Maxiton said:
Now there's a colorful turn of words.
But I think that if anything the difference is even more pronounced: drinking coffee versus taking LSD. I'd urge the OP to use the search function, as this has been discussed at some length on this forum. The drugs they used in the old days were palliatives against exhaustion and pain. They did little or nothing to enhance actual performance. You could call this the propeller era of cycling.
Then along comes new technology, namely EPO and other oxygen vector drugs, as well as human growth hormone and other things we know not of. This is cycling's jet age, where big men and fat as
ses are being propelled up mountains at speeds formerly reserved for true mountain goats, and with much less apparent effort. Here, cycling has turned a qualitative corner, or rather drugs have, and the character of the game, and its winners, has changed.
This is most of the reason why drugs were formerly (tacitly) accepted and are now seen as the total corruption of the sport. Also, though, through at least the seventies society saw drugs as not only the solution for every ill, but also as the avenue to improvement. (In this regard the so-called counter-culture was counter nothing.) Today, in contrast, we've lost this idea and tend to see drugs as a necessary evil, or worse. Personally I find that this rather obscene.
He was open about it in several interviews, and he wasn't the only one. But it meant something different then, and it didn't mean as much (see above). Without the amphetamines Coppi was still Coppi, with all the same capabilities.
This is what is meant by "progress" in sport.
Unfortunately the qualitative increase in the effects of peds on athletic performance, has also been accompanied by a quantitative lowering of character among the riders. This seems to just come with the turf. I mean if you want to be a top cyclist today, how can you avoid being deceptive and unscrupulous? I'd say this wasn't as much the case when doping was less sophisticated and the arms race hadn't really begun in earnest until afterwards. Things have obviously changed. As the drugs and money have taken over, the human aspect of sport has diminished and this can't but be accompanied by its moral debasement.
For me this is what Armstrong and his cronies imbibed and what this last generation of athletes have come to represent, the ones that told Simeoni to shut-up and not to spit on the plate from which one eats. Imagine what's vilified is speaking the truth about the doctored up food that was on that plate, which is the criminal thing to do, and not its happy defense. Omertà has always existed in the sport, however, the stakes were never so high, nor was the game so sophisticated. Either society will change and give up its ethical expectations, or the sport will, or the sport will die. I don't know, today, which one of the three scenarious is the more likely outcome.
In many ways I see this as rather typical of the present age in which, and not only in sport, the more unscrupulous and energetic one is in climbing to the top, the more brazen one is in taking recourse to every kind of illicit practice - so long as the end goal is achieved - the more he will be viewed by the public as an example of success and hence a positive role model.
The media is much to blame in this and so is our hyper-consumer and ultra-commercial, market driven culture, for which the former is naturally a reflection of the latter. Every age creates its heros (and villans) and interestingly the one is usually the opposite reflection of the other in the mirror.
The obscenity and hypocrisy is thereby overlooked today in finding praise in one's fanatical drive and zeal, because in the end there's a big fat pot of gold and, that real drug and ultimate "virtue" of our society, Fame. While the ruthlessness and depravity isn't even considered at all, since that would ruin the whole myth. In fact the extent to which today's sports heroes are applauded and idolized is also in direct proportion to their financial earnings, which is the ultimate barometer of success. In short, the more money's at stake the more corrupt it becomes and the more incorrigible are the protagonists' characters.
But years ago the athletes made much, much, less and there was an almost neighborhood familiarity between the public and the athletes, who were not celebrities, but heros of the working class. Nowadays they are viewed as real aristocrats, princes of the talk shows like actors and commercial musicians. I don't know if this natural law can be applied to the human personality here (and not only), but it seems that whenever the quantity grows exponentially ($) then the quality of moral character drops precipitously among the earners.
The fact that today a media generated cycling celebrity could actually have sat down and talked business and politics with businessmen and politicians, instead of sport (like Bono talking these things rather than music), says much about what commercial success and celebritydom is worth in our world.
Personally I find this rather obscene.
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