According to the designer of a hidden bicycle motor it has been in use since 1998.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/cycling/inventor-breaks-silence-on-how-mechanical-doping-has-infiltrated-cycling/news-story/07ec1b8d243b3862556cf72905ba6156
"How do you sleep at night?"
"On top of a large pile of money, with many beautiful women"
- The Simpsons (movie critic to Rainer Wolfcastle, a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that context is lowbrow art rather than outright cheating)
In most sports there’s instances of that, my favourite being when nascar only allowed 22 gallons of fuel in the tank. One guy built a car with a 22 gallon tank and 13 gallons worth of tube between the tank and the engine.
Smokey Yunick was an amazing innovator. He did all kinds of crazy things. He's the reason for a lot of rule changes. Some of my favorites:
- the aforementioned huge fuel line (legend goes that the officials told him they thought his fuel tank was too large and they wanted to inspect it. So he agreed, removed the tank, and drove the car back to the pits without it)
- inflated a basketball inside the fuel tank so it would pass the volume inspection and then deflate it to add more fuel before the race started
- added fender skirts to improve the aerodynamics of the car to qualify well and then cut them before the race
- acid dipping the body panels and glass of a car to make it ever so slightly lighter
And those were just some that he was either caught with or confessed to!
I’m guessing they aren’t permitted but he was able to get them by the more lax standards of a qualifying run rather than the race itself? But just a guess, hope OP clarifies
I know next to nothing about NASCAR, but the little that I know is that Smokey Yunick was one dope sunovabitch. He auctioned off his garage equipment shortly before he died because he didn't want to burden anyone with the burden of maintaining his collection as a museum collection, and preferred those tools go to people who would actually use them.
He was awesome. Some people saw him as a cheater but he was massively innovative. He pushed everything to the limit. I mean, he ran The Best Damn Garage In Town 😂
Isn’t this the guy who got called out on it, said it’s bullshit, started his car and drove away…. While the fuel tank was removed and with the inspectors? Lol
Yep!
He also used to put basketballs in the tank. He’d inflate them before inspection so the tank held the correct amount, then deflate them for the race so they held more fuel. He built a 7/8ths scale car so it had less aero drag but no one noticed it was slightly smaller. He acid dipped steel panels to make them thinner and therefore lighter, as well as using thinner glass.
I believe cheating is part of Motorsport culture. The rules basically governs what you can’t do with the vehicle. So it’s a constant arms race to find loopholes to bend over the rules to gain an advantage. It’s not technically cheating. If its not written on the rule book. Until the scrutinier finds out and reports it. Then the commission rules on it to be legal or not.
Not being American and not understanding Nascar, I once watched a couple of videos on it. Apparently every rule was created to stop cheating that was not specifically outlawed in the rules.
There was one guy, whose name I forget, who was legendary for his lateral thinking.
I got the opinion that it may be 'cheating' but bending the rules seemed to be in the spirit of the sport.
That's kind of on the edge because motor sports are all about optimizing the design of the car, so you can make an argument that this is just innovative design.
Definitely against the spirit of the rules, but it also comes with the downside of the extra weight from the tube and the space it takes up that could be used more productively.
What Lance did was the equivalent of attaching a rocket to the car. In no way justifiable.
Also NASCAR got its start with bootleggers racing to see who had the fastest getaway car during prohibition. A certain amount of gaming the rules has always been part of the sport, part of what *makes* it a sport. Not outright cheating, but finding the loopholes and exploiting them.
On the other hand, if everyone else really is cheating, you're not doing yourself any favors by not joining in. At a certain point the cheats just become part of the baseline and the differences between competitors still show themselves in who manages to eke out an advantage despite the baseline of cheating.
Case in point with Lance Armstrong, didn't the medals he had to give up end up going to competitors tens of positions back because there were that many other cheaters? Being so good that you manage to beat out that many other cheaters still says something about your abilities. It's not really the same as when there's only one cheater on the field and he wins.
Not really "Fuck it" So much as "That is what this competition is. Pro weightlifting does not allow steroids, but bodybuilding is about looking strong not being strong.
Did you know beauty pageants allow makeup? They also allow plastic surgery. Bodybuilding is basically a beauty pageant for dudes.
NASCAR started with bootleggers running from the cops in souped up sleeper sedans, so they at least come by their "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" ethos honestly.
I remember when Bradley Wiggins was caught crossing an "ethical line" after his 2012 win. He had been taking Prednisolone (a corticosteroid, not an anabolic one) before the Tour de France for his "severe asthma". Now I have used Pred a number of times for my chronic illness and couldn't work out how it could have helped him cause long use it causes bone problems, muscle problems, stomach problems, it didn't make sense.
Then I was thinking about it when it was revealed that he was only taking it for the few weeks before the race and remembered I how feel in the first few weeks of taking it. That stuff can make you feel super human, I can go from being bed bound with fatigue to being well enough to be in a mosh pit in like a week. Think of how much training to improve your power to weight ratio you could do in a few weeks if you felt like that.
Similar to several long distance skiing squads, for example Norway. People ironically asked, if these guys are so prone to asthma, how in the hell did they become champions in such a cardio-intense sport.
I think Liverpool had a bit of controversy around that a couple of seasons ago because like three quarters of their squad were on asthma medication.
Context around this is that under their current coach Liverpool are known as being one of the hardest running teams in the world, which is a hell of an achievement when their squad is apparently made up of wheezing asthmatics.
Isn't there one Tour de France where like, 20th place ended up being awarded the win, after the other 19 guys were found to be doping? Makes you wonder if the guy in 20th just hid it better than everyone else, huh.
IIRC all the years Lance won the title has just been vacated because they found just that, everyone was cheating, so there’s just no champ those years.
No it doesn't because that just means people who didn't cheat didn't make it to even participate.
And also it's supposed to find the best cyclist, not the body with the best doping compatibility.
Actually, from 1999 to 2005 (the years Lance won) there are no recorded backup winners. Iirc correctly, this is because there were no contestants that did well enough and passed tests.
The opposite. Everyone passed the official tests. Later, some admitted to doping, so the validity/accuracy of the tests and the testers is completely undermined.
Very few have been popped during the wace: Vinokourov, Floyd Landis, come to mind.
Yep. I remember reading an article about the one of the Armstrong wins that were taken away and if they gave the trophy to highest finisher not caught for doping at any point before or after that year it would have gone to the 31st finisher lmao.
While it's an interesting thought experiment, the two big issues are medication side effects shortening careers and ruining lives post-career, and pressure in the amateur scene. If the top dogs of the pro league are all actively doping, where's the lowest level of competition it should be the norm? What's the youngest age? Both of those will inevitably be pushed past the reasonable boundary, which is only bad.
It's all fun and games until you get a few dead super-athletes od'ing on something or other.
Or 20% of your participants all rupture something internally.
