Posted on 11/20/2012 12:11:09 PM PST by Notary Sojac
After months of bad press, the greatest competitive cyclist of all time has officially hit rock bottom: The Lance Armstrong Foundation has dropped the name of its eponymous creator and will now be known as the Livestrong Foundation. Rest easy, Lance, it can’t get much – or is that any? – worse.
His story is unparalleled, Shakespearean in scope and breadth. A cocky, gum-flapping athlete battled insurmountable odds after a devastating cancer diagnosis, his greasy soul barely slipping the surly clutches of a certain dirt nap. Ultimately, he rehabilitated his battered body and morphed into a champion.
Not only did Lance Armstrong improbably return to the sport he loved, professional cycling, he used his unfailing narrative as a stick and beat to death his opponents by winning the most grueling sporting event on the planet of earth: The Tour De France. Seven motherloving times!
He must have had help, right? I mean, you can’t just win the Tour that many times without some aid and angels. Could all the old ladies’ prayers and good wishes really have propelled this flesh rocket up the Pyrenees and down the Alps? If they could, Robert Urich would have more Olympic medals than Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz combined. But he doesn’t. Because he’s dead. Sorry, grandma.
As much as everyone wanted to believe Lance’s performance was the result of clean living and hard training, there were whispers for years that he was dirtier than a bum’s ass. The French cycling daily L’Equipe published a long story in August 2005 accusing him of failing a 1999 drug test by using EPO, or erythropoietin, a blood booster commonly used by cyclists to aid in red blood-cell production. The French said he was a habitual doper who had enough money and support to insulate himself from the rules that sought to protect the sport from enhanced athletes who posed an unfair advantage to non-tainted riders. Lance said he didn’t trust the French testing system, probably because they detected those pesky drugs.
When Armstrong gave up the fight in August 2012 against the U.S. Anti Doping Agency (USADA), people’s love turned to sheer outrage and they took his declaration to fight the charges no more forever as an act of personal betrayal. How could cancer boy have put something in his pure body to get him up those hills faster, to knock over those time trials like Southern damsels fainting from the vapors?
But as backlash gripped Lance fans, there was a deeper question more important than simple outrage: Why are people so mad at Lance Armstrong when logic should have told them the guy was doing nothing short of spiking his veins, spinning his blood, and biting off chicken heads to achieve his inhuman feats?
To put it a little differently: The rules pushed by the USADA and the International Cycling Union (UCI) are so arbitrary and widely flouted that it shouldn’t be a big deal that Lance, like most of his comptetitors, broke the rules. You don’t have to have a doctorate in pharmacology to know Lance cheated, but why is it wrong?
The standard answer is simply: Drugs are bad, m’kay? Now this is the aspect that should make the libertarian in all of us wince. Why are drugs bad? Because they’re bad, that’s why. The circular argument is that putting bad things in your body is dangerous and unfair and thus immoral and dangerous. But plenty of things are dangerous and unfair. How about zooming down one-lane, winding mountain passes with eager teenagers ringing cowbells in your face, otherwise known as a typical stage in the Tour de France? That seems kind of dangerous.
It’s highly unlikely Amaury Sport Organization, the body that organizes the Tour, is going to ban enthusiastic spectation. But if they did, would you be outraged by someone ringing a cowbell simply because it’s now illegal? Cycling is by nature dangerous, especially when it’s done right, because a light, strong rider will be able to propel himself at great speeds, virtually unprotected from collision or calamity should he tumble from his steel steed. Professional cyclists may be idiots, but they’re not your children. Cycling is deadlier than the drugs you can consume to make yourself faster at it, so either way, you’re hastening your own death, or at least flirting with the Grim Reaper like a cheap, Charlie-soaked bar girl.
What about the idea that using drugs is unfair because not everyone uses them equally? In addition to taking performance-enhancing drugs like EPO and testosterone (and paying to cover up positive tests), Lance is accused by the USADA of blood doping. That is essentially harvesting your own oxygen-rich blood cells (or borrowing some from a friendly matching donor - thanks bro!) and later injecting them at a critical point (like before a bike race) to deliver more oxygen to working muscles so they can perform longer and stronger.
Of all the techniques and tools in the cycling arsenal, this one I find totally inoffensive. It’s your blood! If you want to make yourself all sickly and anemic and shiver like a hairless cat when the refrigerated sanguine smoothie glugs back into your body, then have at it. As far as I’m concerned, if drinking your own urine somehow made you faster in a time trial, then bottoms up. It’s gross, and it’s weird, but it’s yours.
