Half of Tour de France winners say Lance Armstrong should get his seven titles back

I am not a massive LA fan but I do think that probably most TdF winners have been dopers. Just because it was so endemic for so long. If you excluded everyone that doped it would be 50 or more blank titles.

I also believe that LA's rivals in all 7 were well at it or had been. So it probably was a level playing field.

Apart from that we all know who got the title so it's silly to just leave blanks.

Wow, “I don't necessarily think the same now. Armstrong is the victim of a USADA witch hunt". Its scary to think these words are being used to describe the process of outing a person who later confessed to being guilty. I'm afraid that a few years down the line all will be forgiven, his sponsors will return, his titles will be reinstated and all the pain he caused people during his 'win at all costs' crusade will be forgotten.

Not much of a suprise, those who are more widely believed to have doped want him back, those who are trying not to be tarnished with doping do not.

I'm with Froome and Wiggins etc - leave them blank. If Armstrong ends up doing time, while they're at it maybe they could find room for Pat McQuaid in his cell.

No I see it the other way... he is just as deserving to be on the list of winners as nearly everyone else there.

I think we all feel so strongly about Armstrong because he has been portrayed as a total bully and a control freak. Not only because he was a doper, he was a cnut as well.

I don't personally think thats fair. I'm not saying that it's not the case, only that no other convicted doper has had a complete character assassination through the press... I am sure if we looked in the cupboards of a load of ex-cyclists and dopers there would be loads of dark skeletons lurking.

So, to be objective, I remove all of the talk of his bullying etc and look at the crimes committed. In those cases, and based on the statue of limitations, he should be reinstated for all but his 2005 win.

The "Lance Armstrong: Stop at Nothing" documentary, which I recently watched on BBC4, reminded me why I dislike Lance so much. In addition to his doping, he went after people who spoke out against him, for example spreading insinuations that Emma O'Reilly was a whore and a drunk and setting his lawyers on her. If he was singled out and a "witch hunt" led against him, he fully deserves it

So does Andy think still view Bertie as being the winner of his TDF, leaving Andy in 2nd?

Also, what the cracking hell is Pat McQuaid doing still hanging round the tour?

The greater crime is if the removal of the winner means cycling feels it has a clear conscience. It KNEW it was corrupt. It didn't do enough.

A poor example - look at Turing, the government gives the guy a posthumous pardon and suddenly feels it can reject all blame for the terrible treatment it dished out to the guy.

Armstrong was a cheat. That's bad. LOADS of people in cycling knew it and did nothing. That does not go away just because Armstrong has been nabbed.

The slate has not been wiped clean.

I assume that all of those who are against LA keeping the title also are happy to erase those previous holders who have a chequered history. Didn't Merckx get pulled for drugs? Anqetuil openly condoned such a thing. Lets ban him as well. Also its totally illogical to lump LA's drug taking along with other facets of his character. Bullying if thats what it is, is a different issues and there are two side to that story.
Actually it is totally incorrect to say that there was no winner in the Armstrong years. He was the first over the line . That's what a winner is. You can't have buts . He won.

Truly embarrassing and a massive backward step for the sport, let alone a PR disaster.

But we do know most of them were doping... they got busted before he did.

That's the real reason those tours are blank... its because no one else can realistically be called the winner above armstrong.

Yes ,drugs have no place in our sport .
No matter what you think ,or say , he did drugs ,but he still got over the mountains and hills and route before anyone else who were allegedly on drugs .Period.
If your not first your last .

Lance Armstrong causes Global Warming.

We all know who 'won' those tours, says more about the respondents. Andy doesn't mind giving them back but Alberto does? Obviously Contador was one of the Non-respondents, but very strange comments from Schleck. He finished second three times in a row but says who remembers second place? He was given his tour in retrospect, perhaps the blank spaces undermine his own win; should he be demoted to second after Blank for 2010?

50% of the people I work with think that bicycles should be banned from all roads - all roads. I know because I asked them today when I read a news article about something Carlton Read is going to talk about over some group who claim to represent car drivers - so should we ban all bicycles from UK roads, because 50% of people apparently think it would be a good idea.

And at risk of having some nut job screaming Godwins Law - why don't we cut Hitler a bit of slack - today Hitler suffers terribly being made the butt of endless jokes through cut up chunks of his wonderful film by ignorant oiks on YouTube -all he wanted was a little breathing space for christsake - isn't much to ask for and all we do is treat him as if he was the most horrible human being ever born and I am quite certain that if you asked 100% of people who belong to any fascist or nazi style group whether or not we should celebrate Hitlers ever existing then you will get over 50% saying yes we should.

