Posted on 01/16/2013 2:23:57 PM PST by Kaslin
Another day. Another scandal. Another high-profile celebrity headed to Oprah’s couch to express contrition and try to resuscitate his image. Today it’s Lance Armstrong, but tomorrow it will be someone else -- which is why I believe it’s time to say enough is enough. No more free passes for our children’s role models.
I don’t know Lance Armstrong and apparently nobody else really did either. What I knew was the same cynically constructed fairy tale that he sold all of us: the inspirational story of a young cyclist who nearly died from cancer and was resurrected through the miracles of modern medicine and his own indomitable spirit. The dedicated, focused, gifted and meticulous athlete who pushed himself beyond all barriers of pain to achieve an unprecedented seven Tour de France victories.
But now the truth is finally coming out and the magical tale has lost its luster -- it turns out that his critics were right all along. Lance Armstrong was actually a doper; a cheat who betrayed his sport, his fans, the cancer survivors who looked up to him as a modern-day superman. So recently he sat with Oprah to tape an interview and we all must now wait for Thursday’s airing to judge for ourselves the sincerity of his “confession.”
But I don’t need to see crocodile tears or listen to words carefully constructed by crisis PR experts. Enough is enough. Lance Armstrong should be held fully accountable and we shouldn’t be so quick to forgive the horrible offenses that he committed. He can only look skyward for true forgiveness.
We owe it to today’s youth not to so quickly forgive Lance Armstrong and not to just sweep this whole sordid saga under the rug and let him move on with his life. Americans are a remarkably forgiving society and everyone makes mistakes, but this is something altogether different. A lie of this magnitude cannot be permitted to be trivialized.
Lance is just the last in a string of public figures that let us all down -- and then are given a free pass. Bill Clinton violated one of the ten10 commandments, inside the Oval Office and then lied under oath and to the public about it. Today he has been redeemed, and is revered by the Democratic Party. Tiger Woods admitted to a series of infidelities and, while his golf name has never returned to the same stratospheric levels, has largely moved on.
If we give Lance Armstrong a pass then the real message we send our children is that you can make hundreds of millions of dollars in sponsorships and achieve world-wide fame by cheating -- you just have to make sure that you don’t get caught or you might be embarrassed.
We’re about to become a dictatorship with firearms confiscation and “enemies-of-the-state” round-ups, so forgive me if I can’t muster up any interest in Lance Armstrong or any other wayward celebrity
The lesson learned is that in most endeavors where one attempts to achieve the top rung the limits are pushed, some may push more than others but most all will push as far as they can.
That doesn’t forgive or mitigate the efforts but that is just reality amongst elite competitors in nearly any activity.
So you’re saying Lance Armstrong has replaced Carl Marx as a role model in the minds of public school children?
Why doesn’t anyone seem to care about all of the people who came in second place during those years. That can NEVER be “fixed” or “apologized for”. Those moments never happened for those people and are permanently gone. For THAT ALONE, he should be vilified and scorned.
Too bad you are feeble minded enough to have celebrity role models in the first place instead of striving to be a real role model yourself.
Half of them had failed drug tests too. Track and field and cycling have such epic levels of doping there’s races where the 5th place performer on the day is now the winner. There’s an Olympic sprint from the 90s that no longer has a bronze medal winner, because 6 of the 8 people in the final heat had their stored samples fail later tests. In many sports trophies are lent, not given. NCAA football is on that path thanks to “recruiting violations” that always take 3 or 4 years to investigate.
As Lance seeks forgiveness, let’s not forget that he ruined many other peoples’ lives, businesses and reputations (nuts and sluts attacks, had Trek terminate its relationship with Greg Lemond, filed frivolous lawsuits against anyone who dared to question him, etc.) in order to perpetuate the fraud. And there is some belief that his cancer was actually caused by the doping. He is the lowest form of scum.
Yes, that’s what I’ve been hearing too. The lives he has ruined. I believe Armstrong will be in court for many years to come, and I hope he ends up penniless.
I believe Armstrong will be in court for many years to come, and I hope he ends up penniless.
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Won’t happen , he’ll just move somewhere that won’t enforce foreign (US) decisions.
The way Lance dumped his wife, became an absentee dad and ran off to Hollywood told me what I needed to know about his character. I’m not at all surprised his lies finally unraveled.
One fraud deserves another, so it's totally appropriate that he apparently sat with Oprah and cried out of one eye as part of his "redemption."
The one thing that ought to put Lance Armstrong at the bottom of anyone's toilet is not that he denied the allegations of his performance-enhancing drug use for years -- but that he actually had the shameless b@lls to vilify those who accused him.
At one time supposedly 3 million Democrats in TX wanted Armstrong to run for governor.
Adults built up the name of Lance Armstrong when they were inspired by his cancer story and wanted to support the guy they admired, although most still couldn't enjoy watching the sport any better than anyone else. Adults who saw him as a role model are the few slightly affected.
www.OathKeepers.org
Good post. I don't think his adult fans are disappointed either. Somewhere out there, though, there must be a few kids whose fathers encouraged them to take Lance as a role model. If any of them did, they might be disappointed, but it's not like he was Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan.
I would support that statement ONLY if the USADA were to devote the same scrutiny to the top 20 finishers in all the TDF's that Armstrong participated in.
And I would also demand that the top 30 modern day stage winners of the TDF also be included in that investigation........as a side note, Armstrong isn't one of them.
Probably Armstrong thought that they were fellow dopers who had the shameless b@lls to accuse him of what they were doing themselves -- and what everybody was doing.
Lance doesn't sound like a very classy act, though. He's gotten in more "feuds" than anyone since the Hatfields and McCoys, and apparently he doesn't treat the racers who subordinated their careers to his very well.
Because no one knows who they were, and couldn’t care less. Armstrong was a huge marketing success. He was marketed personally because his sport isn’t exactly a spectator friendly sport to say the least. He definitely didn’t have many child fans lol. Kids were never interested in his personal story, or in watching days of a boring race happening in slow motion on TV.
Liberal elites like Oprah put on dog and pony shows for the masses. Oprah doesn’t care about all the people who played by the rules and were beat by this cheater. She cares about how much passion and butt kissing the guy can do FOR HER.
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