Lance Armstrong

IdleRich

IdleRich
Anyone been following all this? I'm not really a cycling fan but I have two friends who follow it religiously and (because they don't know each other) I've been a proxy for their pro/anti Lance arguments over the last year or so. Glad it's all finally come out and that LA has confessed to doping, making it impossible for even his most blinkered supporters to deny. So what happens now? For him and for cycling?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I'm intrigued as to the furore around drugs in sport in general tbh. Athletics, cycling etc are never going to be clean - those trying to break the rules will always be one step ahead of those trying to enforce them, because of the potential rewards available. This in itself is interesting, often more intriguing than the sport itself. I don't feel particularly duped if I find out an athlete has been taking drugs - it's more that they're the ones who have been caught, and interest in how others are evading detection.

On a human level, Armstrong's story is very interesting - would make a great movie. Much more interesting than watching cycling.
 

Leo

Well-known member
not sure lance's "apology" helped him very much. he still came off as incredibly narcissistic, certainly no one i know came away from it with any sympathy or compassion for him. and i don't buy the "oh, everyone does it" argument. that's like saying it's ok to bail out banks because everyone made risky investments and shouldn't be held accountable. how about the moral hazard?

also, he's a shit for more than just doping: he bullied teammates into doping and lying about it (ultimately their own fault but still), accepted millions in sponsorship dollars while knowingly violating the no-doping terms of the contracts, and won numerous lawsuits (and received millions in cash settlements) against people who accused him of doping.

what's the old adage about "it's not the crime, it's the cover up"? doping was the mistake, for which people can be forgiven. but knowingly cheating sponsors and ruining people financially by committing perjury and winning lawsuits makes you a total shit.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think that the reason that there is so much schadenfreude (especially from journalists) is cos he was so incredibly vindictive in his pursuit of people (especially journalists) who accused him of doping. He really did deliberately ruin (and attempt to ruin) people's careers. But he still had his defenders until the confession as those who chose not to see were able to point to no failed drug tests and argue that the majority of witnesses were compromised. I think that the confession is gonna alienate even those and will certainly win him few friends.
 

Leo

Well-known member
i think someone here said this before about doping (perhaps in an olympics thread): we should have separate leagues (olympics, football, cycling, whatever) where anything goes. let everyone take as many drugs as you want, and have a no-holds-barred clash of the hulking superman titans. would probably get better tv ratings than the real thing.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
it's this see no evil hear no evil thing in sports that is so fucked. Much as I loathe him for other reasons, Suarez was just saying what we all know when he admitting to diving. It's not a moral issue even - it's just part of the game. If you're clever and don't get caught, well, fair enough I guess. It's part of the game itself, and the general blanket denial of the authorities is kind of pathetic. Don't make winning so important (or lucrative) if you don't want people to bend the rules to get there.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Well, stupid if he expected no repercussions in the English context. But i guess the cliche is that in south America, saying that wouldn't be a big deal. I don't know if this is totally true or overstated as a cliche, but....
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
Nicole Cooke:

After the Festina tour in 1998 it was obvious to everyone who followed the sport that drugs were endemic. Like many, I hoped I could win races clean and that things would improve in that dark world as my career progressed.

We were all told in 1999 that testing was now improved and the show had been cleaned up. After all we now had a new, brighter than bright, clean tour Champion in Lance.

[...]
I am appalled that so many men bleat on about the fact that the pressures were too great. Too great for what? This is not doing 71 mph on the motorway when the legal limit is 70. This is stealing somebody else's livelihood. It is theft just as much as putting your hand in a purse or wallet and taking money is theft. Theft has gone on since the dawn of time but because somebody, somewhere else, does it, does not mean it is right for you to do it. There can be no excuse.

[...]
Tyler Hamilton will make more money from his book describing how he cheated than Bessette or I will make in all our years of our honest labour. The situation requires the very basics of morality. Please don't reward people like Hamilton with money. That is the last thing he needs. Donate his literary prize and subsequent earnings from such publications to a charity. There are many places infinitely more deserving than the filthy hands of Hamilton. I am happy to offer some ideas!

[...]
I have been robbed by drug cheats, but I am fortunate, I am here before you with more in my basket than the 12 year old dreamed of. But for many genuine people out there who do ride clean; people with morals, many of these people have had to leave the sport with nothing after a lifetime of hard work — some going through horrific financial turmoil. When Lance "cries" on Oprah later this week and she passes him a tissue, spare a thought for all of those genuine people who walked away with no reward – just shattered dreams. Each one of them is worth a thousand Lances.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/jan/14/nicole-cooke-retirement-statement
 
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trza

Well-known member
I think throughout his career LA's behavior was justified as "being competitive". Any kind of delta bravo story about the guy was just passed on as "he just cares about winning". Even one of the hosts on ESPN knew him in High School and kept claiming "he was just supercompetitive....and wants to win" for as long as anybody knew. Just six years ago, if you were pulled over by a patrolman in Austin TX, and you weren't wearing a LIVESTRONG bracelet, they threw you in jail. I'm actually thinking about buying his book from the used bins sometime soon.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Angel Heredia, the guy who used to invent new drugs for Marion Jones and Maurice Greene and is now Usaine Bolt's "track coach", says that all chemicals naturally procuded by the human body (e.g. EPO, testosterone, insulin, adrenaline) should be legal in sport in any quantity.
 
