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Everybody was doping. The speed of the tour climbed until 2005 [1] and the related scandals and then dropped and is now hovering around 40kph. Talking to compe

Everybody was doping. The speed of the tour climbed until 2005 [1] and the related scandals and then dropped and is now hovering around 40kph. Talking to competitive cyclists in the US at the time, everybody knew everyone was doping because it had become physically impossible to do that speed without doping. The top 10 racers were within 0.3% of Armstrong’s time in the 2005 race. They were all doping and several have had their results stricken. Armstrong was the fall guy and object lesson for a general cleanup of the sport because nobody liked him. The rest was hypocrisy. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_s...

watwut 9y ago
He was not just fall guy, he was one of leaders who not just doped, but also pressured others to dope. The pressuring, organizing and leadership part makes it worst then if he would "just doped like everybody else". If we give credit and admiration to leaders when they do good, as is pretty common here, we should give them analogous considerations when they do bad.
- bartread 9y ago
  Agree. But, regardless, all of this makes it extremely difficult to take cycling seriously as a sport. The fact that it marries this kind of terrible behaviour with an almost priggish, "serious business", attitude does little to help.
  - aghillo 9y ago
    Cycling doesn’t seem any worse than other sports, at least in the UK https://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-violations/ https://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-...
    - neuro_imager 9y ago
      Sports do not all benefit equally from PEDs. The requirement to demonstrate high level muscular endurance over such prolonged time periods makes the relative benefits to cyclists very high. This is different to most sports where you are less likely to grossly manipulate the factors contributing to optimal performance with PEDs. Or at least not be able to manipulate them enough to be out of range of talented non-users.
      - jdietrich 9y ago
        Doping can improve speed, strength, endurance, agility and recovery from training and injury. Those can be decisive advantages, even in relatively skill-based sports. They can't turn you into a top performer, but they can push you over the edge from good to great. I think that many sports just aren't looking very hard for dopers. We know that steroid and HGH use has been rife in baseball for many years, because the MLB was forced to implement a serious testing regime after Jose Canseco blew the whistle. Golfers would likely see a similar benefit in terms of explosive power, but the PGA has the bare minimum of anti-doping controls. A suspiciously large number of golfers have returned from the winter break with an extra 15lbs of muscle and 10 yards on their drive. Soccer places high demands on aerobic endurance so players could benefit enormously from EPO use, but FIFA's testing regime is remarkably weak.
- smallgovt 9y ago
  >> If we give credit and admiration to leaders when they do good, as is pretty common here, we should give them analogous considerations when they do bad. Why do you think this dualism should exist? There are certain qualities we admire and think make a good person. There are other qualities that we detest and think make a bad person. Should we really deem someone worse simply for the fact that he/she previously held admirable qualities? Shouldn't we just judge him based on the negative qualities, in of themselves?
  - neuro_imager 9y ago
    The quote "judge talent at its best and character at its worst" seams appropriate here.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Influencing people is not "admirable quality" on itself. It is positive if you do it for good and horrible if you do it for bad. It amplifies your impact. These qualities don't make you good person automaticaly, they oftentimes make you an asshole. Plus environment where everyone wants to he sen as leader tend to be disfunctional.
dmm 9y ago
> Everybody was doping. Lots of people weren't doping. In fact the vast majority of humanity wasn't doping. Many of those non-dopers may have been competitive had cycling not been full of dopers. The cheaters drive the honest out of the sport.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  You took that out of context. The bulk of the tour was doping or they wouldn't have been logging times that would have won every post doping tour.
  - bamboozled 9y ago
    It’s not that simple. It’s possible that the doping squads pulled the non-dopers along with them thus improving the overall completion time of the entire peloton. Sitting in the slip stream of such a huge bunch of doped up riders would be a major energy saver for clean riders and naturally they too would post better times.
throwaway84742 9y ago
Same with the Olympics. If someone wants to tell me those weightlifters are throwing my deadlift 1 rep max overhead without drugs, I’ve got some fine Louisiana swampland I’d like to sell. Except in this case a whole country was a “fall guy” (Russia).
