:
The evidence is overwhelming that Lance Armstrong did not just use performance enhancing drugs, he supplied them to his teammates. He did not merely go alone to Dr. Michele Ferrari for doping advice, he expected that others would follow. It was not enough that his teammates give maximum effort on the bike, he also required that they adhere to the doping program outlined for them or be replaced. He was not just a part of the doping culture on his team, he enforced and re-enforced it. Armstrong’s use of drugs was extensive, and the doping program on his team, designed in large part to benefit Armstrong, was massive and pervasive.
Read it yourself right here:
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You'd be hard-pressed to find an urban cyclist who hasn't run a red light on a deserted street, pedaled the wrong way down a one-way street, or sailed past stop signs once in a while.
These are, of course, ticket-worthy offenses, but is it possible for police to take them too far?
One Brooklyn cyclist says he was hit with a $1,555 ticket for running three red lights in a row. It's not why he was ticketed that has us stumped, but how.
The cyclist, who asked the Gothamist to keep his name anonymous, says the officer admitted to following him the entire time before deciding to pull him over after the third light.
In total, he was charged $190 for the first light, $375 for the second, and $940 for the third. The headphones cost him another $50.
Sure, he was guilty, but we can't imagine a driver being followed for that long while a cop tallied up his traffic violations.
"This kind of following almost never happens with motorists," attorney Steve Vaccaro told the Gothamist. "But happens surprisingly often with cyclists."
The Grist's Sarah Laskow was even surprised.
"The enmity between cyclists and cops in New York has been well documented, but this encounter doesn’t sound as contentious as it could have been," she writes. "Still, $1,555 is way, way more than drivers end up paying for, say, driving really, really fast on streets where children live."
The takeaway? Think twice before pleading guilty to duplicative traffic violations, like this cyclist did. Chances are you can convince a judge to drop the dupes if you protest the ticket face-to-face.
See Also: 18 reasons you should bike to work >
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The USADA released a mountain of evidence against Lance Armstrong today, and the allegations look pretty ugly.
But one question remains: If he was doping for the better part of a decade, how did he manage to never test positive?
This has been Lance's go-to defense since allegations against him began to surface in the mid-00s, and it's pretty convincing.
Today, the USADA explained exactly how Lance managed to avoid a positive test for all those years.
First of all, the USADA challenges the assumption that Lance never tested positive. In 1999, he allegedly tested positive for cortisone on the first day of the Tour de France. But the report says he got out of it:
"Emma O’Reilly was in the room giving Armstrong a massage when Armstrong and team officials fabricated a story to cover the positive test. Armstrong and the team officials agreed to have Dr. del Moral backdate a prescription for cortisone cream for Armstrong which they would claim had been prescribed in advance of the Tour to treat a saddle sore."
Then in 2001, fellow riders Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis say Armstrong told them he tested positive for EPO (a performance-enhancing drug) at a race in Switzerland. But Landis alleges that Armstrong told him he later "made a financial agreement to keep the test hidden."
It sounds dubious and conspiratorial, but it's in there.
So the notion that Armstrong never tested positive for anything is wrong, at least according to the USADA.
But still, how did he never have an unquestionably positive test?
The USADA breaks it down into four parts, but in short: He was smart. He took drugs they couldn't test for. And when things got hairy, he dodged the testers.
Here's a full explanation of those parts:
1. Avoiding the testers
It sounds absurd, but the USADA says it happened.
"The riders were advised to not answer the door if a tester came after they had used EPO," the report says.
In addition, in 2000 fellow rider George Hincapie testified that Armstrong dropped out of a race in Spain because there would be drug testing.
Other avoidance measures included having a look-out team to spot approaching testers, and retiring to remote locations like Puigcerdà, Spain to make it almost impossible for testers to come out and test you.
Lastly, according to the report, "the team staff was good at being able to predict when riders would be tested and seemed to have inside information about the testing."
2. Using undetectable drugs
This gets at a larger issue: it's simply hard to test people for performance-enhancing drugs.
From 1998-2005, they couldn't test for blood doping or HGH. In addition, EPO "has a very narrow testing window" and wasn't even testable until 2000. Testosterone is notoriously hard to detect as well.
These are all drugs Armstrong allegedly used.
Most of the cyclists who have been taken down by doping scandals haven't had glaring positive tests, they've been hunted down in meticulous investigations like this.
