Off-topic

Lance Armstrong stripped of seven Tour de France titles

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #132262

    Huge news in the world of cycling today as seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong is to be stripped of his titles.

    He was found not only to have used performance-enhancing drugs but masterminding a network of drug use within his team:

    UCI president Pat McQuaid said: “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten.”

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cycling/20008520

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Armstrong’s fame and popularity has made the news hard to take for a lot of people, who simply refuse to believe it:

    http://twitter.com/keithcollantine/statuses/260342194802679808

    I don’t know much about cycling but I’m interested to hear the views of other F1 Fanatics readers on this. Formula One has seen a fair few scandals in recent years but I don’t think there’s ever been anything on the scale of this.

    Also interesting to note reaction from some F1 personalities:

    http://twitter.com/MarkGallagher62/statuses/260356113822781440

    Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso were asked about it during the press conference in Korea:

    MW: Yeah, disappointing. I was a keen cyclist fan through the early 2000s. But slowly, slowly, slowly, over time lost a little bit of passion for the sport. It has been quite obvious, in the last few years, that this was probably going to come, from people on the inside, but the damn wall has now broken and I think that obviously he was the last tree in the forest they wanted to drop down, and a big tree at that. It’s good that they’re trying to clean the sport up, and even retrospectively, it sends a message to lots of different sports that irrespective of what you’ve achieved and how you’ve done it at the time – first of all, it’s a good message – the karma, we’ll come and get you.

    FA: The same. Nothing really to add. Obviously I love cycling, I love bicycles and sure Lance was more than another rider, he was some kind of idol for many people and inspiration for many of us and many media people in the world. It’s not easy and I think he will remain an inspiration for many people, whatever happened, whatever the result. Not easy to put together all things.

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.