- darkerside 9y ago
  What's your 1RM and body weight?
- kurtisc 9y ago
  For every cheater at the Olympics there are 1000 legal competitors back in their home country.
nabla9 9y ago
>Armstrong was the fall guy He was far worse than just cyclist who doped. Most others just doped, cycled and kept heir head down. Armstrong was toxic bully and leader of the doping world who attempted to destroy other peoples life's. He crossed lines others did not cross. His gangsterism and strong-arm tactics against his accusers over the years deserve no sympathy.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Yep. People need to do more research. This whole "our doped up guy beat your doped up guy" attitude is childishly simplistic. Armstrong was a terrible person and did terrible things to do the sport.
  - stagger87 9y ago
    How do you weigh that against the fact that he simultaneously has probably had the largest positive impact on the sport and hobby of cycling in history?
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      As a cyclist, I have to ask: do you have a source for that claim?
    - subpixel 9y ago
      That ranks below the fact that the ends do not justify the means.
    - nojvek 9y ago
      Positive impact? Everyone I know sees professional cycling as a sport of who has the best doping technique without getting caught. It’s not a sport of pure skill. He is the person who ruined cycling for the rest of the world. Tour de France no longer holds the respect that it used it. It’s like professional body building now. Everyone dopes, the bodies are no longer natural and going into freak category. Tons of heart attacks and we’ve accepted it’s the price of the sport.
nl 9y ago
No they weren't. Read the Tyler Hamilton book ("The Secret Race"). That's the book which really brought down Armstrong. In it he makes clear how much better organized the US Postal Service team was than anyone else (except maybe T-Mobile and ONCE). When he left and went to Phonak he was on his own and had to organize his own doping (which went pretty badly). Yes it's true that there were no clean winners in that era, but there were clean riders. Christophe Bassons' book talks about it a lot, but Wikipedia has a decent summary[1]. It's also worth noting that there are no real allegations of drug use against Pereiro, Sastre, Andy Schleck, Evans and Nibali, who all rode against Armstrong or immediately after him. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Bassons#1999_Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Bassons#1999_Tour
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  Are you saying those top 10 cyclists in 2005 weren't doping? Because they all put in times that have never been matched.
  - sin7 9y ago
    They were doping, but it wasn't systematic. Nor was it a team bonding excessive.
  - nl 9y ago
    The top 10 cyclists in the 2005 Tour?[1] Yes, of them Cadel Evans (8th, 11:55 behind) and Óscar Pereiro (10th, 16:04 behind) probably weren't doping. Christophe Moreau (11th, 16:04) has always claimed he'd stopped doping after leaving Festina in 2002 (and this results kind of back this up). I'm not sure where you get the idea that "they all put in times that have never been matched". It's true that Armstrong's average speed for that Tour was the highest ever. That's not very useful - the route changes every year so you can't really compare it. It is more useful to look at times on long hill climbs to mountain top finishes. Unfortunately the best example in the 2005 Tour (the Courchevel stage) doesn't have widely documented times, so we can't compare. Something like Alpe d’Huez is instructive. You'll note that around the 41 minute+ range you start seeing riders from the 1980s, who can't have been on EPO (since it wasn't invented). It's true that Laurent Fignon was banned for drug use, but the amphetamines he used are completely different to the oxygen vector doping (EPO and variants) used after 1991. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Tour_de_France#General_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Tour_de_France#General_cl... [2] http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/fastest-cycling-times-ever-up-alpe-dhuez-how-many-doping-related/ http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/fastest-cycling-time...
Lio 9y ago
I'm sorry but that's just not true, not all professional cyclists were doping. Even reading the accounts of other confessed dopers of the time such as David Miller. Or see the legal testimony of Frankie and Betsy Andreu record at the time, in court. They were all able to name professional cyclists of the time who were known by them not to be doping. People disliked Armstrong not just because he cheated but because he did things like force other members of his team to to dope and fired those that wouldn't. At the same attacking their reputations so that they couldn't blow the whistle on him. Armstrong wasn't the fall guy because he was famous he was the fall guy because he was the instigator.
- agoodthrowaway 9y ago
