rhubroma said:Here's an interesting article, which Bala Verde posted in another thread:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/10/lance-armstrong-doping-charges.html
One thing I beg to differ with Specter's article (who lived in Rome for a spell during LA's Tour "streak," go figure), however, is that if they allowed doping this would bring everyone on a "level playing field." This is simply a base fallacy. Doping doesn't work that way.
First of all not everyone responds the same way. Some athletes receive more performance enhancing benefits than others. This to me seems a plausible explanation to LA's meteoric rise after cancer to becoming a Tour contender, whereas prior to his illness he was nowhere near the top of the peloton in this regard. Phil Anderson remarked as a teammate of LA's prior to cancer that he didn't think LA was even capable of winning a grand tour, because he couldn't "time trial, or climb." While even though he was juiced on a host of drugs before he got sick (and the heavy doses of HGH and steroids probably gave him the disease in the first place – in fact, he told Hincapie that after cancer he stopped using HGH), he evidently hadn't perfected the most sophisticated system ever until subsequent to his initial come-back.
At any rate the second point is even more fundamental: namely, that modern doping has become an arms race in a world driven by unscrupulous business concerns. And to win the arms race one requires boat loads of money. LA didn't pay Ferrari to the acrued amount of 1 million euros for nothing, but to have the best in the business constantly monitoring his personal progress and supplying the means of enhanced success. At the same time, US Postal was a munificent font of funds, in part supplied by US tax payers, which not every team was able to generate. To compete in the arms race, therefore, let alone become the superpower, has little to do with natural ability (of which there were surely a number of riders with at least LA's natural talent, if not more), so much as it does in becoming the right guy for which the business interests surrounding sport, which naturally involved the UCI, chooses to most heavily invest. LA was the story if the century. Sure he worked hard, but any number in his position with the same unscrupulous will to succeed, and with that kind of backing, would have worked pretty freekin hard too.
As far as his cancer foundation is concerned and all the supposed good he's done for the sick (also addressed in the article); as I have previously mentioned, it's appalling, repulsive and grotesque that he has used the cancer community as a shield for his doping and fraudulent colossal earnings. The fact also remains that for all the money he has raised to fight the disease, no cure is in sight, not even in the distant future. While he has also commercialized on the sick with his Livestrong.org, but that's another story. So we can allow cancer research to be funded through other channels as in the past, with possibly more public funding by the government (instead of on the military).
In any case frankly the cancer community would be bettered served, just in terms of image alone, by anyone but the Armstrong farce. I mean, how farcical is it for someone who got the disease by taking too much steroids and human growth hormone, to then come back as a survivor and claim that he is devoting his entire existence to winning the hardest sporting event in the world in their name? Moreover, when claiming emphatically to be a paladin of clean sport, while secretly continuing with the same doping charade that had always been his method to success? Nay, by the most "sophisticated doping" regime sport has ever seen according to USADA!
What Armstrong could and should have done, was confess to his doping habits at the time of his adverse cancer diagnosis. To then accept his sanction, with possible reductions or a waiver for having voluntarily come clean and in compensation for the UCI not having alerted him of his dangerously high hormone levels before his cancer reached such a frightully advanced stage. A different man could have manned up and decided to dedicate his comeback to fighting cancer through cleaning up his sport. For this Armstrong has not been the poster boy of the "fight against cancer," but that of "how to get cancer" because of steroid and human growth hormone abuse. Imagine, thus, how things could have been different if LA had used his testimony and cancer foundation to fight doping in sport and against a type of excessive lifestyle that certainly plays a contributing role to contracting the disease? Other than Livestrong! Instead LA became the Al Capone of cycling, the supreme annihilator of integrity and the utmost perpetrator of omertà. While he never backed down from going after anyone who challenged his false script, even ruining several without compunction just to perpetuate the myth and keep the profits rolling.
Lastly Armstrong doesn't offer the cancer community hope, but false illusions. He was just really freakin lucky. Within the cancer population those whose disease had reached the same advanced stage would have died in the majority; though a small percentage, like himself, would have survived. This has nothing to do with his athletic ability, nor is it because of some perceived indomitable will, but chance. Fortune. Luck. In the end the Armstrong story is merely about fraud, hypocrisy and is ultimately destructive. Lance could have given up on winning 7 Tours, but saved his honor. He could have made millions less, but earned infinitely more approval and respectability (while still accruing big earnings). He could have been a true paladin of clean sport and voice for fighting the disease, but has only demonstrated a malignity and unscrupulousness of colossal proportions.
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