October 24, 2012--Lanced
Officials this week took away Lance Armstrong's seven Tour de France titles. They finally marshaled the incontrovertible evidence they had been seeking for years to prove he cheated by taking cocktails of drugs designed to boost his performance. Much of that testimony came from teammates who rode with him under the sponsorship of the U.S Postal Service. (Why our bankrupt mail system spend millions on this is beyond me, but that is another story.)
The tale the biker whistle blowers told was of widespread corruption in the sport--how they and apparently everyone else cheated. The pressure at that level of competition was such that if you didn't use performance-enhancing drugs you had no chance whatsoever of winning. And winning came to mean everything.
So I suppose justice has been done. From now on we can rest easy when watching cyclists sprinting through the Loire Valley and dragging themselves up and down the Alps, knowing that everyone is competing on a level playing field.
Really?
Doping in all major and minor sports has for many decades been SOP--standard operating procedure. And as long as money and fame await winners at the finish line or end zone, expect most world-class athletes to take the chance, use illegal substances, and hope to allude the drug police.
This feels silly and hypocritical to me.
Why not let Lance Armstrong and every other athlete who wants to do whatever they are willing to risk to do better? After all we're talking about entertainment, not neurosurgery (more about this is a moment), rocket science, or meaning-of-life matters. We're talking about riding a bike at a mile-a-minute clip, hitting home runs, running the 100 meter dash in under 10 seconds, protecting a quarterback with 400-pound offensive linemen, and slam dunking from midcourt. That's what the public these days wants in its circuses.
Pop and many opera stars mike up so as to be heard, and we're OK with that; so why are so many upset when athlete-entertainers shoot up? We fiddle with the equipment (juice up the baseball and move the fences in so more home runs will be hit, develop high-tech swim suits to allow Olympians to slip though the water faster, allow golfers and tennis players to hit the ball further and harder with graphite clubs and rackets, fool with artificial track and field surfaces to facilitate faster times) and that fiddling is considered to be acceptable. But when a Lance Armstrong fiddles with his physiology, we pursue him in the media and relish when he is toppled from his pedestal.
We don't do doping tests on surgeons either before or after they perform delicate operations. In fact, if there is something pharmaceutical they might take to enable them to be more skilled while working on our brains and colons, wouldn't we be eager to go to those doctors who pop those pills? So whatever surgeons might do to enhance their concentration is seen to be advantageous and they might as a result become most esteemed in their filed, while Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds are humiliated in public and turned into pariahs.
The tale the biker whistle blowers told was of widespread corruption in the sport--how they and apparently everyone else cheated. The pressure at that level of competition was such that if you didn't use performance-enhancing drugs you had no chance whatsoever of winning. And winning came to mean everything.
So I suppose justice has been done. From now on we can rest easy when watching cyclists sprinting through the Loire Valley and dragging themselves up and down the Alps, knowing that everyone is competing on a level playing field.
Really?
Doping in all major and minor sports has for many decades been SOP--standard operating procedure. And as long as money and fame await winners at the finish line or end zone, expect most world-class athletes to take the chance, use illegal substances, and hope to allude the drug police.
This feels silly and hypocritical to me.
Why not let Lance Armstrong and every other athlete who wants to do whatever they are willing to risk to do better? After all we're talking about entertainment, not neurosurgery (more about this is a moment), rocket science, or meaning-of-life matters. We're talking about riding a bike at a mile-a-minute clip, hitting home runs, running the 100 meter dash in under 10 seconds, protecting a quarterback with 400-pound offensive linemen, and slam dunking from midcourt. That's what the public these days wants in its circuses.
Pop and many opera stars mike up so as to be heard, and we're OK with that; so why are so many upset when athlete-entertainers shoot up? We fiddle with the equipment (juice up the baseball and move the fences in so more home runs will be hit, develop high-tech swim suits to allow Olympians to slip though the water faster, allow golfers and tennis players to hit the ball further and harder with graphite clubs and rackets, fool with artificial track and field surfaces to facilitate faster times) and that fiddling is considered to be acceptable. But when a Lance Armstrong fiddles with his physiology, we pursue him in the media and relish when he is toppled from his pedestal.
We don't do doping tests on surgeons either before or after they perform delicate operations. In fact, if there is something pharmaceutical they might take to enable them to be more skilled while working on our brains and colons, wouldn't we be eager to go to those doctors who pop those pills? So whatever surgeons might do to enhance their concentration is seen to be advantageous and they might as a result become most esteemed in their filed, while Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds are humiliated in public and turned into pariahs.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:08 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home