spessx

Hey guys,

This is fantasy football in spandex! Test the skill of your intuition and your knowledge of the sport by picking your fantasy team of dopers. You can have a team of up to 5 riders. The person with the most dopers busted by the end of the tour wins!

My picks:

Contador
Leipheimer
Valverde
Boonen
Millar

Blue Order

Would be a good game to start before next year's Tour.

skinnyone

Valverde,
Klodi
Contador
JI Guttirez
Di Luca.

sykerocker 

Contador's safe. First off, it been pretty well proven (well to American justice standards, anyway, don't want to think about European) that he's about as clean as any other non-doping cyclist out there. And besides, his safety from rumor has a guarantee. Leipheimer.

Go ahead, start a rumor mill, pick a few points to dwell on, and get Contador removed for not being squeaky-clean enough. And you start taking the chance that Leipehimer could win the Tour (I think he can pass Evans in the remaining stages). Which would mean nine straight American wins.

Wouldn't the Europeans love that!

Laggard

Why Boonen????

TYB069

Contador,
Soler,
Valverde
Kloeden,
Evans

pcates

yea why boonen?? though i could see him being caught with a gram of blow and a couple hookers

maddyfish

Contador

USAZorro

Silly game, but I definitely had doubts about DiLuca in the Giro. Had doubts about the Astana TT results too.

It's an odd position that fans are put in. It's difficult to trust the riders. It's difficult to trust some of the labs. It's difficult to trust the ADAs. It's difficult to trust the various organizations - UCI, Tour organizers, etc. It's difficult to trust that the media are telling the story straight.

So here I sit, taking everything with a grain of salt, and generally presuming innocent until proven (not alleged) guilty. Kind of exasperating no?

skinnyone

Yeah I agree about astana TTs when DZ got his butt kicked in both TTs in the Dauphine. And the whole UCI/GT/Dick Pound show isnt inspiring any faith either

Ganesha

If Valverde's doping he should get a refund after losing 3+ minutes Rasmussen on the ITT.

sykerocker 

Thanks for bringing up the one single bit of the last 14 months that really annoys the **** out of me: How does someone prove their innocence in this chicken**** outfit? Once an accusation is whispered, it never goes away (7 years of clean drug tests and seven Tour wins, and some schmuck on this board still uses "Lance Dopes" as a header line?).

I'm catching enough tonight alone from the truly cynical who refuse to believe that ANYONE in the Tour isn't doping about Contador - all unproven, of course, and stretching known factual points to make sure he looks guilty - to have me thinking that all it'll take tomorrow is a couple of reporters with the same information and in the mood to sell a few more papers, and by Sunday afternoon Contador's yanked from the Tour and whoever is in second now has the yellow. And it'll be his turn about two months after the tour is over and it's 2006 all over again. And again, and again, and again.

And it's too damned entertaining and profitable to stop.

OK, you want to stop doping by cracking down on the cyclists. Here's how you do it and make it stick:

1. Find and fire whoever the guy is at that French lab who constantly manages to leak stuff to L'Equipe. If it's more than one, fire them all. If it means gutting the lab and restaffing, so be it. That at least guarantees the tests will be done in a calm atmosphere, and the press is kept out until there's actually something to report. And that report isn't made until the B sample is run, which is, I believe how the book says it's supposed to be done.

2. The B sample is NEVER done by the same lab that's done that A sample. Preferably, it's done by a lab in another country. And ANY sloppiness in testing procedure results in the charges being immediately dropped. For good. Period. OK, go ahead with the prosecution, but you have to admit to the labratory screwups in court. Good luck handling the defense at that point.

3. At this point, announce the problem to the press. Let them run rampant and sell all the papers they can.

4. Now said accused rider gets to defend himself, in whatever court is appropriate to where he lives, ruled by the American legal principal INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. I know that's going to be a difficult one for some Europeans (probably some Americans, too) to understand, but it works. And when you've proven the ******* guilty, you've got him by the balls. In the interim, he gets all the pertinent details to be able to mount as effective a defense as he's able.

4. If found not guilty, the matter is dropped. He's innocent (yeah, I know, some people just cannot live with that concept, but that's what 'not guilty' equates to - innocence) as per a court of law and may not be legally hounded on that charge ever again. If found guilty, string the ******* up.

Of course it'll never happen. The current, oh-so-pious attempt at ending drugging once and for all is too based on each interested party getting as much media publicity as possible (example: They couldn't mention this stuff about Rasmussen until he was in the yellow? - hello!!!) first, and actually stopping the doping second.

OrionKhan

TYBO69 is looking pretty good here with these picks.

Helmet Head

Choose any five at random from this list:

https://www.cyclingnews.com/road/2007.../?id=startlist

Helmet Head

Huh. What do you know. My random selector ended up with the top 5 on GC:
[tt]
1 Alberto Contador Velasco (Spa) Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team 86.04.16
2 Cadel Evans (Aus) Predictor - Lotto 1.50
3 Levi Leipheimer (USA) Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team 2.49
4 Carlos Sastre Candil (Spa) Team CSC 6.02
5 Haimar Zubeldia Agirre (Spa) Euskaltel - Euskadi 6.29[/tt]

Helmet Head

Why not? Pettachi, Zabel, ...

ezoons

1. Contador
2. Sastre
3. Di Luca
4. A. Schleck (I hope I'm wrong)
5. Millar (I can also dream, right?)