  Sorry but it is naive to think people on the Tour were not doping. The tour speeds were simply too high to explain by human physiology. The tour speeds peaked in 2005 and the top riders all within 0.3%. I’ve done amateur cycling racing in 35+ categories and there’s doping even among Cat2 riders today. That’s how deeply doping is embedded in cycling.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    To me it became obvious during the 90s that they must all be doping. It's simply not possible that a lot of top 10 guys get caught while the others don't engage in doping. This stuff is just too effective. I have seen people take steroids and putting on 30 pounds of muscle within a few months after stagnating for years of hard training. You simply can't compete cleanly against that. As far as I know the benefits of epo are also spectacular.
  - Lio 9y ago
    Well you’ve got your “hunch” that there were absolutely no clean riders but on the other hand there’s the testimony of people there at the time who’ve already been convicted. If David Miller says he wasn’t approached about doping until his form started to flag that would indicate that there was a time before he doped. Miller, Hamilton and Landis have all spoken about the riders they cheated of wins. _My_ hunch is that if they believed that everyone riding professionally back then was doping they’d say so and they haven’t. They might not have been in the top ten but they were still riding and still clean.
walrus01 9y ago
Armstrong was not the fall guy. Armstrong and Bruyneel orchestrated the first scientifically organized, methodical, rigorous doping program run as if it was set up by a mafia. They used legal threats and lawsuits to protect themselves for years. They set out to destroy their opponents (The Andreus, French journalists, Greg LeMond, etc). Other senior members of the US postal team and its continuations were highly complicit, Hincapie in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#USADA_investigation_2011–2012 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/sports/lance-armstrong-.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/sports/lance-armstrong...
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  > Armstrong and Bruyneel orchestrated the first scientifically organized, methodical, rigorous doping program Maybe in cycling, it was the first, maybe. State actors have been running these types of doping programs at the Olympic level for a long time.
  - walrus01 9y ago
    The main difference is that the Olympics is a short event. The European continental cycling season is long and has a great number of events, from the early spring classics into the fall. The UCI protour teams were organized very differently than a country's national olympic committee's team. I'm not saying that a great deal of doping didn't exist before the US Postal system made a systematical scientific practice out of it. The 1990s was rife with doping but on a more individual level. What Armstrong and Bruyneel did was organize it, protect it, engage their own scientific analysis resources to find ways to get around in-event and outside-of-competition doping controls, etc. And then bully, lie to, threaten both their own teammates and everyone outside of their inner circle. More info on the team director for US Postal/Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Bruyneel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Bruyneel
FigBug 9y ago
Armstrong would have gotten away with it if he hadn't tried is comeback. He returned to the sport in 2009 and tried to play the game the old way after the game had changed. He'd already won the Tour 7 times, what did he have to gain with his comeback? Nothing -- and he lost it all.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
It's not the doping that I dislike about the man. Doping and PEDs have been as much a part of cycling as the bikes themselves since the Tour de France was inaugurated. The concerted campaign to slander and ruin the lives of those who got in his way or called him out for his actions, that's the thing that made me lose respect for him as a person.
sirtaj 9y ago
No, they were not all doping. Many top-tier cyclists show integrity and character by resisting doping under intense commercial and team pressure, only to be often beaten by dopers. I've probably mentioned this here before, but Nicole Cooke's retirement statement [1] is worth reading. Every medal won by a doper is theft, no less. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-retirement-statement https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-r...
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I don't think any clean athlete has won a top cycle race in a long time. You can't compete against dopers.
handbanana 9y ago
Pretty much this. There's a ton of drugs in sport, and doping goes back to at least the 40s/50s. Steroids and a whole host of other things were legal when Lemond was winning, and lots of other sports had/have issues with doping. There are aren't many sports where the top athletes haven't ever doped (most just never get caught)