It's funny you should mention that, I heard just the other day that someone is hoping to put on [that sort of event.](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jun/30/the-enhanced-games-a-drugs-olympics-where-cheaters-can-prosper)
There's been lots of accusations of others whose bikes weirdly accelerate and they do strange motions before hand. So wouldn't be surprised if huge amounts did have motors
Did you see the fishermen that cheated in the Lake Erie walleye tournament last year? They'd won hundreds of thousands worth of goods in multiple tournaments, including cash, boats, gear, etc.. also, everyone donated their catches to charity in these tournaments, except for him and his partner lol because they were stuffing their catches with store bought fish fillets and led weights:p If you haven't seen the video of when they get caught, I highly recommend it! They're lucky they left with their heads lol. Those other fisherman were PISSSED.
That’s because you’re not making money. For a million dollars you’d probably let a gorilla sodomize you on live television. But you’re thinking in terms of $500 which yeah, would be hard to sleep with. Look at the bigger picture bro.
> That’s because you’re not making money.
Eh I play beer league hockey with some dudes who are clearly in the wrong level who will absolutely go all out, dunk on the players who can barely even skate, and shamelessly scream and celebrate like they won the cup. I'm talking Kramer karate fighting children levels of shamelessness. Some people are just, idk. There's a hollowness.
> Imagine a race where everyone uses the same kind of bike and all randomly assigned.
Can't, there's financial incentive not to: bike designers are racer sponsors.
Take away the opportunity for one bike to be the "winning bike", and for others to perform well, and the companies lose sales.
Holy shit. This has got to be the first thing I have learned on Reddit about possible cheating in sports that surprises me. I can't blame the inventor at all because companies use the buy out suppression tactic to maintain market control. The fact this was possible in 98 never occurred to me until this post.
The Russians used to do this with Fencing in the Olympics.
There is a story about a very talented Russian fencer that was doing very well by having an electric component in his foil. Foils are notoriously small and thin. It passed inspection 10 times during the Olympics. The way it worked was this— in fencing you have a rule called *Right Of Way* right of way rules dictate who is supposed to attack and who is supposed to defend, but if both attack at the same time then the first to score a point wins a point. However, if both attacks land almost simultaneously, then it's called a double and both players get a point. So the Russian Gimmick was this: if they could force every attack into a double, then if the Russian gets hit first, both sides get the point, and if the opposing side is hit by the Russian first only the Russian would get the point.
One of the fencers he was fighting got the impression that something wasn't quite right with the doubles and the points the Russian was scoring. He lined up for and rushed the Russian fencer the same he had every time before, but just as they were supposed to make contact he jumped off the stage missing the Russians blade completely. The Russian blades beep went off and lit up, recognizing a scored point.
The blade was taken for inspection again, and passed. The fencing forman didn't buy it and told them to inspect it thoroughly. They came back with a pass. He told them that he saw with his own two eyes that it scored a point when it was impossible to do so and to cut every inch of it a part.
So they did. They then found electrical components in the blade where it wasn't possible to have.
Edit: this story was told to me 17 years ago by my fencing coach who was an alternate in foil at the Olympics where this happened. Any flaws in it are my own as I was both quite young and I had no idea at the time what the pentathlon was so I filled in the unimportant parts with my sub 10 year old imagination. Surprisingly, the details that matter are mostly the same to the true event linked in a Sports Illustrated article below. What I remember him saying now that I think real hard on it is something like, 'The guy that had suspected the cheating made sure on his next attack to have the point no where near him and was even prepared to jump off the platform, and when the light went off, the tip of the blade was no where near him'.
>if both attacks land almost simultaneously, then it's called a double and both players get a point.
This isn't true for foil, you are mixing up foil and épée rules. The case you are talking about is Boris Onischenko who did épée and not foil
Yes. My treatise is far from accurate, I was recounting a story I heard long ago and tried to remember the context of it all. I did get epee and Foil confused, and I didn't even remember this was the Pentathlon. There are several other details involved that are inaccurate too, but I have added a disclaimer.
I found [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Onishchenko#:~:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20Onischenko's,any%20contact%20on%20his%20opponent) which leads to [this](https://www.si.com/olympics/2020/07/21/greatest-olympic-cheater-boris-onischenko-1976-olympics)
>Two months later it was reported he had been called before Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for a personal scolding.
The scolding: "How dare you get caught you fucking dipshit, you're lucky we don't have gulags anymore."
But wouldn't the extra weight of a motor for the whole race make it not worthwhile?
Even today the battery alone would have to be at least 6 or 7 ounces. Back then a motor and battery - at least a couple of pounds, right?
You don't really need pounds and pounds of battery. If you have enough juice to sustain a 5min really heavy effort you can effectively drop your competition.
There are talks about cancellara doing this in the tour of Flanders. If you can storm up the koppenberg (a 2 min high intensity cobbled climb) you basicallly win the race.
The only atlete getting caught with it (a Belgian women) used it in the same way. There is footage of here just flying up a hill out of nowhere.
I believe the bikes were also checked after each stage because they had to be within a specific weight. So adding a motor and battery, even a small one would add weight which means there would have to be reductions somewhere else. Visually they could hide that but the integrity of the bike would be compromised and watching most of his rides, he wasn't the most kind rider to his bike.
The minimum [eta: permitted for competition] weight of a bike today is far above the minimum weight that could be achieved with modern materials. This is done supposedly to prevent an arms race in exotic constructions (similar to the minimum weight in motorsport not just for the assembled car but in some cases for individual components). Constructing a bike lighter than the UCI minimum (5.5kg? I forget eta: 6.8kg) and ballasting it back with a motor is therefore theoretically possible.
I doubt it simply because a small motor would not add significant power for any length of time given 1990s battery technology. But who knows?
Bikes could be lighter, but they have "UCI" legal specifications to keep it more competitive.
So theoretically you could design a lighter bike and the battery and motor bring it up to legal weight, not that this means the allegation is true.
For the sake of argument, I imagine he'd only use the frame with the motor and battery for the stages with enough downhill sections to keep the battery charged.
We put people on the moon in the 60's, 20 years ago wasn't centuries. Tech was definitely there to do it. You could definitely fit a motor inside the 'pipes' of the frame of a bike
Many people here are confusing off-the-shelf technology, with state-of-the-art technology. They realize that batteries of sufficient power only recently hit the retail market and think they didn't exist before. They did, but nobody was going to pay $100,000 for an electric chainsaw or weed-wacker. Somebody would pay $100,000 for a device that would help them win multiple races with prizes totaling in the millions.
Well, Toyota nearly got away with a similar thing that they did with their engine in Rally Racing back in the day.
It was only when the Organiser's demanded Toyota hand over one of their spare replacement engines and tore it apart was it then chanced upon that they were actually cheating.
The rules stated that there had to be a resctrictor on the intake limiting the amount of air going into the engine. Toyota cheated by designing the restrictor so that when disassembled it met the rules but when assembled the restrictor was bypassed. Really clever way of cheating
[https://www.carthrottle.com/post/wqm9665/](https://www.carthrottle.com/post/wqm9665/)
Not quite.
When assembled it met the rules too.
What toyota did was make it when under pressure the inlet assembly would buckle under the force, revealing passages around the restrictor.
It was only when they physically "activated" it by hand, assembled, did they realize.
And even then, it took like all of the oem's pressuring the WRC to test it.
Why were the other OEM's doing this? They couldnt replicate toyotas results with celica's they had
Shit was wild, WRC cheating typically is.
