Lance Armstrong

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Beast of Burden
Alright, I think you may be going a bit far now. If we are going to restrict this to track and field athletes, then it is stuffed (now, ten years ago, twenty years ago) with interesting, attractive, sympathetic, dubious, larger-than-life or silent and subtle characters who may or may not have cheated. Also, in sport, apart from sheer tactics or performance, part of the appeal and pleasure is the creation of character, myth, spectacle and narrative (or is for me).

As far as my defamed stable of athletes (the ones mentioned and those unmentioned in my unwise "etc. etc.") they all belonged to BALCO or Trevor Graham, so I was drawing a pencil sketch of the type of personalities developed and drawn to US Training Camp and Drug Lab culture. Kelli White and Dwain Chambers were interesting for the way in which they did not quite fit the profile, ingénue in comparison to Greene and Jones who were more both more professional and illicit in their doping regimes. Marion Jones is obviously a fascinating character and I was probably doing her a disservice with my adjectives, but I was drawing something of a group portrait that was site and time-specifc. I am wary of the exact intersection between BALCO and racial politics that you proclaim. I think you have over-played a fairly strong hand. But then I am, I guess, structurally racist.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
it's not about having a hand or being right. as i say, i'd criticise myself for the same things - hands up.

criticising those athletes from the same athletics stable en masse wasn't especially what i had a problem with, it was the language you used to do it. no emotion? one-dimensional? vacuous? what have these things even got to do with it; they're just groundless slurs that purport to have insight into what the named people are really like, way beyond their actions in doping.

i didn't say you were structurally racist: i just made the point that you, like all of us, aren't immune to being infected by the structural racism that does clearly exist. How could you be? it's denying this fact that's problematic. there's a great quote from goethe about this in relation to the idea that you can only know yourself when you are able to conceive of oneself as being guilty of any sin, and don't reject the idea out of hand, because, well, that's not me. I wasn't saying you were racist at all, I was saying that momentarily you had lapsed into repetition of attitudes that while not outright racist are themselves rooted in racial prejudice. I've done this recently too, but I had to hold my hands up (I admit that this is easier when speaking to a friend than over the internet, when everything tends to degenerate into arguments that are perceived by one person as intensely critical whether intended as such or not).

But I can't find the Goethe quote.

Over and out now, not because this is not interesting, but cos I need to return to work before i get sacked, sadly...
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
:D more influenced by psychodynamics tbh

I stand by the points expressed though, and I wasn't meaning to be massively critical of you. If it came across that way, then I apologise.

ok, back to work!
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
From a perspective of someone who really does care about the sport of cycling and who doesn't think it's solely for cunts...
The Lance 'confession' appears to be as self serving as anything else in his career. He carefully avoided any of the truly large implications of the report - the structural corruption which allowed him to know when and where testing would take place, turning a blind eye to failed tests (just this week Le Monde appears to have evidence querying his never failed a test line), the bribery of thousand upon thousands of dollars handed over to the UCI supposedly for better drug testing equipment, the bullying of fellow team mates into taking drugs, the destruction of clean athlete's careers because they spoke out and wouldn't be in Lance's gang, the vilification of good people - masseuses and other lowly paid functionaries (his favourite imprecation for women seems to 'whore'), the savaging of journos who knew the truth - Kimmage (you are the cancer) and Walsh (you hate cycling cos your son was killed on a bike).

All he has admitted to is that he doped but 'so was everyone else.' He refuses to admit he doped on his comeback, has not named names and chose to do all of this on Oprah rather than in front of a grand jury.

Lance loves the story - the mythic Lazarus like comeback from the dead and this allowed him to hide in broad daylight and to shame those who questioned him as if to query his achievements meant you were on the side of cancer. Criticise Lance and you are allowing children to die. He knew it was a good story, that's why It's Not About The Bike sold so well. And, yes, I am sure it will make a good movie but only once Verbruggen and McQuaid are finally called to account as well.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Leo said:
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.
Click to expand...

That might have been me. Actually the idea is that competitors can take whatever drugs they like provided each team or individual athlete is sponsored by GSK, Pfizer, AstraZeneca or whoever and gets their gear exclusively from that company. That way, high-profile matches and athletics competitions become an excellent opportunity for pharma developers and manufacturers to showcase - and, to an extent, road test - their latest patents. Additionally, in parallel to the actual competition there'd be a competitive league table for the companies, a bit like the constructors' championship in Formula 1.

There would be absolutely astonishing performances, far beyond anything unenhanced humans could ever achieve, and every now and then someone would simply explode as they crossed the finishing line or put the ball through (rather than in) the net.

I think someone said at the time that it sounded like a Ballard story...
 
P

paolo

Mechanical phantoms
From the guardian:

The 'help' has evolved over the years but the fact remains that our sport is damn hard, the Tour was invented as a stunt, and very tough motherfuckers have competed for a century and all looked for advantages.
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From the BBC:

"The 'help' has evolved over the years, but the fact remains that our sport is damn hard, the Tour was invented as a 'stunt', and very tough [athletes] have competed for a century and all looked for advantages."
Click to expand...
 
matt b

matt b

Indexing all opinion
Savile was of course a cycling fan and they covered up for years, so the protection of Armstrong from himself is to be expected. Shame on you BBC.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
6a00d8341bfa1853ef017c37c38771970b-400wi
 
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