Fuck Lance Armstrong..

[wtmusic]

115. Hampsten quit in '95, Mercier in '97

Doping "had not really taken off"? Really.

“Before EPO,” the 1988 Giro d’Italia champion Andy Hampsten told me, “we knew we were always racing against guys on drugs, but I don’t think those drugs gave them more of an advantage than the advantage we had knowing they’re gonna come crashing down. We didn’t lose energy worrying about what other people were doing; we just focused on ourselves, and we didn’t need to win every race.”

That “higher ground” attitude of Hampsten’s American team, Motorola, began to change in 1994. “There was a lot of grumbling on the team,” Hampsten said, “and we did get technical data from team doctor Massimo Testa because he’d talk to his colleagues on other teams. He was always straight with me. ‘Sure enough,’ he said, ‘if so-and-so who you raced with for eight years and you always dropped on the climbs, if that guy’s beating you now, his hematocrit is 15 points higher, and he’s gonna kill you in the mountains.’”

http://redkiteprayer.com/tag/andy-hampsten/

"Scott Mercier says doping culture at US Postal made him quit professional cycling

Mercier was a member of the team in 1997, one year before Lance Armstrong joined the roster, and says that performance enhancing drugs were already a part of the set-up.

At the end of that year's Tour de Romandie Mercier said he was called into a room by Pedro Celaya, who has been charged by the United States Anti-Doping Agency but has opted for an arbitration hearing, and told to take steroids to aid his training.

"He called the riders into his room one at a time to give us a training programme - it had been a hard early season," Mercier told Sky Sports."

http://www1.skysports.com/cycling/news/15264/8189460/Scott-Mercier-says-doping-culture-at-US-Postal-made-him-quit-professional-cycling

Why did Bonds and McGwire dope? I suppose it was to "win", although you're not really winning if you cheat, are you? Now they're just disgraced has-beens like Lance. I don't envy those idiots in the slightest.

I'm not sure why you say I'm not very competitive in sports, I guess it's all relative. I ride about 4,000 miles and climb a vertical century (528,000 ft) in a good year. I don't play basketball but I'm fairly certain I could kick your ass on a bicycle. So yes, I can get competitive, and I know more than most about pro cycling. But that's relative too.