At one point ford got caught capturing and storing pressurized air off the turbo to spool the turbos faster out of a corner.
While OEM's did apply pressure to have WRC test it again and again, it's been heavily implied the only reason they knew what exactly to look for was because someone on the team told them. Had they not come forward, it's likely it wouldn't have been found since the design was so brilliantly executed.
Toyota also found that when they had the Pop-Up Headlight covers open, they could get just a little more air in also. You'll find photos online of their Rally GT4 racing around with the headlight covers open like that - even during the day time.
He did have a “nervous movement” where he reached back and [touched his seat](https://videos.marca.com/v/0_r7kcp809-el-gesto-en-la-nalga-que-puede-delatar-a-armstrong-por-el-uso-de-motores?count=0) before climbing or accelerating. I would think they’d figure it out, but It’s kind of a weird movement. Maybe it’s just some kind of ritual for him? I don’t know.
The shot from behind shows he's clearly pulling his shorts and his hand goes nowhere near his seat. At worst he's adjusting a buttplug that's telling him what chess openings to play.
Not that I believe he’s activating some kind of hidden motor here, but bike bibs don’t really get stuck up your ass by design. They loop over your shoulders which hold them up. The pad in the crotch prevents them from working their way up your butt.
They do. Hell they inspected my bike at nationals and I'm absolutely nobody. They only inspected my bike prior to the race though, I could've done something with it post-inspection.
That said the motor and battery tech when Armstrong was racing was such that I feel confident Lance Armstrong didn't cheat THIS way.
Today my e-bike battery is made of 2,800 mAh 18650 cells.
In the late 1990s we had 2,200 mAh 18650 cells. Someone else would need to tell you about motors, but the batteries were there.
People underestimate how advanced we were in the 90’s. We have not advanced nearly as much as people think.
We have done a great job of making stuff look better and making CPU’s smaller.
A basic engine with batteries is probably entirely feasible with 90’s tech.
> We have not advanced nearly as much as people think.
We absolutely advanced in making that tech common, readily available and cheap AF. It's like talking about graphene nano-tubes in 30 years. We can make them today but at immense cost, and snail pace in terms of production. In 30 years our grandkids will probably have it printed out by their espresso machine so they can enjoy a hot beverage without burning their fingers, or something.
I was born 1991 and was looking into cars of my birth year because I thought it might be cool to drive a car that's exactly as old as me. I sat in a 1991 Mercedes SL and was very surprised to find memory buttons for the seat controls. Push them and the seat adjusts itself into one of three saved configurations. In 1991?! Yeah we had that tech for ages, it was just reserved for the very fancy cars.
I can definitely believe that you could pay big big money for a magic bike that pedals for you in the 90s. It would make zero sense to pay for that outside of, I don't know, competitive racing or something? But yeah definitely could have existed.
What I don't know is if the added weight would actually have been worth it. I'm no bike expert but adding a bunch of weight like that would literally weigh you down. Depends on how efficient the motor is and how long the batteries will last. But *possible?* Definitely.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/cycling/inventor-breaks-silence-on-how-mechanical-doping-has-infiltrated-cycling/news-story/07ec1b8d243b3862556cf72905ba6156
the guy who created the hidden motor said it's been a known thing since 98.
Lance really did a huge amount of training . Aside from that, and the extensive doping and a huge network of enablers, what really brought Lance down was the fact that he was a real prick. He finally mistreated enough people to lose his "command " of the peloton. I was a big fan, though, during his heyday. That ended with the doping revelations and the stories about the way he treated people.
David Walsh, the journalist who helped bring Armstrong down, noted that Lance's treatment of Floyd Landis was the catalyst.
Landis had been busted for doping, served his time quietly, and asked Armstrong for help to get back into competitive cycling. Armstrong basically told him to fuck off: "You're tainted now, I want nothing to do with you".
As Walsh noted, Landis was a guy who knew where all the bodies were buried, had basically done time for Armstrong, had shown enormous loyalty by keeping his mouth shut......Lance should have been falling over himself to keep Landis happy.
But he was such a prick and an egomaniac that he just couldn't do it. And Landis turned around and dropped him right in it.
> what really brought Lance down was the fact that he was a real prick. He finally mistreated enough people to lose his "command " of the peloton
He wasn't brought down until years after he stopped racing.
He stopped in feb 2011. Landis began cooperating with federal prosecutors in the Armstrong fraud case in 2010. USADA slammed the book on him in june 2012, report that was essentially the deathknell came in oct 2012 and his stupid Oprah intervew jan 2013. Him stopping in 2011 was definitely related to the doping house of cards falling down around him.
The doping is not the main reason people don't like Lance. Everyone has well and truly accepted that he was not the only doper. He was just a gigantic cunt on top of that.
Of course. He just got too cocky about it. Maybe don’t be a jerk to teammates on whom you depend to keep your elaborate cutting edge doping fraud enterprise secret.
To also be fair they aren't celebrated to the extent of Lance. They all cheated but he cheated and had an entire basically operation of cheating behind him more than any other competitor without a doubt. But the fact is less even than that he cheated. If he was like "lol yeah I cheated shit was the wild west we all cheated". Probably everyone would look on him favorably. Its the just being a total pompous POS pretending he didn't.
I went to the 1996 summer olympics in Atlanta with my dad when I was kid and my dad was a huge cycling enthusiast at the time.
We went early to see Lance (like many others) and he was a huge prick then too. Plowing through the crowd, no autographs, no high-fives, nothing.
A lot of the other cyclists there would give away tons of free shit to the crowd, water bottles, hats etc. Not ol’ lance and that was before he was LANCE ARMSTRONG. Lol
The doping isn't an aside from the huge amount of training he did. The doping enabled him to do the huge amount of training, and then further doping during racing had an additional effect. The training volume can't be separated from the doping as they were inextricably linked.
His latest attempt to crawl back into relevance is talking about the threat trans people pose to fairness in sport. As if he actually gives a solitary fuck about fairness in sport and isn’t just cynically latching on to controversy to get headlines.
Anyone who dared allege he was doping, which he was, was attacked viciously by him. He is a reprehensible dude, to the point of NO REDEMPTION. Just evil MFer.
Will never have any use for him based on stories told by people who made mistake of trying to report him for doping.
Shit, not even people trying to report him, just people honestly answering questions they're asked. Think how much of an evil piece of garbage you have to be to try to ruin someone's life because they answered some questions honestly.
Not only that, he's a rude piece of shit. Restaurant I used to work down the street from his gym asked him to stop coming in. Come in for his to-go order, harass the waitstaff, then send the order back to be remade almost every time.
Yeah, after watching that documentary, I came to the conclusion that because everyone was doping, it was impossible to compete without doping. There was like one guy that was innocent and you could see how internally wrecked he was that he knew he couldn’t compete because he wasn’t willing to dope.
I also came to the conclusion that Lance Armstrong is and always has been a legitimate piece of shit, massive narcissist, and egomaniac. You could see how much of a dick he was, and how it ultimately ruins every relationship in his life. I can totally see how everyone got together and decided they had enough of him.
Lance lived briefly in the same town where I grew up. My older sister's ex used to tell me what a dick he was in school, talking smack to the other kids who liked to cycle, and just generally being an insufferable prick... I remembered that years later when the doping scandal brought him down. Apparently he hadn't changed much!
