suerly to complete something like the tour de france you must have to bee on something to recover enough to do those stages at those speeds ?
At what speeds? At the speeds Lance, Mig, Bjarne, Jan, Marco etc were winning the TdF then yes, you had to be on something.
At the speed Ryder Hesjedal won the Giro this year? No, apparently you can achieve that by being a naturally phenomenal athlete plus lots of very hard training and dedication (assuming you believe Garmin to be a clean team). If you then apply a scientific approach to coaching and race strategy, you can achieve the kind of speeds at which Wiggo won the TdF this year, which were a lot faster than the opposition but still not nearly as fast as ten years ago (again, assuming Sky are a clean team).
One thing Lance fans can console themselves with is the thought that if the peloton had been clean, he could very probably have won clean. There's no doubt he's a phenomenal athlete even without the drugs. It's a shame - he was in some ways a victim of the era he rode in. But on the other hand, he appears to have been one of the main perpetrators and exploiters of those circumstances, and actively stamped down on anyone who wanted to change the sport for the better, so I have absolutely no sympathy for him at all.
Whatever anyone thinks of the USADA, they are by far the lesser of the two evils in this story.
d.