3. Having a really good doctor who knew how to beat the tests
Armstrong had a long relationship with Dr. Michele Ferrari, who allegedly knew what he was doing when it came to doping. Here's an example of how complicated things got in the USADA report:
"Dr. Ferrari recognized that the EPO testing method works through separating and measuring the quantity (known as “intensity”) of various types of EPO and comparing the ratio of EPO bands in what is known as the “basic” region (where the bands tend to be caused by the administration of synthetic EPO) to bands in the acidic region (where the bands are naturally produced). However, because the test operates by measuring a ratio, the test can be fooled to a degree by increasing the amount of EPO in the acidic region (i.e., those produced naturally),which can be accomplished by stimulating natural production of EPO either through going to altitude or by sleeping in an altitude tent (also known as a “hypoxic chamber”). Dr. Ferrari advised the use of hypoxic chambers to reduce the effectiveness of the EPO test in detecting the use of synthetic EPO. Regular training at altitude (such as at St. Moritz, Tenerife or Aspen) would achieve a similar result."
4. Saline
The report says the team injected its riders with saline in order to trick the test. An example:
One of the bolder examples of the use of saline to fool the testers was at the 1998 World Championships when Armstrong’s doctor literally smuggled past a UCI official a liter of saline concealed under his rain coat and administered it to Armstrong to lower his hematocrit right before a blood check.
So even though the "he never tested positive" excuse looks good on paper, the USADA has a pretty convincing answer for why that doesn't matter.
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Many of those who have followed the pro-cycling doping saga over the past few years have concluded that the reason most of the world's top cyclists doped is because most of the other top cyclists were doping, so if you weren't doping, you wouldn't be able to compete.
This didn't mean that doping was okay. It wasn't. And everyone who did it knew it wasn't, or they wouldn't have gone to such extreme lengths to hide it.
But when everyone's cheating, and everyone knows everyone's cheating, the act of cheating takes on a different meaning among the group than it does when only a handful of people are cheating.
And, based on some of the testimony that was released in the evidence against Lance Armstrong, it appears that this "everyone was cheating" view of pro cycling is accurate.
The testimony of George Hincapie, one of Lance Armstrong's closest teammates, spells this out in detail. It also reveals the moment in which Hincapie and Armstrong decided to dope.
Hincapie came clean publicly today. Below are two excerpts from the affidavit that Hincapie provided during the USADA's investigation of Lance Armstrong.
Then there came the decision to do it:
The testimony of Stephen Swart, the third teammate referenced above, corroborates Hincapie's recollection:
SEE ALSO: Here's How Lance Armstrong Never Tested Positive
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Following today's release of the bombshell USADA report on Lance Armstrong's alleged history of doping, many are taking a second look at Armstrong's past.
One of the most shocking moments of that past, first found by journalist Bill Gifford and posted by Robert Mackey to the New York Times' Lede Blog, comes from this sworn deposition from 2005.
At the time Armstrong's company was suing SCA Promotions after they refused to honor an agreement to pay him for winning 5 consecutive Tours de Frances. The group argued he must been using performance enhancing drugs, but Armstrong — under oath — said he did not. He went on to add that he didn't use these drugs, not just for professional reasons, but also he would lose “the faith of all of the cancer survivors around the world.”
The section begins around 2.50.
WATCH:
This of course raises uncomfortable questions. Armstrong is perhaps one of the most well-known cancer survivors in the world — he was famously given just a 40% chance of survival — and has established a large and successful charity that shares his name and is devoted to cancer awareness.
Just today the Lance Armstrong Foundation announced plans for its 15th anniversary, and since it's foundation the foundation is said to have raised $480 million, a good deal of money.
Will people abandon it after today's damning report? A quick scan of Twitter finds many voicing support of Armstrong's charity work, even if they are damning of his doping. It doesn't appear that previous allegations have hurt the charity either — numbers provided by the foundation to ESPN suggest donations are up 5.7 percent in average dollar amount and 5.4 percent in quantity this year.
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The 202-page report on the Lance Armstrong doping scandal that the US Anti-Doping Agency dropped yesterday is damning.
It makes the case that Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs to in every major event he has ever competed in.
More damningly, it paints Armstrong as the driving force behind a sophisticated, worldwide doping ring involving riders, coaches, and trainers.
At this point, there is only one argument left for Armstrong to make: everyone was doing it. Specifically, 20 of 21 top-3 finishers from 1999 to 2005 were doing it, and 36 of 45 top-3 finishers from 1996 to 2010 were doing it. Take a look at this paragraph (which was slipped into the introduction of the report without much comment) in the USADA report:
Twenty of the twenty-one podium finishers in the Tour de France from 1999 through 2005 have been directly tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations or exceeding the UCI hematocrit threshold. Of the forty-five podium finishes during the time period between 1996 and 2010, thirty-six were by riders similarly tainted by doping.
So in a 15-year period, there were only 9 riders who managed to succeed without cheating, according to the USADA.
It's fair to say that in that period, doping was a competitive element of the sport. You could argue that no one got an unfair advantage by doping because everyone was competing on the same (albeit outlawed) chemical playing field.
It's not the most convincing defense in the world, and it doesn't take away the fact that Armstrong violated the rules of the sport.
But it should at least give people some pause and temper the righteous indignation in the aftermath of the USADA report.
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