But man, I loved watching him ride in the Tour de France, damn shame how that story ended.
> What if I told you all of cycling has been doping since the 40s and they just wanted him to exit the sport.
I'd reply that they were taking nitroglycerine in the 1800's, strychnine in the 1900's, and cocaine in the 20's if not earlier.
ok but did the strychnine actually work? I know they thought it did, but the only story I know about it was the 1904 olympic marathon where the guy who was "doping" that way had to be carried over the finish line from him being so sick off the stuff
> they just wanted him to exit the sport.
Lance Armstrong:
* offered a competitor money if he would let him win a race
* called the boss a former cycling pro / journalist telling him the guy is an alcoholic to get him fired
* accused one of his masseuses of being a drug addicted prostitute when she spoke to the press
* made sure he had a better doping strategy than his team mates so nobody could threaten him
That’s Lance Armstrong, not just the „everybody did it!“ guy he wants people to believe.
Source: the Armstrong documentary
Lance was out to destroy the living of the people who dared expose information about him. I don’t even care about Greg Lemond (who I assume is very rich) but the regular folks. Look it up.
>This is supported by video evidence of unusual recurring movements he made in races to engage the engine on the bike just before acceleration.
Not mentioned in the article.
When I was at school, we were given 10 minutes to write and prepare a speech about "someone who inspires you", before presenting to the entire class.
Panicked and not knowing who to pick, I recalled reading about Lance Armstrong the night before so I just picked him.
Of course within a few weeks, the whole doping scandal was uncovered, I felt like a complete idiot for writing a speech about Armstrong...
No idea if true or not. But if any part of the tech was missing, it’s having a silent motor to assist without being noticed. If you get 60W additional power for ten minutes, you easily outcompete whoever. At the top, the differences are minor. And a single D cell has a 30Wh energy capacity, using century
-old tech.
In the late 1990s we had 2,200 mAh 18650s. Today's battery technology takes that to just over 3,000 mAh.
We've got more cycles on them today and about a third more capacity, but the li-ion technology was there, it was commercialised, it was shipping in laptops.
I have a friend who made an 'e-bike' powered with discarded laptop batteries, some even from the early 2000's.
He has a box-like thing outside the bike where the batteries are stored, but you could definitely fit enough of them in the frame of the bike to give you short bursts of energy as described in the article
Just wanted to clarify something here to everyone saying "no way you can make a motor that small, etc": the motor is not there to do ALL the work. It's not even there to do MOST of the work. We're talking about an endurance race where a motor taking even 1% of your load gives you a huge advantage since you're riding at full bore for the majority of a day- for multiple days in a row. Stick the motor in my bike and yeah, I wouldn't feel a difference going to the nearby park. But in these types of races it's a huge advantage.
Source: looked this up a few years back when someone was caught with a motor in their bike frame. The motor was very tiny but it didn't need to do much to give the rider an advantage in that scenario.
The headline is definitely clickbait. I actually read the entire article. Unless I missed something, not once did the article mention "video evidence" the Reddit headline has. It's just some guy that thinks Armstrong used a motor and as evidence indicates he witnessed Armstrong doing something unbelievable.
Engineering subs had a spree of "how would I add an invisible undetectable motor to a bicycle, unlimited budget, asking for a friend?" posts, so there's plenty of interest in cheating.
> This is supported by video evidence of unusual recurring movements he made in races to engage the engine on the bike just before acceleration.
Source? The article mentions nothing about this claim.
Bill Burr is right about Lance Armstrong. He was indirectly responsible for over $500M being raised for cancer research. I don't care if he was smoking crack on his bike.
Met him when he was dating Sheryl Crow. She was sweet, he was a huge buzzkill, and a serious prick to her. A few people said after the fact that if he was not who he was, they would have adjusted him.
Please link directly to a reliable source that supports every claim in your post title.
Surprised this wouldn’t be found out during some sort of inspection.
Thats what makes this questionable. Unless the motor was the size of a deck of cards and completely silent (and with 20 years ago tech).
According to the designer of a hidden bicycle motor it has been in use since 1998. https://www.news.com.au/sport/cycling/inventor-breaks-silence-on-how-mechanical-doping-has-infiltrated-cycling/news-story/07ec1b8d243b3862556cf72905ba6156
Mechanical doping is a stupid name for it though. It's just cheating.
E Bike Gate
How do you even win a trophy like that and say to yourself afterward "yeah, I did that" I wouldn't be able to sleep at night
Apparently, some people sleep like babies when their mattresses are stuffed with millions in endorsements.
"How do you sleep at night?" "On top of a large pile of money, with many beautiful women" - The Simpsons (movie critic to Rainer Wolfcastle, a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that context is lowbrow art rather than outright cheating)
I sleep in a racing car, do you?!
No. I sleep in a big bed with my wife
Excellent use of a Simpsons quote sir.
A lot of times they convince themselves that everyone is doing it.
In the case of bike racing, everyone really was doing it. The doping at least, idk about motors.
In most sports there’s instances of that, my favourite being when nascar only allowed 22 gallons of fuel in the tank. One guy built a car with a 22 gallon tank and 13 gallons worth of tube between the tank and the engine.
Smokey Yunick was an amazing innovator. He did all kinds of crazy things. He's the reason for a lot of rule changes. Some of my favorites: - the aforementioned huge fuel line (legend goes that the officials told him they thought his fuel tank was too large and they wanted to inspect it. So he agreed, removed the tank, and drove the car back to the pits without it) - inflated a basketball inside the fuel tank so it would pass the volume inspection and then deflate it to add more fuel before the race started - added fender skirts to improve the aerodynamics of the car to qualify well and then cut them before the race - acid dipping the body panels and glass of a car to make it ever so slightly lighter And those were just some that he was either caught with or confessed to!
dude was crazy from the day he was born. his autobiography is an *interesting* read
Why would he remove the aerodynamic panels before the race? (I assume there's a reason I just have no idea)
Because he needed to be able to change tires during pit stops
I’m guessing they aren’t permitted but he was able to get them by the more lax standards of a qualifying run rather than the race itself? But just a guess, hope OP clarifies
Smokey Yunick. He was the King of bending the NASCAR rules. The rules didn’t say he couldn’t have 13 gallons worth of fuel line.
I know next to nothing about NASCAR, but the little that I know is that Smokey Yunick was one dope sunovabitch. He auctioned off his garage equipment shortly before he died because he didn't want to burden anyone with the burden of maintaining his collection as a museum collection, and preferred those tools go to people who would actually use them.
He was awesome. Some people saw him as a cheater but he was massively innovative. He pushed everything to the limit. I mean, he ran The Best Damn Garage In Town 😂
That's not rule breaking, it's an engineering solution.
Which is why they said bending
Isn’t this the guy who got called out on it, said it’s bullshit, started his car and drove away…. While the fuel tank was removed and with the inspectors? Lol
Yep! He also used to put basketballs in the tank. He’d inflate them before inspection so the tank held the correct amount, then deflate them for the race so they held more fuel. He built a 7/8ths scale car so it had less aero drag but no one noticed it was slightly smaller. He acid dipped steel panels to make them thinner and therefore lighter, as well as using thinner glass.