If any rider in a UCI-sanctioned race wanted to deliver more oxygen to their working systems by strapping on an oxygen tank like an octogenarian on the nickel slots at the Golden Nugget, they are free to do that, according to the World Doping Agency’s banned list. So you can have an oxygen tank on your back but not in your recycled blood, which only makes the means of transmission problematic. Hey wait a second, that’s not your air! You didn’t breathe that!
Imagine the unfair advantages a multi-millionaire celebrity like Lance Armstrong has over less-wealthy rivals: He can buy the best chefs, nutritionists, masseurs, physical therapists, movement specialists, physiologists, acupuncturists, chakra balancers, and ball tuggers. Lance could have a mountain chateau in Tourmalet, a climate-controlled bungalow in San Sebastian, a compound in Colorado for high-elevation training, and an oxygen-deprivation gym for cross training. He could have gadgets and gizmos to knead his sore calves when the servants retired for the evening, he could sleep in Michale Jackson’s old hyperbaric chamber (Bubbles is lonely!), he could extract the marrow of Heraclitus and spread it on toast points. With all the technology available in nutrition, medicine, components, bike frames, shoes, pointy, goofy-ass racing helmets, and every other element of cycling,everything could be deemed unfair, or unnatural!
Money is an advantage, technology is an advantage, genes are an advantage (or disadvantage, in many cases!). None of it is fair.
Here is a proposal for reform: Why not have two cycling leagues and see which one earns riders the most support from fans and sponsors? Let the market decide! TV ratings for the Tour De France doubled when Lance Armstrong was racing, and even now with wider cable distribution and a larger available audience the numbers were much smaller for the 2012 Tour than they were for Lance’s last victory in 2005. It could be like bodybuilding which has a “natural” non-juiced circuit. You could allow purists their riders who could conquer the great climbs of the world on diets of grass and coconut milk (because animal protein of any kind would be an unfair advantage). Then there would be a circuit for doping, manipulative assholes on another. Who do you think would attract a bigger crowd? A larger audience? More endorsements?
Lance Armstrong is guilty of a lot in the eyes of the UCI and USADA, two groups so profoundly mired in their mutual disdain it’s a miracle they can conjure charges and responses in between bouts of flinging feces at each other. USADA claims Lance paid UCI to cover up at least one positive drug test, and UCI claims USADA’s mama’s so big she straps buses to her feet to go roller skating. It’s that ugly. What is uglier still is the arbitrary nature with which substances and procedures are banned, wasting millions of tax dollars through USADA (which gets funding from the drug czar's office, of all places!) and the failed Department of Justice investigation against Armstrong, which should have never been launched in the first place. Policing sport is not the role of the government.
Remember your outrage and why you detest a guy who was doing the same thing his predecessors had done legally just a few years before, and that all his adversaries were doing concurrently. Save some of your bile to curse the name of Laurent Fignon, the guy who won the tour in 1983 and 1984, the years before blood doping was banned. He admitted to using amphetamines and cortisol, but no one is retroactively calling for him to give back his prize money, mostly because he is dead. Are you as angry with Laurent as you are at Lance? And if you are, how do you feel about Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour and a longtime critic of Armstrong? In the 1989 Tour, LeMond beat Fignon by a mere eight seconds(!), partly because LeMond wisely availed himself of all sorts of aerodynamically progressive equipment. Fignon, a Frenchman who disdained innovation that couldn't be shot directly into his ass, even refused to cut his ponytail, causing extra drag and precious lost seconds over the 21-stage race.
What if “science” deems blood-doping and injectables as innocuous (and generally useless) as the creams and supplements they sell at GNC? With falling viewership and global loss of interest in cycling, it’s more than likely that the powers that be will expand the list of accepted drugs and practices. If the day comes when cyclists can finally emerge from the shadows and party-hearty with their testosterone, their EPO, even an ELO mixed tape, make sure you know why you hate Lance Armstrong. It’s not because he made his former teammate and defrocked Tour winner Floyd Landis babysit a mini-fridge full of Lance blood for a long, hot, Austin summer, or because he shrunk his weenis with hormone injections, or had better oxygen-uptake than you.
No, it’s because in the end, Lance refused to admit what was as plain as the saddle sore on your butt after a 115-mile ride: that he cheated to win, and nobody did it better. No man is a hero to his former personal assistant, but Lance Armstrong was an asshole until the very end.
