Cycling

Quote of the Morning

"As for Armstrong, I'm afraid I cannot muster much anger about the actual use of what he correctly calls "performance enhancers". If everyone is cheating, in some ways, no one is. And the ubiquity of performance enhancers in the sport when he was at its helm means he was competing against chemically-enhanced equals. He still won. Those drugs take human performance to new levels, but they do not abolish core and real athletic prowess, focus, and psychological grit. I've long believed in ending prohibition in sports on performance enhancers - because they are everywhere and unstoppable. We should rather have tests that ensure equality of enhancement. We could also have drug-free football, for example, alongside the steroidal monstrosities of the NFL. Fans might even prefer to watch human beings play the game again, rather than herds of steroidal human cattle, slowly turning their brains to mush." Andrew Sullivan

I'm glad to see I'm not alone on these points. While I watched the confession last night, I couldn't help but to feel vindicated in my view that all of the visibility of doping in cycling and all of the subsequent angst is due to almost exclusively to cycling's transparency and increasingly strict testing requirements. Period. If other sports, like football, were as diligent in policing drugs as cycling, there would surely be many more Lance Armstrongs spanning most of major league sports -- baseball being a rare and refreshing exception.

Yes, Lance cheated then lied and bullied his way through many, many years of competition. But don't think for a second that professional cyclists are any more corrupt that your favorite athletes.