watwut 9y ago

He was not just fall guy, he was one of leaders who not just doped, but also pressured others to dope. The pressuring, organizing and leadership part makes it worst then if he would "just doped like everybody else". If we give credit and admiration to leaders when they do good, as is pretty common here, we should give them analogous considerations when they do bad.

bartread 9y ago
Agree. But, regardless, all of this makes it extremely difficult to take cycling seriously as a sport. The fact that it marries this kind of terrible behaviour with an almost priggish, "serious business", attitude does little to help.
- aghillo 9y ago
  Cycling doesn’t seem any worse than other sports, at least in the UK https://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-violations/ https://www.ukad.org.uk/anti-doping-rule-violations/current-...
  - neuro_imager 9y ago
    Sports do not all benefit equally from PEDs. The requirement to demonstrate high level muscular endurance over such prolonged time periods makes the relative benefits to cyclists very high. This is different to most sports where you are less likely to grossly manipulate the factors contributing to optimal performance with PEDs. Or at least not be able to manipulate them enough to be out of range of talented non-users.
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      Doping can improve speed, strength, endurance, agility and recovery from training and injury. Those can be decisive advantages, even in relatively skill-based sports. They can't turn you into a top performer, but they can push you over the edge from good to great. I think that many sports just aren't looking very hard for dopers. We know that steroid and HGH use has been rife in baseball for many years, because the MLB was forced to implement a serious testing regime after Jose Canseco blew the whistle. Golfers would likely see a similar benefit in terms of explosive power, but the PGA has the bare minimum of anti-doping controls. A suspiciously large number of golfers have returned from the winter break with an extra 15lbs of muscle and 10 yards on their drive. Soccer places high demands on aerobic endurance so players could benefit enormously from EPO use, but FIFA's testing regime is remarkably weak.
smallgovt 9y ago
>> If we give credit and admiration to leaders when they do good, as is pretty common here, we should give them analogous considerations when they do bad. Why do you think this dualism should exist? There are certain qualities we admire and think make a good person. There are other qualities that we detest and think make a bad person. Should we really deem someone worse simply for the fact that he/she previously held admirable qualities? Shouldn't we just judge him based on the negative qualities, in of themselves?
- neuro_imager 9y ago
  The quote "judge talent at its best and character at its worst" seams appropriate here.
- watwut 9y ago
  Influencing people is not "admirable quality" on itself. It is positive if you do it for good and horrible if you do it for bad. It amplifies your impact. These qualities don't make you good person automaticaly, they oftentimes make you an asshole. Plus environment where everyone wants to he sen as leader tend to be disfunctional.

dmm 9y ago

> Everybody was doping. Lots of people weren't doping. In fact the vast majority of humanity wasn't doping. Many of those non-dopers may have been competitive had cycling not been full of dopers. The cheaters drive the honest out of the sport.

Ensorceled 9y ago
You took that out of context. The bulk of the tour was doping or they wouldn't have been logging times that would have won every post doping tour.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  It’s not that simple. It’s possible that the doping squads pulled the non-dopers along with them thus improving the overall completion time of the entire peloton. Sitting in the slip stream of such a huge bunch of doped up riders would be a major energy saver for clean riders and naturally they too would post better times.

throwaway84742 9y ago

Same with the Olympics. If someone wants to tell me those weightlifters are throwing my deadlift 1 rep max overhead without drugs, I’ve got some fine Louisiana swampland I’d like to sell. Except in this case a whole country was a “fall guy” (Russia).

darkerside 9y ago
What's your 1RM and body weight?
kurtisc 9y ago
For every cheater at the Olympics there are 1000 legal competitors back in their home country.

