On May 25, 7:14 pm, "Crescentius Vespasianus"
wrote:
Riis just killed the sport known as pro-cycling. The European police in
Italy and France were in the end correct and the people who criticized them
were wrong. I think David Millar was the first to crack under those warm
interrogation lights. In the end he told them all they needed to know about
this cycling-Mafia. Kudos to all of the European police agencies, in
cracking this Mafia wide open for all to see. All that crap about these
guys going up grades 8% at 26 mph were simply an illusion. Where does
Carmichael go now, when people now know it wasn't his training, but what he
had in the medicine bag. What about Liggett, will he now return to being a
shoe salesman? Trautman can now compare his steroid perfected Yankee team
to the EPO perfected CSC team. It was the perfect illusion,......all of it.
We should all give them a giant round of applause for this magic trick of
the century called pro-cycling.

I hope your wrong...but after all that's transpired the last couple of
weeks, I sure ain't gonna argue!!!

One of the really sad parts is that this quote from Riis:

"When I was a rider in the 1990s, I worked extremely hard to get my
results. I worked extremely hard, day in day out and I sacrificed a
lot just even to be part of the best."

is basically true. Just as it is for every other member of the
peleton (even Floyd). Those guys are super-human athletes without EPO
or any other drugs. A lot of the non-cycling public now thinks that
these guys are just no-talent, average-joe lazy bums that are just
willing to take a needle. This slight probably even carries down to
amateurs and wanna-bes who are out there paying their dues at their
own level. I think whoever said drugs can't turn a donkey into a
racehorse got it right. Too bad the talented men and women of future
peletons will have an even tougher fight against an already-jaded
public.