Game recognize game

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Sport Illustrated (SI.com) has an interesting little read up about the stain on Spain.

Five years ago, after a picturesque but particularly tough ride in the French Alps, the soon-to-be seven-time winner of the Tour de France declared that Alejandro Valverde had all the makings of cycling’s Next Big Thing.

. . .

In fact, we learned this week, Valverde was none of those things. Instead, as the Court of Arbitration for Sport demonstrated, he was really a relic of the bad and, hopefully, bygone era when riders doped themselves to the gills and largely got away with it.

Read the rest: sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/cycling/….

It’s hardly reading between the lines when John Leicester lays out a road map like this:

A look back to the results that day in 2005 when Armstrong’s crystal ball failed him reads like a who’s who of dopers. It shows how bad cheating was in cycling and how much progress has since been made – even if there is still a way to go.

Third over the line in Courchevel was Mickael Rasmussen. Basso was fifth, Eddy Mazzoleni was seventh, Andrei Kashechkin was 10th, Floyd Landis was 11th and Leonardo Piepoli was 12th.

They have all since served or are serving two-year doping bans.
Id.

Were we watching the high water mark in blood doping? Or are we still buried in it?

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About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

5 Replies to “Game recognize game”

  1. …i only hope it’s never revealed that mr cancellara had need for enhancement of any sort to achieve these wondrous last race results, wherein everyone knew his intent was to ride off before the finale’ & in his doing so, quite magnificently, there was nary a strong enough response by anyone…

    …that, sir, would be devastating information…one has need to keep faith…

  2. Oh so very buried in it. Didn’t Valpiti come in second last week? The faith is gone, all that is left is some very questionable medical waste.

  3. I’ve said it before-They’re gonna dope, regardless. Best to accept what you cannot change. Embrace the inevitable.

  4. Watching Cancellara bring it in yesterday I am thinking, damn, he is in some good form right now. And wondering what else might be fueling the past few weeks. Would like to think it is just well planned training/peaking but immediately thinking it seems too good to be true. And if it is too good to be true…
    Would like to think I am just jaded with a little age, but then realize I am just not as idealistic anymore. Still impressive to watch.

  5. “Still impressive to watch.”

    That may be all we have a right to ask for. Demanding door blasting performances without dope could well leave us relegated to the next EarthCrisis tour.