Lance Armstrong cheated. Lance Armstrong tried to and, in some cases, succeeded in threatening people in order to cover up his dishonesty. Lance Armstrong only needs to do one thing for cycling - piss off and never come back.

By the time Armstrong has his titles back officially, they'll be the least of his worries. He's going to be put though the mincer in American courts, will have nothing left. He even had to sell his private jet !

'I think we all feel so strongly about Armstrong because he has been portrayed as a total bully and a control freak.'

He's been *portrayed* as that? So he never did any of it? Get your head out of the sand.

I think part of the problem about Armstrong is that the scientific aspect of his wins seems so large. Evidence suggests that Armstrong was a regular pro-peloton doper before his cancer (Betsy Andreu's bedside comments withstanding) and at that point he was just an ordinary rider in the scheme of things. Basically by pushing the envelope of drug taking he won seven titles. It's not just that he doped, but the extent to how he doped - he would otherwise have been a nobody, an also-ran. So you cannot tell me that he was just like all the others. What he did probably risked his and other peoples lives.

We could also go on about self-serving lies, manipulation and bullying but that's just the nasty side of LA.....

'So, you won the Worlds clean'

No. No he didn't.

I'd love to be a mediocre also ran if mediocre also ran meant being a national triathlon champion as a teenager and clocking up a few decent wins including a Tour stage in my early 20s.

That tells you all you need to know about their attitude to drugs.

And the fact that it was the most recent winners - Evans, Wiggo and Froome - who don't think Armstrong should be given those titles back suggests that some progress is being made in the anti-doping war. Well done to them.

The attitude part of the war on doping may be at high tide, but the technical part of being able to detect EPO usage is not. Micro dosing can still be used without detection. Micro dosing just enough to prevent hemoglobin levels from falling during the tour (as would be natural) would not trigger a blood passport alert.
I am not accusing anybody but think this technical problem should be addressed.

Quote:

I've been watching the Armstrong Lie - not finished yet - but one of the things that I'm not quite buying is his statement that they began doping as a group because they were getting comprehensively kicked by other teams, week in week out, while he was wearing the rainbow jersey. So, you won the Worlds clean, but get routinely battered every week? What, the rest of the peloton thoughts the Worlds wasn't worth doping for?

That's actually backed up by Emma O'Reilly's book and by various other snippets of information. American cycling was nowhere close to what the Europeans were doing at that time - not even on the radar. So while good Americans could win races clean (or by buying off their opponents which is an accusation levelled at Lance in one of his early domestic US victories), you'd go to Europe and while it's easy enough to survive a One Day Classic or a few days Tour clean, it becomes a different kettle of fish when you do a 3-week race and Europeans and especially the eastern-bloc countries have relatively advanced doping programmes, you're clean and you get your arse handed to you.

Doping doesn't make you fast - I mean I could take all the EPO and blood transfusions going, I'd still be shit. What it does allow you to do is train much harder and recover much better, it's that which makes you fast. The rider still needs to put the work in and have the raw talent and ability to make it count.

LA was obviously extremely talented (in much the same way that Pantani was obviously a superb climber way before he started doping) but more than that, LA was lucky. 7 Tours and no major crashes or injuries or illness is incredible when you look at it recently and see how easy it is for favourites (Wiggins/Vinokourov in 2011, Froome/Contador in 2014) to crash out or otherwise get injured (Geraint Thomas riding with a fractured pelvis for example). And luck counts for an awful lot, especially in one-day races which are far less predictable than a 3-week Tour.

Removing Lance's titles was a political thing - there's no other explanation for it when you also have people like Riis still in there as a winner and still managing a team. I'm not sure that the argument about reinstating them actually achieves much. I don't mind LA as a person at all actually, what bugs me is the fact that cycling refuses to move on - it all comes back to Lance this, Lance that and the legacy of mistrust that he's left - every stage win pored over, every performance looked at for evidence of doping. It's taken away the spectacle of the sport.

Lance was quite happy to portray himself as 'Cycling Jesus' and pity those who couldn't believe.

Well, just like Jesus he's now being made a scapegoat for the sins of professional cycling.

It's all very poetic.