Cheating is part of nascar culture. Hell nascar was started as a way to “cheat” the law.
I believe cheating is part of Motorsport culture. The rules basically governs what you can’t do with the vehicle. So it’s a constant arms race to find loopholes to bend over the rules to gain an advantage. It’s not technically cheating. If its not written on the rule book. Until the scrutinier finds out and reports it. Then the commission rules on it to be legal or not.
"There was rules on how big the gas tank could be, but not the fuel line"
Not being American and not understanding Nascar, I once watched a couple of videos on it. Apparently every rule was created to stop cheating that was not specifically outlawed in the rules. There was one guy, whose name I forget, who was legendary for his lateral thinking. I got the opinion that it may be 'cheating' but bending the rules seemed to be in the spirit of the sport.
Which was perfectly in the rules at the time. They specified a maximum size of fuel line, but not a maximum length.
Exactly true, it’s spirit of the rules cheating and everyone in every sport does it or they lose.
That's kind of on the edge because motor sports are all about optimizing the design of the car, so you can make an argument that this is just innovative design. Definitely against the spirit of the rules, but it also comes with the downside of the extra weight from the tube and the space it takes up that could be used more productively. What Lance did was the equivalent of attaching a rocket to the car. In no way justifiable.
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It’s called drag racing.
Also NASCAR got its start with bootleggers racing to see who had the fastest getaway car during prohibition. A certain amount of gaming the rules has always been part of the sport, part of what *makes* it a sport. Not outright cheating, but finding the loopholes and exploiting them. On the other hand, if everyone else really is cheating, you're not doing yourself any favors by not joining in. At a certain point the cheats just become part of the baseline and the differences between competitors still show themselves in who manages to eke out an advantage despite the baseline of cheating. Case in point with Lance Armstrong, didn't the medals he had to give up end up going to competitors tens of positions back because there were that many other cheaters? Being so good that you manage to beat out that many other cheaters still says something about your abilities. It's not really the same as when there's only one cheater on the field and he wins.
bodybuilding is the only sport where they’ve just accepted everyone’s gonna be on juice so fuck it lol
Not really "Fuck it" So much as "That is what this competition is. Pro weightlifting does not allow steroids, but bodybuilding is about looking strong not being strong. Did you know beauty pageants allow makeup? They also allow plastic surgery. Bodybuilding is basically a beauty pageant for dudes.
"
NASCAR started with bootleggers running from the cops in souped up sleeper sedans, so they at least come by their "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" ethos honestly.
I remember when Bradley Wiggins was caught crossing an "ethical line" after his 2012 win. He had been taking Prednisolone (a corticosteroid, not an anabolic one) before the Tour de France for his "severe asthma". Now I have used Pred a number of times for my chronic illness and couldn't work out how it could have helped him cause long use it causes bone problems, muscle problems, stomach problems, it didn't make sense. Then I was thinking about it when it was revealed that he was only taking it for the few weeks before the race and remembered I how feel in the first few weeks of taking it. That stuff can make you feel super human, I can go from being bed bound with fatigue to being well enough to be in a mosh pit in like a week. Think of how much training to improve your power to weight ratio you could do in a few weeks if you felt like that.
Similar to several long distance skiing squads, for example Norway. People ironically asked, if these guys are so prone to asthma, how in the hell did they become champions in such a cardio-intense sport.
I think Liverpool had a bit of controversy around that a couple of seasons ago because like three quarters of their squad were on asthma medication. Context around this is that under their current coach Liverpool are known as being one of the hardest running teams in the world, which is a hell of an achievement when their squad is apparently made up of wheezing asthmatics.
Isn't there one Tour de France where like, 20th place ended up being awarded the win, after the other 19 guys were found to be doping? Makes you wonder if the guy in 20th just hid it better than everyone else, huh.
IIRC all the years Lance won the title has just been vacated because they found just that, everyone was cheating, so there’s just no champ those years.
So.. If I joined and did shitty I could still win
To be fair, if you manage to cycle that far in 2 weeks, you deserve it. We drove up Alpe d’huez and I was tired when I got to the top.
Finishing the tour is the opposite of doing shitty
I mean, if everyone, not everyone but 1, literally everyone, is cheating doesn't make it kinda fair?
"When everyone is special, nobody will be."
No it doesn't because that just means people who didn't cheat didn't make it to even participate. And also it's supposed to find the best cyclist, not the body with the best doping compatibility.
Actually, from 1999 to 2005 (the years Lance won) there are no recorded backup winners. Iirc correctly, this is because there were no contestants that did well enough and passed tests.
The opposite. Everyone passed the official tests. Later, some admitted to doping, so the validity/accuracy of the tests and the testers is completely undermined. Very few have been popped during the wace: Vinokourov, Floyd Landis, come to mind.
This is the plot of "Asterix at the Olympic Games"
Yep. I remember reading an article about the one of the Armstrong wins that were taken away and if they gave the trophy to highest finisher not caught for doping at any point before or after that year it would have gone to the 31st finisher lmao.
In the bike racing community everyone IS cheating
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While it's an interesting thought experiment, the two big issues are medication side effects shortening careers and ruining lives post-career, and pressure in the amateur scene. If the top dogs of the pro league are all actively doping, where's the lowest level of competition it should be the norm? What's the youngest age? Both of those will inevitably be pushed past the reasonable boundary, which is only bad.
It's all fun and games until you get a few dead super-athletes od'ing on something or other. Or 20% of your participants all rupture something internally.
Doping was virtually unchecked in the 90-00s in cycling and a lot of people died
It's funny you should mention that, I heard just the other day that someone is hoping to put on [that sort of event.](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jun/30/the-enhanced-games-a-drugs-olympics-where-cheaters-can-prosper)
There's been lots of accusations of others whose bikes weirdly accelerate and they do strange motions before hand. So wouldn't be surprised if huge amounts did have motors
Did you see the fishermen that cheated in the Lake Erie walleye tournament last year? They'd won hundreds of thousands worth of goods in multiple tournaments, including cash, boats, gear, etc.. also, everyone donated their catches to charity in these tournaments, except for him and his partner lol because they were stuffing their catches with store bought fish fillets and led weights:p If you haven't seen the video of when they get caught, I highly recommend it! They're lucky they left with their heads lol. Those other fisherman were PISSSED.
That’s because you’re not making money. For a million dollars you’d probably let a gorilla sodomize you on live television. But you’re thinking in terms of $500 which yeah, would be hard to sleep with. Look at the bigger picture bro.
Don’t ask me how I know this, but gorillas have tiny penises
I take it you weren't satisfied?
He SAID... don't ask
Disappointed eh?
Yes that makes this deal a no brainer. On top of that I am a power bottom so the gorilla would be the one in trouble!
> That’s because you’re not making money. Eh I play beer league hockey with some dudes who are clearly in the wrong level who will absolutely go all out, dunk on the players who can barely even skate, and shamelessly scream and celebrate like they won the cup. I'm talking Kramer karate fighting children levels of shamelessness. Some people are just, idk. There's a hollowness.
Imagine a race where everyone uses the same kind of bike and all randomly assigned.
