Riis was a rockstar

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I’ll say this: Riis was a rockstar in 1996

I originally posted this vid on the old html site a week or so ago. I got an email about it today, and why the hell not just post that shit?

From: Mike
Subject: Rockstar Riis

Ok. So he aced Big Mig. And we know he was epo’d up. Mr 60% and all. But still. Tell me you can watch that clip without holding down your crazy-go-nuts button! That kind of attack on an uphill stage is why you get up it fucking 6am to watch the tour live . Sure, explain to you wife why you’re screaming at the tv with a hard on about how some mostly bald weirdo just aced big mig, jan, jaja and all the rest. Again, at 7am. “Who’s Big Mig and what is wrong with you?”

Somebody back me up here. Same deal with Pantani. When that little guy took off, the camera motorbike couldn’t get it all on tape it happened so fast. Like he stopped time, hit the turbo, and left them all. Fuck Hawking, he don’t know shit. And then watching him try to get his 120 pound ass down the hill in a rainstorm before anyone with some l33t decending skillz could catch him. God damn bastards were bouncing off cars trying to get off that (those were the lucky ones!! Hug at TDF Spectator if you see one) That’s fucking drama. Fuck the drugs. I am torn up thinking about how doped both these sob’s were, but I can’t deny how awesome this was to watch. Edge of the seat. Scream at the TV. Bounce off the wall , drop your beer, tell your neighbor. Call your friends. Make them watch a hour-and-a-
half-7yr-old VHS tape in a 8×10 dorm room on a friday night cause it’s THAT FUCKING COOL that you can’t let them MISS ONE MINUTE. Sure, they could have been out on the town, meeting girls, drinking, stealing street signs or sliding down san francisco hills in milk crates, but THEY NEEDED TO SEE THIS.

So. Back to the drugs. I wish it never happened. I wish my favorite 7- day-a-week-all-races-count-I-don’t-care-Chippo-Who? sprinter Zabel didn’t dope. Breaks my cold heart. And Riis. And Tyler. And Landis. And Every other damn rider from 1990-2005 (hoping it’s tapering off even slightly in the last two years). Do something. Strip titles. Suspend people. But don’t hate the players, hate the game.

I got a bottle of sweet sweet scotch telling me that waaaay more did it, only the big ones are admitting it. It still ain’t right, but Riis is: That shit was exiting as fuck, and I can’t forget it- you can’t either. Tell me you don’t see that rider up the hill from you and have some kind of tour-de-whatever flashback. Dopings wrong. It
happen(s/d). Doesn’t mean it’s less exciting to watch.

[/Scotch] Print this shit. PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW [/Scotch]

Yeah, I remember watching that crack of dawn race coverage with a cup of coffee and the dogs looking at me sideways. My wife stayed in bed and the dogs soon joined her after they realized the screaming wasn’t a big deal. Master does that every morning now, he’s just loco.

Riis was the best of the rest. And they were all on dope. There is no point in stripping titles, who would you give it to? The only clean rider in the race dropped out after the first eight days. If that long.

Riis was a rockstar.

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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

One Reply to “Riis was a rockstar”

  1. You think you were amazed as an OUTSIDER of the peloton? Let’s revisit what Willy Voet and Team Festina thought from INSIDE the peloton as related by Voet in his omerta busting tome: Breaking the Chain:

    [The years from 1994 to 1998 were crazy ones for the Festina team: full of success, constantly growing popularity and results which took us step by step to the head of the UCI’s world team points rankings. These were the years of folly. Aside from the new boys and a few other clean riders who were left on the margins we would see the whole spectrum of drug-taking; everyone was at it, whatever team they were in. Even if some went further than others in the arms race. Remember Bjarne Riis’s stunning win on the Hautacam climb in the 1996 Tour de France. The Dane, who was to win the race, literally played with his rivals before obliterating them. And the haematocrit level of his rivals, certainly at Festina, had been blithely boosted to about 54 per cent. His exploit was as perturbing for those in the know as it was spectacular to the uninitiated. Two years later from my prison cell I couldn’t help laughing nervously when I saw Riis become the riders’ spokesman as the Tour de France descended into farce. What kind of cycling was he defending?]

    The full book excerpt can be read here: http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/chain2.shtml