Lance cheated? Oh my. Wake the f#*k up.
The problem I have of stripping Armstrong is simply this: If you read the conclusions of USADA against Armstrong as far as they’ve been published, they make the testing polices of The IOC and ICU seem ludicrous and idiotically easy to get around, to the point of almost willful blindness. The details of the testimony against Armstrong are like something out of the movie Animal House when Bluto and D-Day steal and copy exam answers. If it’s that juvenilely easy to beat the tests, we have absolutely no way of knowing if any rider in the past 30 years was clean. Simply having taken the tests and passing them is meaningless, apparently.
Much was made of Armstrong’s apparent misstatement that he passed over 500 tests during his career, when “in fact” he only took 260 tests (and passed them all). Excuse me, but my wife has yelled at me “thousands of times” (according to her) in a single day to put my coffee cups in the dishwasher (it was only 373 times according to my independent analysis). All the Athletes are dirty, and anyone who believes otherwise is living in the same world where the earth is only 6000 years old.
Landis got caught, and in a pique of jealous rage implicated the greatest champion of his generation. Call it what it is, the drug generation, and its never going to be possible to put that jennie back in the bottle. Same in baseball, basketball, and football. When the home run totals fall to 1980 levels; when star NFL and NBA players are hurt more than healthy, when track and field athletes in the Olympics stop breaking records and revert to speeds of the Edwin Moses and Prefontaine levels; the fans will start losing interest, and the owners and powers will look the other way and let the next generation of athletes do what’s necessary to bring the fans back, and then stab those same athletes in the back when they are no longer perceived as necessary. This is your fault, fans. And yours, media. You are all hypocrites.
Can anyone even define cheating? The London Olympic committee bragged that it created “the fastest track in Olympic history”. They spent over $20,000,000 to create a track that would actually spring athletes foreword and higher, so their runs would be faster and jumps would be greater. This isn’t cheating? Nike, Adidas, and Reebok invest millions in custom foot ware for the top contenders to improve their chances of winning, and improve the athletes value as an endorser. Michael Phelps wears a $300,000 body suit that creates the most friction free surface for gliding through the water. He didn’t buy this. It was given to him. Nigerians don’t have access to this, and neither did Michael Spitz, the 1970’s Olympic swimming champion who was considered the greatest swimmer of all time until Phelps shattered his medal records.
Without drugs, naked in a swimming pool, who would be faster, Spitz or Phelps? Without drugs, naked and barefoot on a sweltering track, who would be faster, Jessie Owens or Carl Lewis (yes, he was drugged up like crazy, everything but steroids). I’d bet of Spitz and Owens every freaking time!
Fitnessgroan's Blog 
While advantages come in all types of forms, from faster tracks to sleeping in altitude tents, there does seem to be a need for some limit. We don’t want to see parents giving five year olds growth hormones so that they can dominate in pee-wee football or have athletes given drugs to disguise brain injuries. But to be honest, I can see no clean line other than to have a set of conditions that everyone in a particular sport agrees to — something like NASCAR race car specifications.
My reply is in the next post.