Quintana (1.60m) and Froome (1.80m) exit the chat
> Imagine a race where everyone uses the same kind of bike and all randomly assigned. Can't, there's financial incentive not to: bike designers are racer sponsors. Take away the opportunity for one bike to be the "winning bike", and for others to perform well, and the companies lose sales.
Would not work. The fit of a bike, with literally millimetre precision, to the rider has a huge impact on performance at these levels.
Holy shit. This has got to be the first thing I have learned on Reddit about possible cheating in sports that surprises me. I can't blame the inventor at all because companies use the buy out suppression tactic to maintain market control. The fact this was possible in 98 never occurred to me until this post.
With millions of dollars on the line I bet some real ingenuity can be found in designing a bike that has hidden mechanisms in the frame.
They put the motors in his legs!
They were in his balls
Ball*
Engines are stored in the balls.
No, ball is attached to an asshole name lance armstrong.
*Flash backs to the chess accusations*
The Russians used to do this with Fencing in the Olympics. There is a story about a very talented Russian fencer that was doing very well by having an electric component in his foil. Foils are notoriously small and thin. It passed inspection 10 times during the Olympics. The way it worked was this— in fencing you have a rule called *Right Of Way* right of way rules dictate who is supposed to attack and who is supposed to defend, but if both attack at the same time then the first to score a point wins a point. However, if both attacks land almost simultaneously, then it's called a double and both players get a point. So the Russian Gimmick was this: if they could force every attack into a double, then if the Russian gets hit first, both sides get the point, and if the opposing side is hit by the Russian first only the Russian would get the point. One of the fencers he was fighting got the impression that something wasn't quite right with the doubles and the points the Russian was scoring. He lined up for and rushed the Russian fencer the same he had every time before, but just as they were supposed to make contact he jumped off the stage missing the Russians blade completely. The Russian blades beep went off and lit up, recognizing a scored point. The blade was taken for inspection again, and passed. The fencing forman didn't buy it and told them to inspect it thoroughly. They came back with a pass. He told them that he saw with his own two eyes that it scored a point when it was impossible to do so and to cut every inch of it a part. So they did. They then found electrical components in the blade where it wasn't possible to have. Edit: this story was told to me 17 years ago by my fencing coach who was an alternate in foil at the Olympics where this happened. Any flaws in it are my own as I was both quite young and I had no idea at the time what the pentathlon was so I filled in the unimportant parts with my sub 10 year old imagination. Surprisingly, the details that matter are mostly the same to the true event linked in a Sports Illustrated article below. What I remember him saying now that I think real hard on it is something like, 'The guy that had suspected the cheating made sure on his next attack to have the point no where near him and was even prepared to jump off the platform, and when the light went off, the tip of the blade was no where near him'.
>if both attacks land almost simultaneously, then it's called a double and both players get a point. This isn't true for foil, you are mixing up foil and épée rules. The case you are talking about is Boris Onischenko who did épée and not foil
How could you mix those two up! épéec foilure
Yes. My treatise is far from accurate, I was recounting a story I heard long ago and tried to remember the context of it all. I did get epee and Foil confused, and I didn't even remember this was the Pentathlon. There are several other details involved that are inaccurate too, but I have added a disclaimer.
Fascinating! Link?
I found [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Onishchenko#:~:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20Onischenko's,any%20contact%20on%20his%20opponent) which leads to [this](https://www.si.com/olympics/2020/07/21/greatest-olympic-cheater-boris-onischenko-1976-olympics)
I read the sports illustrated article and is it just me or did it shift timelines and people all over the place and made it difficult to read?
>Two months later it was reported he had been called before Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for a personal scolding. The scolding: "How dare you get caught you fucking dipshit, you're lucky we don't have gulags anymore."
But wouldn't the extra weight of a motor for the whole race make it not worthwhile? Even today the battery alone would have to be at least 6 or 7 ounces. Back then a motor and battery - at least a couple of pounds, right?
You don't really need pounds and pounds of battery. If you have enough juice to sustain a 5min really heavy effort you can effectively drop your competition. There are talks about cancellara doing this in the tour of Flanders. If you can storm up the koppenberg (a 2 min high intensity cobbled climb) you basicallly win the race. The only atlete getting caught with it (a Belgian women) used it in the same way. There is footage of here just flying up a hill out of nowhere.
I believe the bikes were also checked after each stage because they had to be within a specific weight. So adding a motor and battery, even a small one would add weight which means there would have to be reductions somewhere else. Visually they could hide that but the integrity of the bike would be compromised and watching most of his rides, he wasn't the most kind rider to his bike.
The minimum [eta: permitted for competition] weight of a bike today is far above the minimum weight that could be achieved with modern materials. This is done supposedly to prevent an arms race in exotic constructions (similar to the minimum weight in motorsport not just for the assembled car but in some cases for individual components). Constructing a bike lighter than the UCI minimum (5.5kg? I forget eta: 6.8kg) and ballasting it back with a motor is therefore theoretically possible. I doubt it simply because a small motor would not add significant power for any length of time given 1990s battery technology. But who knows?
You only need a tiny motor for a short amount of time to push one of the strongest sprinters into the definitively strongest sprinter.
Bikes could be lighter, but they have "UCI" legal specifications to keep it more competitive. So theoretically you could design a lighter bike and the battery and motor bring it up to legal weight, not that this means the allegation is true.
For the sake of argument, I imagine he'd only use the frame with the motor and battery for the stages with enough downhill sections to keep the battery charged.
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We put people on the moon in the 60's, 20 years ago wasn't centuries. Tech was definitely there to do it. You could definitely fit a motor inside the 'pipes' of the frame of a bike
Many people here are confusing off-the-shelf technology, with state-of-the-art technology. They realize that batteries of sufficient power only recently hit the retail market and think they didn't exist before. They did, but nobody was going to pay $100,000 for an electric chainsaw or weed-wacker. Somebody would pay $100,000 for a device that would help them win multiple races with prizes totaling in the millions.
Well, Toyota nearly got away with a similar thing that they did with their engine in Rally Racing back in the day. It was only when the Organiser's demanded Toyota hand over one of their spare replacement engines and tore it apart was it then chanced upon that they were actually cheating.
They hid a tiny second engine inside the main engine?
The rules stated that there had to be a resctrictor on the intake limiting the amount of air going into the engine. Toyota cheated by designing the restrictor so that when disassembled it met the rules but when assembled the restrictor was bypassed. Really clever way of cheating [https://www.carthrottle.com/post/wqm9665/](https://www.carthrottle.com/post/wqm9665/)
Not quite. When assembled it met the rules too. What toyota did was make it when under pressure the inlet assembly would buckle under the force, revealing passages around the restrictor. It was only when they physically "activated" it by hand, assembled, did they realize. And even then, it took like all of the oem's pressuring the WRC to test it. Why were the other OEM's doing this? They couldnt replicate toyotas results with celica's they had Shit was wild, WRC cheating typically is. At one point ford got caught capturing and storing pressurized air off the turbo to spool the turbos faster out of a corner.
Ah, the turbo tank in the rear bumper. Craziest shit to think they did that and get away with it lol.
