His titles would go to Ullrich (3 of them), Zulle, Basso, Kloden and Beloki. So that would be 3 proven drugs cheats and one shady one. Yeah The Tour is Dead, long live the Tour

then the whole process starts all over again......

Degenkolb. Again.

certainly is nippy - good to see CF maintaining his place only 10 seconds behind the yellow , erhh red jersey.. errh

It does seem a tricky precedent to apply consistently.

Applying similar logic, surely they should retrospectively strip every East German athlete or swimmer of their Olympic titles? Where would it end?

A lifetime ban for Armstrong from now (if they've got the evidence) might not have any practical consequences but it would more than taint is career. Trying to re-write the records just seems to cause as many problems as it solves.

What a mess, so we could be seeing guys who didn't even finish on the podium in the "Armstrong years" being awarded Tour wins?...goes to show how widespread it was back then.

The thing is there has been rumours for years over him, has Armstrong's profile and charity work meant a cover up in the UCI?

well, hopefully that's the end of the debacle and cycling can carry on building it's reputation despite all this ridiculous points scoring by the drugs agencies

regarding east german athletes - I don't think I would want to see many of the women 'stripped' as they would look more like men than erhh, men !

Cycling News are running with the story that the reason he never failed a test was that he was tipped off in advance of the testers, suggesting an insider in the anti-doping agencies. Whether that involves the UCI or not, who knows, but it's pretty damning.

There's also the alledged payment of something like 200-400,000 us dollars that he paid to the uci that has been muted about. It's widely thought that this was some.kind of hush money. Which was used ironically to help purchase a new drug detection equipment.

Anyway to talk about cycling cheats. Alberto is starting to look good again. Froomdogs lack of tactical nouce has shown his limitations. Yeah he can have these explosive out of the saddle sprints, however I'm more sure than ever now that Wiggo and his superb VAM stats would've brought him back.

The last mountain stage at the TDF was due to Wiggo getting over excited and wanting to go with a bang instead of playing to his strengths. I'm even. more certain of this now.

Satire is dead.