Armstrong stripped of 7 TdF titles

[Deckerd]

Besides, the definition of 'fairness' in a profession sports is a joke. Team GB's athletic velodrome bikers have the best bicycles and helmets in the world due to advanced aerodynamics technology; no other country can match Britain in that regard. That whole industry is kept under close wraps. Is it any wonder why Britain wins so many medals in velodrome events?

F1 cars are never alike because each team can use different materials and even components. The team with the most reliable and fastest car wins; so much for racing talent prevailing.

There's nothing in the world to stop every other cycling team to develop their own technology. The fact that the GB team are fast is mostly down to the sheer numbers of cyclists there are and because they go round schools recruiting sporty kids and then training them up, on a huge scale. In any case you immediately rebut your own argument by mentioning F1. So long as the equipment conforms to the rules it's fair. That's the definition of fair. Not pumping yourself with EPO.

 

[Roger Wilco]

The F1 comparison is nonsense anyway, since the car in motorsports is far, far more important to a driver's success than a cyclist's bike or helmet. Beyond the marketing bullshit, there's very little that differentiates the top-of-the-line bicycles from each other. In fact I would be willing to make the hypothesis, that no cyclist in the last 20 years has won a race thanks to his bike, nor lost it because of it. (not counting mechanical problems).

The Team UK bikes are a little different, and I criticised their secrecy during the Olympics also, but I would be shocked if they really made a difference. Do you really think the British know more about aerodynamics and carbon fiber than German, French, American, Korean, etc. billion-dollar multinational companies? Not to mention that the rules what bicycle designs can be in official races don't even allow for any radical changes.

 

[Shaytan]

Track cycling is certainly not the best exemple anyway because if there is a sport where doping is an institution...

 

[Deckerd]

Bradley Wiggins was complaining about the new rules for the velodrome Olympics. They changed the rules so that all races were gender equal, which is fine but got rid of quite a few of the different variations (this despite the fact that the swimming Olympics has a bewildering array of similar competitions). They also reduced the number of competitors from one country to two for each competition (where else in the Olympics is this rule in place?) All of these changes was to prevent the British (or any other dominant country) cleaning up at the Olympics. How did that work out then guys? Bradley's complaint: for every one British competitor in every race there were a couple of world champions sat at home. Nobody begrudges a Jamaican one two three at the 100m but cycling apparently is a different bucket of spanners.

 

[Hound of UIster]

So what you're saying is that when someone runs a doping scam on such a massive scale he acquires heroic status?

Sure.

There are people who still believe Jerry Sandusky was thrown under the bus to take the fall for Paterno.

 

[Roger Wilco]

Nobody begrudges a Jamaican one two three at the 100m but cycling apparently is a different bucket of spanners.

All that was at least in part also due to the UCI's constantly degrading standing among Olympic sports federations. Cycling was actually not very far from getting kicked out of the Olympics completely because of the doping issues.

 

[Deckerd]

My point is not doping but national training programmes.

 

[Roger Wilco]

I wasn't disagreeing with you, I just made a more general point.

 

[Shaytan]

My point is not doping but national training programmes.

If I say that's the same thing, I guess that I'm annoying ?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Track cycling is certainly not the best example anyway because if there is a sport where doping is an institution...

Yep.

 

[Deckerd]

I don't think the British were any more clean than anyone else during the bad old days. In fact the only reason most people got away with it was that even with doping they were too shit to win anything.