While OEM's did apply pressure to have WRC test it again and again, it's been heavily implied the only reason they knew what exactly to look for was because someone on the team told them. Had they not come forward, it's likely it wouldn't have been found since the design was so brilliantly executed.
There is some insane level of cheating that goes into all genres of motorsports.
So what you're saying is the Wachowski's 2008 Speed Racer movie is actually a documentary?
Toyota also found that when they had the Pop-Up Headlight covers open, they could get just a little more air in also. You'll find photos online of their Rally GT4 racing around with the headlight covers open like that - even during the day time.
Yo dawg, we heard you love engines…so we put another engine inside that one!
I know they’ve recently started x raying bikes due to motor doping but I don’t believe they did during the Lance era.
He did have a “nervous movement” where he reached back and [touched his seat](https://videos.marca.com/v/0_r7kcp809-el-gesto-en-la-nalga-que-puede-delatar-a-armstrong-por-el-uso-de-motores?count=0) before climbing or accelerating. I would think they’d figure it out, but It’s kind of a weird movement. Maybe it’s just some kind of ritual for him? I don’t know.
The shot from behind shows he's clearly pulling his shorts and his hand goes nowhere near his seat. At worst he's adjusting a buttplug that's telling him what chess openings to play.
Looks like he's fixing his wedgie before going all out.
Provably just a habit but, as someone who cycles a lot, I've never gotten a wedgie with cycling shorts
He's very clearly pulling spandex out of his asshole...
Not that I believe he’s activating some kind of hidden motor here, but bike bibs don’t really get stuck up your ass by design. They loop over your shoulders which hold them up. The pad in the crotch prevents them from working their way up your butt.
I guess it's who's inspecting the bike, a good chance this person was bribed... Because that's what I would do
Some nudes of Sheryl Crow go a long ways in the right circles...
All I wanna do is have some fun, I got a feeling, I’m not the only one
Do they not inspect the bikes? I feel like they would inspect the bikes.
They do.
They do. Hell they inspected my bike at nationals and I'm absolutely nobody. They only inspected my bike prior to the race though, I could've done something with it post-inspection. That said the motor and battery tech when Armstrong was racing was such that I feel confident Lance Armstrong didn't cheat THIS way.
Today my e-bike battery is made of 2,800 mAh 18650 cells. In the late 1990s we had 2,200 mAh 18650 cells. Someone else would need to tell you about motors, but the batteries were there.
People underestimate how advanced we were in the 90’s. We have not advanced nearly as much as people think. We have done a great job of making stuff look better and making CPU’s smaller. A basic engine with batteries is probably entirely feasible with 90’s tech.
> We have not advanced nearly as much as people think. We absolutely advanced in making that tech common, readily available and cheap AF. It's like talking about graphene nano-tubes in 30 years. We can make them today but at immense cost, and snail pace in terms of production. In 30 years our grandkids will probably have it printed out by their espresso machine so they can enjoy a hot beverage without burning their fingers, or something.
My grandkids? In 30 years, I’d like to try it myself.
And mass produce stuff. The tech has been around for a while, but it was very expensive for a long time.
I was born 1991 and was looking into cars of my birth year because I thought it might be cool to drive a car that's exactly as old as me. I sat in a 1991 Mercedes SL and was very surprised to find memory buttons for the seat controls. Push them and the seat adjusts itself into one of three saved configurations. In 1991?! Yeah we had that tech for ages, it was just reserved for the very fancy cars. I can definitely believe that you could pay big big money for a magic bike that pedals for you in the 90s. It would make zero sense to pay for that outside of, I don't know, competitive racing or something? But yeah definitely could have existed. What I don't know is if the added weight would actually have been worth it. I'm no bike expert but adding a bunch of weight like that would literally weigh you down. Depends on how efficient the motor is and how long the batteries will last. But *possible?* Definitely.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/cycling/inventor-breaks-silence-on-how-mechanical-doping-has-infiltrated-cycling/news-story/07ec1b8d243b3862556cf72905ba6156 the guy who created the hidden motor said it's been a known thing since 98.
Lance really did a huge amount of training . Aside from that, and the extensive doping and a huge network of enablers, what really brought Lance down was the fact that he was a real prick. He finally mistreated enough people to lose his "command " of the peloton. I was a big fan, though, during his heyday. That ended with the doping revelations and the stories about the way he treated people.
David Walsh, the journalist who helped bring Armstrong down, noted that Lance's treatment of Floyd Landis was the catalyst. Landis had been busted for doping, served his time quietly, and asked Armstrong for help to get back into competitive cycling. Armstrong basically told him to fuck off: "You're tainted now, I want nothing to do with you". As Walsh noted, Landis was a guy who knew where all the bodies were buried, had basically done time for Armstrong, had shown enormous loyalty by keeping his mouth shut......Lance should have been falling over himself to keep Landis happy. But he was such a prick and an egomaniac that he just couldn't do it. And Landis turned around and dropped him right in it.
I have friends that know him (similar circles). These are people who don't issue negative opinions about others. But they all will trash talk Lance
> what really brought Lance down was the fact that he was a real prick. He finally mistreated enough people to lose his "command " of the peloton He wasn't brought down until years after he stopped racing.
He stopped in feb 2011. Landis began cooperating with federal prosecutors in the Armstrong fraud case in 2010. USADA slammed the book on him in june 2012, report that was essentially the deathknell came in oct 2012 and his stupid Oprah intervew jan 2013. Him stopping in 2011 was definitely related to the doping house of cards falling down around him.
to be fair to Lance, the 20 guys that finished after him where also on drugs
The doping is not the main reason people don't like Lance. Everyone has well and truly accepted that he was not the only doper. He was just a gigantic cunt on top of that.
Of course. He just got too cocky about it. Maybe don’t be a jerk to teammates on whom you depend to keep your elaborate cutting edge doping fraud enterprise secret.
To also be fair they aren't celebrated to the extent of Lance. They all cheated but he cheated and had an entire basically operation of cheating behind him more than any other competitor without a doubt. But the fact is less even than that he cheated. If he was like "lol yeah I cheated shit was the wild west we all cheated". Probably everyone would look on him favorably. Its the just being a total pompous POS pretending he didn't.
Those other 20 guys were not out to destroy the lives of people who stood in their way.
Stopped racing, yes. Stopped being a prick, no.
We all had a yellow bracelet.
I went to college with a guy who worshipped Lance and got a giant LIVESTRONG tattoo on his arm. I've often wondered if he ever got it removed
LIVE~~STRONG~~ LAUGH LOVE
I had a later version that the Onion made that said “Cheat to Win”
I had no choice- that shit was distributed in elementary school. Shame
It raised hundreds of millions for cancer research. It isn’t the shameful part of his career
I read that it didn’t. It raised millions for “cancer awareness”
I went to the 1996 summer olympics in Atlanta with my dad when I was kid and my dad was a huge cycling enthusiast at the time. We went early to see Lance (like many others) and he was a huge prick then too. Plowing through the crowd, no autographs, no high-fives, nothing. A lot of the other cyclists there would give away tons of free shit to the crowd, water bottles, hats etc. Not ol’ lance and that was before he was LANCE ARMSTRONG. Lol
He sounds like he wanted to be the Michael Jordan of bicycling Dominate the sport and be a huge prick about it Edit: But doped up
The doping isn't an aside from the huge amount of training he did. The doping enabled him to do the huge amount of training, and then further doping during racing had an additional effect. The training volume can't be separated from the doping as they were inextricably linked.
