How did lance armstrong not get caught for doping for so many years? If its that hard to get caught then should we be worried about other althletes?

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How did lance armstrong not get caught for doping for so many years? If its that hard to get caught then should we be worried about other althletes?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I think the real ELI5 (but not shared with kids ironically) is that there is mass doping in all sports and people are only caught when they or their team do something stupid.

Just look at the data from when samples are tested retroactively with a new assay, look up the Balco scandal, or watch Icarus on Netflix. No sport is clean.

Anonymous 0 Comments

>If its that hard to get caught then should we be worried about other althletes?

LOL. Occam’s razor says that all top athletes in all sports are doping.

But I don’t think you need to worry about that.

Meanwhile, check out this list of 100 m record holders, with those that were eventually caught doping crossed out:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHD6QzaV0AA7-7h.jpg](https://runningmagazine.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/wEHVnN9eJeEL-3nnyfJzbYPWnkK1rGDJ1PCxd9oIFjw.jpg)

Anonymous 0 Comments

One quick answer is he was also going through testicular cancer and was able to use that to get around pooping hot for certain things. Allowed him to take different performance enhancing drugs under the guise of doing it for his cancer.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you had experienced the effects of performance enhancing drugs, you would realise that every professional athlete uses them. Only a few get caught!

IMHO they should run 2 Olympics, one for drugless and one for fully loaded! See what those MF’s can do doped to the maxx!!

Anonymous 0 Comments

A huge percentage of professional athletes dope it up, you need elite genetics+drugs to be the best of the best. Sad truth.

Anonymous 0 Comments

No one has said this already, but Lance has since said that one of the biggest reasons is simply that he and his team knew how to avoid random tests by literally hiding from testers and cycling their drug use to test clean when they needed to. The random checks the UCI used were avoidable when you knew you were hot if you knew the guy was coming, either by lookouts or corruption.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why should we be worried? I got bills to pay and the planet is on fire, we should just let them dope. who cares.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Im sorry but “worried about other athletes” literally made me blurt out a laugh. Pro athletes in every sport are on a variety of PEDs. Cycling is especially notable in this matter.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hate to break it to you, but every athlete at the top is on something. It’s just a matter of how good they (or their manager or doctor or whoever) are at timing cycles to not get caught. Drug tests are super easy to pass with PEDs

Anonymous 0 Comments

I know people in his inner circle and spent time in his orbit and coached athletes that were on his teams.

He was DEFINITELY a Malignant Narcissist, to begin with, even before he went to Europe, but the REAL story in Europe was rife with drugs since the very beginning of cycling, so don’t get it twisted. *Cycling has ALWAYS been HEAVILY into drug use, for its entire history.* Our puritanical attitude about it is a new thing, and largely related to Lance’s outrageous behavior finally bringing attention to a sport most people didn’t care about until he was in it.

And he initially thought he could win in Europe without drugs- he thought he was THAT good. Europe proved him wrong and in many ways showed him the basic template of how to cheat and get away with it, as the underlying systems of cheating had existed for 100 years already.

But, there is a VERY simple answer to your question:

He operated like a Mob Boss. That’s how. He still does.

Mob Boss or Don is the best metaphor, and has all of the hallmarks of mob boss behavior:

* **Omerta** – The Mafia code of silence. This is perhaps the clearest and most well-known aspect of his behavior, which he did not invent but perfected.
* **I’m A Legitimate** **Businessman**- Cancer and his Cancer foundation was a cover to a degree that most people don’t fully grasp. It is The Perfect Narrative, and he took pains to ensure he did all of this stuff VERY visibly and was as thorough about this cover as he was with his ‘preparation’; creative, even. The *many* stories of “he didn’t stand to gain anything by helping me” disguised the fact that he DID stand to gain something by helping you, but one you could not imagine due to the Power Of The Perfect Narrative. Such narratives are often used by the Mafia also to ensure a ‘sheen’ of goodwill among those who might have doubts. Look at the Danbury Trashers for example. People TO THIS DAY are SERIOUSLY invested in that narrative.
* **Underboss**- Johan Bruyneel was his Underboss.
* **Capo** – The capo was originally the head of a family in Sicily. Now, the capo is more like a lieutenant who serves the family boss. This would be the other, secondary Director Sportiv’s involved in his teams. Sean Yates, for example, among others, including Michele Ferrari and the Trek technical staff, soigneurs, etc.
* **Family** – Each individual gang within the Mafia is known as a family. Not everyone within a family is actually related, although it is common for relatives of mobsters to be inducted into the same family as their brothers or fathers. Sean Yates graduated into Capo status after being ‘in the family’ and earning Lance’s respect and teaching him not a little about how to do a lot of skillful things on a bike that you can only learn when you’re Sean’s size- like descending.
* **Wiseguy** – Someone who is involved with the Mafia. This includes the rest of the team, the newbies, or people brought in for support that are not expected to directly impact his goals- i.e. the non-Tour team, etc.

Notice that the other ‘leaders’ who left the team you’ll notice would, suddenly, in the middle of the next season “get caught”, which was likely orchestrated by Lance or his ‘family’, if they were any danger to Lance. They would often try to reproduce the ‘formula’ Lance projected but lacked the willpower to pull it off. I’d say Alberto Contador did it best, but even he was not as naturally malignant a personality as Lance was, even before he was as famous as he became.

He corrupted, to some extent, all of cycling in the end, not only most of his lieutenants, staff, and team members, including the UCI itself by using his leverage and vast media impact to effectively control the entire narrative for the entire sport for most of his career, and frankly, he was SO FUCKING GOOD AT THIS that it was only hubris that brought him down- i.e. his comeback.

Once he left for his first retirement, cycling was cleaning itself up and had made improvements to the anti-doping in the short time that he was no longer actively working to counteract those things, so these changes were allowed to evolve and led to his being caught at the end, which he says himself.