Lance should never had himself photographed with Geroge Bush on a bike ride. Big mistake!
Did anyone seriously believe that Lance Armstrong could recover from cancer and get back into competition shape without some performance enhancing drugs? I don’t think that anyone would be dumb enough to believe that was possible. Frankly, with or without the performance enhancing drugs, I give Armstrong an awful lot of credit for his accomplishments of beating cancer and returning to competition.
Rules against performance enhancers are idiotic. No one wants to see some seedy looking grain-eater pushing their yogurt fueled ass up a mountain in lackadaisical time spans.
No. We want to see the inhuman. We want that experience pushed to the edge and beyond and to have someone come back and tell us what it was like...
Striving to be more than human is older than Herakles.
Set up a parallel line of sports for those willing to push their bodies to destruction for glory and fame. Mere-humes can compete against other Mere-humes. Morethans can compete against Morethans... It'd be interesting to see which one garners more viewership and ad revenue.
The biking commission or whatever they’re called in accordance with their own rules and regulations ruled against Armstrong.
Just as we’re supposed to accept and respect the ruling of the OJ jury, no matter how ignorant and stupid they were, shouldn’t we accept and respect the biking commission’s ruling?
I can’t answer about a third party, but he’s been busted a few times.
If you’re interested in Armstrong, confused, and want to get to the bottom of it, read Hamilton’s book.
The most damning evidence was collected, and published, by Americans. So we remain superior to the French, in that regard.
“Nope. You’re not familiar with this. Armstrong is guilty as hell and there’s all the evidence in the world.”
I got the impression that he was above repproach for years because he was some sort of “American Hero”, but now that Heil Hussein declared war on America, he had to go.
Nevertheless, for people to proclaim Armstrong’s innocence because no one ever found a syringe or a positive test result would be like expecting that a murderer can’t be convicted of a murder if the body was never found.
“Just as we’re supposed to accept and respect the ruling of the OJ jury, no matter how ignorant and stupid they were, shouldn’t we accept and respect the biking commission’s ruling?”
Apparently the answer is “NO” for those who really, REALLY want to believe.
How little many of us differ from leftist Hussein Head Commie freaks....
...and not a word about the cyclists who racked up more individual stage wins in almost all of Armstrong's TDF wins...
In fact, despite all of Armstrong's TDF appearances and wins, he's not even in the top 25 of individual stage winners.
This was a government financed witch hunt and the government finally won......
Who's he next target?
My nomination for the shortest list in the world:
1. Tour de France cyclists who never doped.
And who else in the top 10 riders during that time frame were guilty also but were never invesigated by our government?
Or is this just a domestic issue?
Correction needed, he has never admitted to using drugs......
If you wish to examine Armstrong's record, then how many of the top 20 stage winners of the TDF (of which Armstrong was not a member of) were given the same government scrutiny?
Pols cheat the public everyday.
Was Armstrong really the drug induced superman you are making him out to be? If so, then please tell me how he was only able to accumulate between only one and three stage wins during each TDF while numerous Europeans scored more........
Winning at all after cancer is winning big.
My nomination for the shortest list in the world:
1. Tour de France cyclists who never doped.
So true. The problem the tour had with the stripping of lances titles is that the runners up in most years had been convicted of drugs usage....
Sad state for a sport that demands the ultimate in endurance/tactics/guts....
To ride 2000+miles over a course of weeks, with mountains, time trials thrown
in is daunting.
If you have ever ridden 50 miles at a leisurely pace you know of what I speak....
Not condoning doping etc.... just respecting the challenge they face
I think that the events of this last election, i.e., the extreme fraud by the democrats, has lowered the bar for any type of cheating. If Obama gets the big prize as the result of cheating, why not Lance? At least he has some redeeming social value via his work with cancer. Obama has never done anything for anyone except his own little blue-lipped self.
(Not condoning Lance; just making a point as devil’s advocate.)
The deliberate government driven destruction of Armstrong does more to harm the charities that he has supported and that have endorsed him than will ever do to make the sport of cycling drug free.........
Who cares how fast some guy can ride a bicycle? You want them to quit cheating? Quit watching. You don’t see a lot of cheating where there’s no money involved. I can watch the neighbor kid ride his bike. If you like watching cheaters, well, then, that’s different than watching bicycle racing. Then you reward the cheaters. Ohhh........
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