nabla9 9y ago

>Armstrong was the fall guy He was far worse than just cyclist who doped. Most others just doped, cycled and kept heir head down. Armstrong was toxic bully and leader of the doping world who attempted to destroy other peoples life's. He crossed lines others did not cross. His gangsterism and strong-arm tactics against his accusers over the years deserve no sympathy.

cup-of-tea 9y ago
Yep. People need to do more research. This whole "our doped up guy beat your doped up guy" attitude is childishly simplistic. Armstrong was a terrible person and did terrible things to do the sport.
- stagger87 9y ago
  How do you weigh that against the fact that he simultaneously has probably had the largest positive impact on the sport and hobby of cycling in history?
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    As a cyclist, I have to ask: do you have a source for that claim?
  - subpixel 9y ago
    That ranks below the fact that the ends do not justify the means.
  - nojvek 9y ago
    Positive impact? Everyone I know sees professional cycling as a sport of who has the best doping technique without getting caught. It’s not a sport of pure skill. He is the person who ruined cycling for the rest of the world. Tour de France no longer holds the respect that it used it. It’s like professional body building now. Everyone dopes, the bodies are no longer natural and going into freak category. Tons of heart attacks and we’ve accepted it’s the price of the sport.

nl 9y ago

No they weren't. Read the Tyler Hamilton book ("The Secret Race"). That's the book which really brought down Armstrong. In it he makes clear how much better organized the US Postal Service team was than anyone else (except maybe T-Mobile and ONCE). When he left and went to Phonak he was on his own and had to organize his own doping (which went pretty badly). Yes it's true that there were no clean winners in that era, but there were clean riders. Christophe Bassons' book talks about it a lot, but Wikipedia has a decent summary[1]. It's also worth noting that there are no real allegations of drug use against Pereiro, Sastre, Andy Schleck, Evans and Nibali, who all rode against Armstrong or immediately after him. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Bassons#1999_Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christophe_Bassons#1999_Tour

Ensorceled 9y ago
Are you saying those top 10 cyclists in 2005 weren't doping? Because they all put in times that have never been matched.
- sin7 9y ago
  They were doping, but it wasn't systematic. Nor was it a team bonding excessive.
- nl 9y ago
  The top 10 cyclists in the 2005 Tour?[1] Yes, of them Cadel Evans (8th, 11:55 behind) and Óscar Pereiro (10th, 16:04 behind) probably weren't doping. Christophe Moreau (11th, 16:04) has always claimed he'd stopped doping after leaving Festina in 2002 (and this results kind of back this up). I'm not sure where you get the idea that "they all put in times that have never been matched". It's true that Armstrong's average speed for that Tour was the highest ever. That's not very useful - the route changes every year so you can't really compare it. It is more useful to look at times on long hill climbs to mountain top finishes. Unfortunately the best example in the 2005 Tour (the Courchevel stage) doesn't have widely documented times, so we can't compare. Something like Alpe d’Huez is instructive. You'll note that around the 41 minute+ range you start seeing riders from the 1980s, who can't have been on EPO (since it wasn't invented). It's true that Laurent Fignon was banned for drug use, but the amphetamines he used are completely different to the oxygen vector doping (EPO and variants) used after 1991. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Tour_de_France#General_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Tour_de_France#General_cl... [2] http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/fastest-cycling-times-ever-up-alpe-dhuez-how-many-doping-related/ http://www.stickybottle.com/latest-news/fastest-cycling-time...

