The French Are At It Again
Personally, I don’t know whether Lance Armstrong had any performance enhancing drugs in his system in 1999. I think it’s pretty proven that for these last few tours, there is no way he did. But regardless, the only thing that can be proved by some French magazine testing 1999 urine samples is that the French really hate Americans. In general, Europeans can’t seem to get over the fact that an American has now won the Tour de France more consecutive times than anyone in the history of the race. It was one thing for an American with a French name like LeMond to win a few times, but Armstrong’s domination was too much for them. So like any sore loser, L’Equipe is attacking in a way that can only do one thing, cast doubt over Armstrong and cycling in general. Because they were using samples from 1999, there is no possible way for retesting or submitting to further tests. All they are doing is saying “see, we did this very objective test. Trust us! He’s bad like we always knew he was!”
As Lance points out on his web-site, even L’Equipe had to admit some of this:
The paper even admits in its own article that the science in question here is faulty and that I have no way to defend myself. They state: ?There will therefore be no counter-exam nor regulatory prosecutions, in a strict sense, since defendant?s rights cannot be respected.?
So just to be clear here folks, they are saying — “Look how bad he is, and he can’t defend himself because this was just something we dug up from 1999. But nothing else other than trashing his reputation will be done.” By publishing these results, they have proven only one thing — how much they hate Lance Armstrong and most likely, how much they hate Americans.