Angel Heredia, the guy who used to invent new drugs for Marion Jones and Maurice Greene and is now Usaine Bolt's "track coach", says that all chemicals naturally procuded by the human body (e.g. EPO, testosterone, insulin, adrenaline) should be legal in sport in any quantity.

DMT would be an interesting one. Having the finalists blaze a load of freebase DMT on the starting line and then blink in and out of the Realm of the Machine Elves along the 100 metres would be worth watching, their HiDef slowmo facial expressions anyway.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I have long held the contention that, much as we generally claim to value purity in sport, we also long to see an unnatural performance. This is why we get so fixated by sprint records. The peformance that goes beyond what you believe is possible, that cheats your retina but is also clean, is something of a Holy Grail in sport. It probably doesn't exist. The Bolt Beijing 100m and Berlin 200m were close, but I do not believe they were clean.

It is all a matter of degree, anyway. The (legal) line between performance-transforming and performance-enhancing subtsances, and the decisions made on what is or isn't acceptable, are somewhat hazy, almost arbitrary. In some ways, I have more sympathy for Lance Armstrong, who at least seemed to have a moment of searing disillusionment followed by fatal epiphany in his career, than Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Maurice Greene, Justin Gatlin, etc. etc., who all very deliberately and with no emotion or motivation other than greed, cheated to win and to earn. I don't think these people cared about their sport. I believe that Armstrong (once) did. I get the impression that his personality was overturned by the corruption of cycling. After that, he was driven by a ferocious cynicism and a desire to get revenge on those who cheated before he did.

I might be over-dramatising this, but there is something layered and tragic about the downfall of Armstrong that you don't get with the implosion of vacuous, one-dimensional, venal characters like my aformentioned athletes.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I have long held the contention that, much as we generally claim to value purity in sport, we also long to see an unnatural performance. This is why we get so fixated by sprint records. The peformance that goes beyond what you believe is possible, that cheats your retina but is also clean, is something of a Holy Grail in sport. It probably doesn't exist. The Bolt Beijing 100m and Berlin 200m were close, but I do not believe they were clean.

It is all a matter of degree, anyway. The (legal) line between performance-transforming and performance-enhancing subtsances, and the decisions made on what is or isn't acceptable, are somewhat hazy, almost arbitrary. In some ways, I have more sympathy for Lance Armstrong, who at least seemed to have a moment of searing disillusionment followed by fatal epiphany in his career, than Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Maurice Greene, Justin Gatlin, etc. etc., who all very deliberately and with no emotion or motivation other than greed, cheated to win and to earn. I don't think these people cared about their sport. I believe that Armstrong (once) did. I get the impression that his personality was overturned by the corruption of cycling. After that, he was driven by a ferocious cynicism and a desire to get revenge on those who cheated before he did.

I might be over-dramatising this, but there is something layered and tragic about the downfall of Armstrong that you don't get with the implosion of vacuous, one-dimensional, venal characters like my aformentioned athletes.

How have you concluded that the aforementioned athletes were vacuous and one-dimensional, and driven by greed without emotion? Seems like a crude caricature of multi-faceted human beings to me. Unless you know them, you have no idea what their lives were like. One thing we can say - as black Americans, they are likely to have had (far) fewer professional choices under present conditions than Lance Armstrong - the number of black people succeeding in professional sports, as compared to the number of black people succeeding in various other professional fields, is obviously titanically lopsided. So to claim they were vacuous greed machines, but good ole Lance y'know, really cared, is crass to say the least.

Sure, say you don't like Maurice Greene, but to blithely dehumanise him and three other black sportspeople in this way, while paying intimate attention to one white sportsman';s story and his psychological motivations, smacks of only one thing. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but jeez, c'mon.

the emotionless, vacuous Marion Jones as interviewed by Oprah.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I tend to compare that group as personalities to Kelli White and Ben Jonson, but if you want to stump a defense for Jones and Montgomery, then fair enough, point taken.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
but they're totally different people, which I know you know. The one-dimensional black athlete with little capacity for complex/contradictory pscyhological motivations is a trope - also often applied to musicians too, obv, in well-worn ways that are maybe more discussed/dissected within mainstream culture.

Some people escape it, true, but again that's based upon the exceptionalism that was really well discussed in that review of Django Unchained - http://www.opendemocracy.net/matthew-cole/django-in-chains-american-racism-and-bootstrapping-myth Black athletes not only have to be good, but they have to have superhuman personalities (Ali, Usain Bolt etc) if they're not to be branded in some way faceless.

*This is in no way to suggest that, as a white person, I don't find myself on occasion crassly trotting out such tired cliches, it taking a friend to point out to be just how thoughtless and mindless what i'm saying really is. Those cliches are still so strong and so embedded within most white discourse (DU seems an excellent example according to that article, tho still not seen it), whether mainstream or 'liberal', that it's a constant fight to identify and reject them for what they are - racial prejudice.
 
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