Lio 9y ago

I'm sorry but that's just not true, not all professional cyclists were doping. Even reading the accounts of other confessed dopers of the time such as David Miller. Or see the legal testimony of Frankie and Betsy Andreu record at the time, in court. They were all able to name professional cyclists of the time who were known by them not to be doping. People disliked Armstrong not just because he cheated but because he did things like force other members of his team to to dope and fired those that wouldn't. At the same attacking their reputations so that they couldn't blow the whistle on him. Armstrong wasn't the fall guy because he was famous he was the fall guy because he was the instigator.

agoodthrowaway 9y ago
Sorry but it is naive to think people on the Tour were not doping. The tour speeds were simply too high to explain by human physiology. The tour speeds peaked in 2005 and the top riders all within 0.3%. I’ve done amateur cycling racing in 35+ categories and there’s doping even among Cat2 riders today. That’s how deeply doping is embedded in cycling.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  To me it became obvious during the 90s that they must all be doping. It's simply not possible that a lot of top 10 guys get caught while the others don't engage in doping. This stuff is just too effective. I have seen people take steroids and putting on 30 pounds of muscle within a few months after stagnating for years of hard training. You simply can't compete cleanly against that. As far as I know the benefits of epo are also spectacular.
- Lio 9y ago
  Well you’ve got your “hunch” that there were absolutely no clean riders but on the other hand there’s the testimony of people there at the time who’ve already been convicted. If David Miller says he wasn’t approached about doping until his form started to flag that would indicate that there was a time before he doped. Miller, Hamilton and Landis have all spoken about the riders they cheated of wins. _My_ hunch is that if they believed that everyone riding professionally back then was doping they’d say so and they haven’t. They might not have been in the top ten but they were still riding and still clean.

walrus01 9y ago

Armstrong was not the fall guy. Armstrong and Bruyneel orchestrated the first scientifically organized, methodical, rigorous doping program run as if it was set up by a mafia. They used legal threats and lawsuits to protect themselves for years. They set out to destroy their opponents (The Andreus, French journalists, Greg LeMond, etc). Other senior members of the US postal team and its continuations were highly complicit, Hincapie in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#USADA_investigation_2011–2012 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#... https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/sports/lance-armstrong-.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/sports/lance-armstrong...

Ensorceled 9y ago
> Armstrong and Bruyneel orchestrated the first scientifically organized, methodical, rigorous doping program Maybe in cycling, it was the first, maybe. State actors have been running these types of doping programs at the Olympic level for a long time.
- walrus01 9y ago
  The main difference is that the Olympics is a short event. The European continental cycling season is long and has a great number of events, from the early spring classics into the fall. The UCI protour teams were organized very differently than a country's national olympic committee's team. I'm not saying that a great deal of doping didn't exist before the US Postal system made a systematical scientific practice out of it. The 1990s was rife with doping but on a more individual level. What Armstrong and Bruyneel did was organize it, protect it, engage their own scientific analysis resources to find ways to get around in-event and outside-of-competition doping controls, etc. And then bully, lie to, threaten both their own teammates and everyone outside of their inner circle. More info on the team director for US Postal/Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Bruyneel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Bruyneel

FigBug 9y ago

Armstrong would have gotten away with it if he hadn't tried is comeback. He returned to the sport in 2009 and tried to play the game the old way after the game had changed. He'd already won the Tour 7 times, what did he have to gain with his comeback? Nothing -- and he lost it all.

toomanybeersies 9y ago

It's not the doping that I dislike about the man. Doping and PEDs have been as much a part of cycling as the bikes themselves since the Tour de France was inaugurated. The concerted campaign to slander and ruin the lives of those who got in his way or called him out for his actions, that's the thing that made me lose respect for him as a person.

sirtaj 9y ago

No, they were not all doping. Many top-tier cyclists show integrity and character by resisting doping under intense commercial and team pressure, only to be often beaten by dopers. I've probably mentioned this here before, but Nicole Cooke's retirement statement [1] is worth reading. Every medal won by a doper is theft, no less. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-retirement-statement https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-r...

maxxxxx 9y ago
I don't think any clean athlete has won a top cycle race in a long time. You can't compete against dopers.

handbanana 9y ago

Pretty much this. There's a ton of drugs in sport, and doping goes back to at least the 40s/50s. Steroids and a whole host of other things were legal when Lemond was winning, and lots of other sports had/have issues with doping. There are aren't many sports where the top athletes haven't ever doped (most just never get caught)