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Monday, July 30, 2007

Lance Cheated

The Tour de France is happening. News flash. It is happening right now.

Some weird channel up in the 400's - the Outdoor Life Network, the channel that brings us the National Hockey League, if you must know - paid way too much for it back in 2005 when Lance Armstrong competed for his seventh title.

Ah, 2005. These were the salad days of bicycling, when the whole country got behind Lance, the greatest American hero, and the French turned out in droves to loathe him. These were the days when rumors of blood doping and illegal substances ran amok, days cycling probably eyes longingly given the cesspool of positive tests and broken rules in which they now find themselves.

Tim Donaghy, Michael Vick and Barry Bonds would all look like Albert Schweitzer right now if only they had chosen their sport more wisely.

Lance Armstrong already was Albert Schweitzer. He kept some interesting company, though.

In the past two years, Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich, Floyd Landis, Patrik Sinkewitz, Alexandre Vinokourov and Michael Rasmussen were all removed from the Tour de France for some version of illegal performance enhancement. The list is significantly longer than that, but if you are like me you cannot name a single rider from the last two Tours who is not one of those six guys.

Perhaps inspired by their colleagues in Major League Baseball, Americans have comported themselves particularly badly. Landis, through his managerÕs astonishing interaction with Greg LeMond, revealed himself to be not just a cheater, but a foul human being.

2004 Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton received a two-year ban for an illegal drug transfusion and came back with the charmingly odd defense that he had an ingrown twin, so he often appeared to have two peopleÕs blood in his body.

President Clinton, your table is ready.

As the greatest names in cycling turn from black to red and the sports world wrings its great collective hands wondering what went wrong, let us examine the commonality among the names.

Let's see... they are all male. They all have bikes.

None of them could beat Lance Armstrong.

I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible that Armstrong was the best cyclist in the world by such a margin that everybody else cheated and could not beat a guy recently recovered from testicular cancer. Theoretically possible. But probable?

The whispers of Armstrong's ill-gotten gains have been deafening. Virtually everybody in the world except the casual American sports fan believed he was guilty, and as Van Walker will tell you elsewhere in these pages, where there is smoke, there is almost always fire.

This is a simple geometric proof. If A > B and B > C, then A > C. It works the same way logically. If no proven cheaters could beat Armstrong, he also cheated.

I can hear you out there, emerging from your Prozac haze to disagree, to wail your paeans to Livestrong, to protect an American icon, but can you really? Do you believe Mark McGwire took performance-enhancing drugs? Is there somehow more empirical evidence against McGwire than against Armstrong?

Both McGwire and Armstrong are good guys and have done more for their communities and for this world than their accusers likely ever will. Armstrong's comeback from life-threatening cancer is truly inspirational in a world that badly undervalues the concept of inspiration.

I am not a hater. But I have ten fingers, and I can do the math.

Baseball has no problems compared to cycling. What competitive bicycling and the Tour de France need is good Old Testament justice, a little Sodom and Gomorrah scrubbing. When a sports guy reads of cycling travails, because he sure as hell is not watching them, he must cast his eyes to the sky and mutter to the deity of his choice, "Man, seriously, are you gonna handle this?"

Let Lance Armstrong's accomplishments on a bike wash away with everything else. He has plenty left on his resume. He is a great American even if he gives back his seven Tour titles. Flush it all away.

Nobody would notice anyway. Can you name the current leader on the Tour de France now that Rasmussen has been thrown out? Do you even know what channel the Outdoor Life Network is?

You have to recognize by now that Lance Armstrong cheated, but he cheated at cycling, and since he stopped, we as a nation cannot be bothered even with cycling's Super Bowl. He did not violate our trust, he did not threaten the sanctity of anything we hold dear. It is time to take a deep breath and let the whole thing go

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