So we've come full circle in about 10 years. I've been saying for years that once a popular figure was caught in the PED web, they would attack the system. That theory is on full display in this case.
When Barry Bonds was the only one cheating (snicker), I said if you use the same standards you have to look at McGwire, Clemens and Lance Armstrong. It's taken 10 years, but all three have since fallen from grace.
And again using the same arguments that went against Bonds, you at least have to say Hmmmm...... at the run
Derek Jeter is making at Pete Rose. And that case has just started to be made in some peoples minds.
from Yahoo Sports:
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/unfounded-suggestion-yankees-jeter-used-hgh-fan-reaction-204000190--mlb.html
Didn't we openly question how Bonds could not be improving as a hitter (granted a power hitter) at such an advanced age? Where are the SABR-cats and the media zealots now with their pocket calculators and their angry rhetoric?
And who is doing the calculations on what the odds are on all these perfect games that are being tossed lately? Even if you say, well it's because testing is working, the rate of perfect games has to be greater than at ANY other time in baseball history, pre and post steroid era.
Hell, perfect games and no-hitters seem to be happening at a rate unexplained by any other era save the war years. Or would this lead us to the conclusion that tinkering with the liveliness of the ball was more of an issue than PED's ever were? This just in, HR's still down in Coors Field, HELLO!!!!
You mean we could have replaced drug - testing with humidors and coefficient of restitution tinkering instead of the PR nightmare that testing has wrought?
And cheating doesn't seem to have gone down much at all. Guys are taking the 50 game suspension like an extended trip to the DL. It's like imposing a fine equal to these guys tip money. No effect. Just apologize, take the PR hit, continue to ring the cash register and get on with it.
This is what happens when we selectively apply morality -- sometimes on an absolute basis (against those we don't like) and sometimes on a relative basis.
It's reflected in society when we can one day hear the President say "rape is rape" to defend an agenda and on another day hear Whoopi Goldberg say "it wasn't rape - rape" to defend a colleague ( Roman Polanski ) who committed statutory rape. What seems absolute is not applied on an absolute basis, we grade our friends on the curve.
That's why I agree with Armstrong in a sense when he says "Why have testing?" If all we're going to do is judge people in the court of public opinion anyway, why not cut out the middle man? He's just taking his ball and jacks and playing the game in a court where he knows he can win. He likely loses in a court of law and wins in the court of public opinion, the other guys -- Bonds, Clemens, et al -- not so much.
I also agree with Lance when he
SEEMS TO BE SAYING (if you read between the lines a little bit) that "Hey, I passed all your tests, played by YOUR rules and and therefore competed on a
LEVEL playing field, you
CANNOT go back retro-actively and change the rules and say I cheated." And I would agree with him completely.
YOU CAN'T. But if I give Armstrong the courtesy of that argument, I have to give it to everybody.
In all cases, what these guys are
NOT saying is "I cheated by your definition as fans and writers, but not by our definition as competitors." And those are two different standards. And they could NEVER say that openly and publicly, but it does seem to be the truth.
Most sports operate under different legal and moral standards anyway. I can charge the mound and punch a guy, which would be an assault on the street. But it's just good clean fun in the context of a game at the old ball yard.
Anyway, I hate to say I told you so....but you know that's not true. Still just shaking my head at all this foolishness we seem to enjoy putting ourselves through..
Here are some other background stories so you can judge for yourself since that's the direction this seems to be going. THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION, ONLY IN AMERICA!!!
from RedState.com
On Lance Armstrong | RedState:
"There’s a lot of jealousy in the world. I don’t know whether Armstrong cheated or it is all jealousy. But he tested clean every time and the USADA has ignored its own statute of limitations to make an example of Armstrong.
The horror stories of professional athletes and the abuse they suffer at the hands of anti-doping bureaucrats can boggle the mind. There’s something very much of the feel of a witch hunt to this. If Armstrong was doping, then by God take away his awards and give him a medal for being the smartest damn athlete on the planet.
You can read Lance Armstrong’s statement here. Again, I’ve got no dog in the fight and I haven’t much cared for Lance Armstrong since he left his family for Sheryl “one piece of toilet paper” Crowe. But objectively, it seems the investigation of the USADA amounts to holding Armstrong under water until he dies to declare him human or, should he survive, burning him at the stake for being a witch. In the process they’ve taken a sport made relevant by Lance Armstrong and put the whole thing under a cloud of suspicion that the anti-doping bureaucrats’ tests can’t even beat Lance Armstrong."
Michael Phelps better watch his back with this as precedent.
Exit point: if we’re going to go through this witch hunt every time an athlete gets too famous, maybe we should just let them dope and then, on the same competitive level, see who is best.
'via Blog this'
http://bicycling.com/blogs/boulderreport/2012/08/24/texas-fold-em/?cm_mmc=Twitter-_-Bicycling-_-Content-Blog-_-texas-fold
There’s been much talk of whether the sanction of Armstrong matters after 13 years since his first Tour win, and the
hopeless moral relativism of trying to re-award his seven titles during an era when much of the top 10 on GC was also doped. That conveniently ignores that several of those charged—Bruyneel and Michele Ferrari, most prominently—are still active in the sport.