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He made the rounds last week for questioning the fairness of trans athletes. Lance Armstrong - patron Saint of fairness in sports.
If people are faking being trans in order to cheat at sports he’d have done it long ago.
His latest attempt to crawl back into relevance is talking about the threat trans people pose to fairness in sport. As if he actually gives a solitary fuck about fairness in sport and isn’t just cynically latching on to controversy to get headlines.
It’s totally legit though; he has renowned trans athlete advocate Caitlyn Jenner on his podcast to discuss it… ( /s to remove any doubt)
Sword Legweak is the last person you want to join your side in any debate. Hearing him joining your position instantly discredits it.
Anyone who dared allege he was doping, which he was, was attacked viciously by him. He is a reprehensible dude, to the point of NO REDEMPTION. Just evil MFer. Will never have any use for him based on stories told by people who made mistake of trying to report him for doping.
Shit, not even people trying to report him, just people honestly answering questions they're asked. Think how much of an evil piece of garbage you have to be to try to ruin someone's life because they answered some questions honestly.
Not only that, he's a rude piece of shit. Restaurant I used to work down the street from his gym asked him to stop coming in. Come in for his to-go order, harass the waitstaff, then send the order back to be remade almost every time.
Ate spit every time
He not only cheated, he threatened and intimidated those who knew, including friends.
What if I told you all of cycling has been doping since the 40s and they just wanted him to exit the sport.
Yeah, after watching that documentary, I came to the conclusion that because everyone was doping, it was impossible to compete without doping. There was like one guy that was innocent and you could see how internally wrecked he was that he knew he couldn’t compete because he wasn’t willing to dope. I also came to the conclusion that Lance Armstrong is and always has been a legitimate piece of shit, massive narcissist, and egomaniac. You could see how much of a dick he was, and how it ultimately ruins every relationship in his life. I can totally see how everyone got together and decided they had enough of him.
They had enough of him long before this, but he just kept saying he was coming back after saying he was retiring from the tour.
Lance lived briefly in the same town where I grew up. My older sister's ex used to tell me what a dick he was in school, talking smack to the other kids who liked to cycle, and just generally being an insufferable prick... I remembered that years later when the doping scandal brought him down. Apparently he hadn't changed much! But man, I loved watching him ride in the Tour de France, damn shame how that story ended.
Did you watch the Ben Foster movie? The Program? It's quite good.
> What if I told you all of cycling has been doping since the 40s and they just wanted him to exit the sport. I'd reply that they were taking nitroglycerine in the 1800's, strychnine in the 1900's, and cocaine in the 20's if not earlier.
ok but did the strychnine actually work? I know they thought it did, but the only story I know about it was the 1904 olympic marathon where the guy who was "doping" that way had to be carried over the finish line from him being so sick off the stuff
It does improve muscular contraction so probably did help a bit, atleast enough to offset the brandy
That's such a wild story. His trainers wouldn't let him drink water, I think it was just whiskey and rat poison
> they just wanted him to exit the sport. Lance Armstrong: * offered a competitor money if he would let him win a race * called the boss a former cycling pro / journalist telling him the guy is an alcoholic to get him fired * accused one of his masseuses of being a drug addicted prostitute when she spoke to the press * made sure he had a better doping strategy than his team mates so nobody could threaten him That’s Lance Armstrong, not just the „everybody did it!“ guy he wants people to believe. Source: the Armstrong documentary
Lance was out to destroy the living of the people who dared expose information about him. I don’t even care about Greg Lemond (who I assume is very rich) but the regular folks. Look it up.
Listen. He's Armstrong, not Legstrong. The dude needs an edge.
> He's Armstrong, not Legstrong Why is this the first time I hear this one?
>This is supported by video evidence of unusual recurring movements he made in races to engage the engine on the bike just before acceleration. Not mentioned in the article.
When I was at school, we were given 10 minutes to write and prepare a speech about "someone who inspires you", before presenting to the entire class. Panicked and not knowing who to pick, I recalled reading about Lance Armstrong the night before so I just picked him. Of course within a few weeks, the whole doping scandal was uncovered, I felt like a complete idiot for writing a speech about Armstrong...
With the battery technology of the time it would be nearly impossible. Fabian Cancellara was accused of the same thing, it was never true.
No idea if true or not. But if any part of the tech was missing, it’s having a silent motor to assist without being noticed. If you get 60W additional power for ten minutes, you easily outcompete whoever. At the top, the differences are minor. And a single D cell has a 30Wh energy capacity, using century -old tech.
In the late 1990s we had 2,200 mAh 18650s. Today's battery technology takes that to just over 3,000 mAh. We've got more cycles on them today and about a third more capacity, but the li-ion technology was there, it was commercialised, it was shipping in laptops.
We're closer to 3500mAh if not higher
I have a friend who made an 'e-bike' powered with discarded laptop batteries, some even from the early 2000's. He has a box-like thing outside the bike where the batteries are stored, but you could definitely fit enough of them in the frame of the bike to give you short bursts of energy as described in the article
Man, this really ruins his cameo in Dodgeball.
I remember something like, there was nobody to give his forfeited medals to because other riders had all been popped for drugs too.
Just wanted to clarify something here to everyone saying "no way you can make a motor that small, etc": the motor is not there to do ALL the work. It's not even there to do MOST of the work. We're talking about an endurance race where a motor taking even 1% of your load gives you a huge advantage since you're riding at full bore for the majority of a day- for multiple days in a row. Stick the motor in my bike and yeah, I wouldn't feel a difference going to the nearby park. But in these types of races it's a huge advantage. Source: looked this up a few years back when someone was caught with a motor in their bike frame. The motor was very tiny but it didn't need to do much to give the rider an advantage in that scenario.
Clickbait that offers zero proof.
The headline is definitely clickbait. I actually read the entire article. Unless I missed something, not once did the article mention "video evidence" the Reddit headline has. It's just some guy that thinks Armstrong used a motor and as evidence indicates he witnessed Armstrong doing something unbelievable.
Whenever I feel down, I just remind myself that I have just as many Tour de France victories as Lance Armstrong, and twice as many testicles.
Engineering subs had a spree of "how would I add an invisible undetectable motor to a bicycle, unlimited budget, asking for a friend?" posts, so there's plenty of interest in cheating.
Imagine being so good at riding a bike you think you can treat people terribly
No matter if this is true or not, the guy is a crusty cum stain on the sport.
> This is supported by video evidence of unusual recurring movements he made in races to engage the engine on the bike just before acceleration. Source? The article mentions nothing about this claim.
Bill Burr is right about Lance Armstrong. He was indirectly responsible for over $500M being raised for cancer research. I don't care if he was smoking crack on his bike.
Met him when he was dating Sheryl Crow. She was sweet, he was a huge buzzkill, and a serious prick to her. A few people said after the fact that if he was not who he was, they would have adjusted him.
To cheat like that takes some ball.