Russ Smith

I just started reading a book last night(can't remember the title offhand) aobut doping in cycling. Talk about scary stuff. But one of the fascinating
things is why so many cyclists seem to come down with serious illnesses at a young age in the peak of health, like Lance Armstrong did. Because for years one of the ways they doped was giving them injections of cortisone which they believed help dramatically in recovery time from exertion. Of course cortisone suppresses your immune system, in one case a guy who was on the same junior team as Lance developed a severe case of human parvo virus that ended his career eventually. He was never fully recovered.

Parvo is apparently extremely common, over 60% of people will get it at some point in their lives, but it's usually harmless. IN his case he got it so severely he lost over 2 full years of his career and was never the same after.
He's convinced he got infected from a dirty needle that a doctor injected him with who told him it was "extract of cortisone." THe rider is now a doctor and knows that there is no such thing, it was straight cortisone and he's convinced that's why his infection was so bad.

All kinds of stuff about riders dying of heart attacks because EPO made their blood so thick they got a blood clot while sleeping. Guys used to rig heart monitors to alarms so that if their heart rate dropped too low it would wake them up so they could start doing jumping jacks to get the pulse rate up before they had a heart attack! 10 dutch riders in less than 2 years died of heart attacks from EPO in the late 80's early 90's.

I haven't gotten to the part yet about Landis right now they're tying in all these guys who at one point had ties to Lance Armstrong and were doping and building the case that Lance did too. The implication is that Landis had been suspected of doping for quite awhile prior to his TDF win but it got very little hype because nobody cared about Floyd Landis until after Lance retired.

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