But in terms of the evolution of anti-doping and its effects on future cases, if Armstrong had really sought to expose the workings of what he calls a personal vendetta by Tygart, a biased system, and the paucity of evidence, he had another avenue available to him: He could have requested an open hearing where the full weight, or absence, of USADA’s evidence would be made clear, along with what he called a “one-sided and unfair” process.
If anyone thought this would finally clear up the Armstrong account, they’re wrong. Those firmly convinced of his innocence or guilt remain so. The rest wonder why this can’t somehow be finally resolved so that it at least just goes away.
Instead, it drags on, and the gravitational pull threatens to suck in the entire sport. If the UCI is overruled by CAS in an arbitration with USADA over stripping the titles, the decision could put them in violation of the WADA code, which would jeopardize cycling’s standing as an Olympic sport.
http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/injustice-all
I didn’t wonder if I would finally find out if Armstrong had doped—though I do wonder if there is any cyclist left on earth who doesn’t understand the decision has long been rendered. The judgment of Lance Armstrong was not rendered during the SCA arbitration in 2004, when the guaranteer of a contracted $5 million bonus for winning the Tour sought to prove that because he doped he should forfeit the money, nor did it come during the federal investigation that was closed without charges this past February, nor will it arise from USADA. The trial of Armstrong has been held in public and by the public since he first faced questions about cheating during the 1999 Tour, and at some point between then and now society delivered its maddening outcome: The jury is hung.
[ Honest Lance vs. Lying Lance ]
You believe or you don’t, and anything USADA says or decides will change that for few.
Through nearly two decades of various degrees of intensity and proximity as a fan, chronicler, antagonist, and friend of Armstrong, I granted him at times my full belief and at other times at least the possibility that he had raced clean; in 2011, I became convinced beyond any doubt that he had doped. I said so in this magazine more than a year ago, and detailed why, to much clamor and at least one public hope that I would burn in hell. Inciting nearly as much vitriol from his critics, I also said and still believe he was the greatest Tour de France champion of my era, a skilled bike racer with insane focus and a genetic gift that revealed itself when he was still in his teens, and that generations from now he will be revered as one of cycling’s complex but astounding legends.
http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/which-lance-armstrong?page=0,0
We asked two experts—forensic psychologist Ken Manges, and Paul Ekman, a renowned researcher on lying and liars—to help us understand what sort of internal machinations and motivations might be at work in either possibility. While neither Manges nor Ekman would comment directly on Armstrong, both offered insights into the traits, personality types, and reactions most common among celebrities who have faced allegations of dishonesty, cheating, corruption or similar wrongdoing. What follows are two imagined fictional character sketches based on that input.
http://www.bicycling.com/news/pro-cycling/lance-armstrongs-endgame
WHEN I told my daughter that I believed that Lance Armstrong had doped, she didn't have much to say. She had more important things on her mind, had a big homework project going—writing a clerihew using her own name. But she knows in her 12-year-old way what Lance Armstrong means to me. She knows that I met him before she was born, that I spent most of a year away from her so I could follow him around the world and write a book about his comeback, that I think he, along with a few guys with funnier names she often can't remember, such as Coppi and Anquetil and Zoetemelk and Merckx, was beautiful on a bicycle. She's heard me talk, for years now, to and about people who confront cancer or their deaths or that of their beloved with more strength because of him. She knows that group includes her own mother. She knows I've been on television telling Jim Lehrer or Larry King or John Roberts that I believed he didn't dope or, sometimes, that we couldn't know if he'd ever doped. She knows that Armstrong has called our house and left messages and her friends overheard and thought that was really nuts so he must be cool even if her dad likes him. She knows that I am embarrassed to have once owned a signed Lance Armstrong lunch box. She knows that I talked to him last time I was down in Austin. She knows I've been sick to my stomach lately.
For all of those reasons and whatever unknowable simple moralities operate in a child's mind, she summoned a moment of empathy for her father and asked, "How does that make you feel?"
"I don't know," I said, which was both true and false. It encompassed the chaos of everything I was feeling but identified none of it. I figured I should pick one emotion, so I said, "Accepting that Lance cheated makes me want to cry. A 46-year-old guy. Can you imagine that?"
But Natalie had already gone back to her life's own pressing matters. And I was stuck with mine.
You, The Jury
The FDA investigation of Armstrong should finally provide a definitive legal answer—judged by a jury of his peers to be innocent (or not worthy of being indicted) or guilty. We've distilled 10 of the most salient allegations for you. If you were on a jury, your vote would be based in large part on your response to these arguments. By Joe Lindsey
http://www.velonation.com/News/ID/12726/AFLD-claims-Armstrong-was-regularly-tipped-off-about-tests.aspx
