With Queen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rock anthem \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bicycle Race\u00e2\u20ac\u009d blaring from loudspeakers, the Tour de France sets off for another day, the riders a blaze of color in their lurid shirts. This, undoubtedly, is one of sport\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most spectacular sights.<\/p>\n
But is it believable?<\/p>\n
A decade ago, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his record seven Tour titles, the answer to that question was largely \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Doping had rotted cycling to the core. At least 80 percent of riders in the grand tours of France, Spain and Italy were doping, anti-doping scientists in Switzerland now calculate using blood tests from that time. Back then, researchers in Paris who were working on a method to catch one of the most common forms of cheating struggled to find clean samples to try out their new test…\u00c2\u00a0 Details<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With Queen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rock anthem \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bicycle Race\u00e2\u20ac\u009d blaring from loudspeakers, the Tour de France sets off for another day, the riders a blaze of color in their lurid shirts. This, undoubtedly, is one of sport\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most spectacular sights. But is it believable? A decade ago, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his record seven Tour […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-road-bike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16076"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68060,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16076\/revisions\/68060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}