> > From: Frank Obusek



> > What else? I've been watching some old Tour tapes. I'm still
>> convinced that my favorite Lance stage is the Sestriere mtn top
> > finish in 1999.


Hi Frank,
Can you still look at such tape with the same eye after knowing that
L.A. samples were positive for EPO that day, AND the next AND still 3
days later?

As for myself I had looked at that stage finish live with utter
disgust, my hopes of a cleaning up of the cycling world after the
dramatic and terrible 1998 TdF were shattered on the way to
Sestrières : it was possible to win without breathing.

LeMond and Hampsten must have felt the same way .

A fitting but sad coda to this and the previous Tour should be
mentioned. In 2004, in an interview in the French newspaper Le Monde,
Greg Lemond said, "In 1990 I won the Tour and my team [Z] won the
top-team classification. One year later, not one of us could follow
the pace in the pack. There had been a radical change." He went on to
note that when he when he was winning, his VO2 Max (maximum oxygen
consumption, the basic measurement of an athlete's aerobic capacity)
was tops among professional racers. Today, Lemond said, he would be
in the 51st percentile. In other words, the Greg Lemond of 1990 who
won the Tour de France would be sent back for water bottles today.

Commenting on this interview in an open letter, Andy Hampsten wrote,
"Like Greg, I, too, saw what I believe were the effects of EPO when
it entered pro cycling in the early '90s. In the first years it grew
from a few individuals reaping obscene wins from exploiting its
'benefits', to entire teams relying on it, essentially forcing all
but the most gifted racers to either use EPO to keep their place in
cycling, quit or become just another obscure rider in the group."

Quote from our sponsor
http://www.torelli.com/raceinfo/tdf/tdfhistory1990.html

Cheers
François

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]