Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France a record 7 times. He was to many, including me, a sporting icon. Someone who overcame potentially terminal cancer and went on to dominate the sport of cycling for a decade. He transcended the sport, and raised cycling’s profile in the process. And, now we know that he was a cheat.
Last week, the US Ant Doping Agency (USADA) published a 1,000 page report which provides convincing evidence that Lance Armstrong and the United States Postal Service cycling team “ran the most sophisticated doping scheme ever”.
One of the many newspaper articles on this sorry story is here. And here is a link to a programme transmitted on BBC Radio 5 on Monday (15th of October). After listening to it, I am left in little doubt that Armstrong did indeed cheat the sport of cycling. But, much sadder I think, he cheated millions of people who believed in his sporting prowess.
I understand there has recently been some debate about doping in the sport of chess, i.e. whether it is OK to drink caffeine etc during a match.
Really? Are you serious??!
Google has about 2.5 million hits for “chess doping caffeine” (without the quotes). This is the first one: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/outrage-over-ivanchuk-the-great-chess-doping-scandal-a-595819.html
(Der Spiegel is the main German weekly news magazine, which also has a good online news site. This is from the English version of the online site.)
I see that caffeine is no longer a banned substance, though.
There was a brief discussion on BBC Radio 5 this morning about using caffeine to boost performance. When I did my 1st marathon, back in 1982, I stopped drinking caffeine about a month before the marathon and then, on the morning of the race, drank some strong coffee. I have no idea if it helped, but I had read in a running magazine that it could boost your performance.
There was some fuss in the famous Kasparov v Bobby Fisher chess match about caffeine, wasn’t there?
[…] few months ago I blogged about the news that Lance Armstrong had been labelled a cheat in an official US Anti Doping Agency report. In that […]