Friday, January 30, 2015

Why Do You Think They Call It "Dope?"

Whoever said "Cheaters never prosper" didn't know Lance Armstrong. Mister Livestrong  made a career out of it. And while a good portion of the rest of the globe awaits the next installment of the unfolding drama that is "Deflategate," Lance took the opportunity to show up and remind us all what real cheating looks like. 
In case you've forgotten, Lance Armstrong was once the winner of the Tour de France seven times. In a row. It was an awesome accomplishment made possible, we find out later, by cheating. Through a series of injections and transfusions and chemicals we now call "PEDs," Lance and his team of altered supermen took the biking world by storm in the late twentieth century and into the new millennium. It took nearly a decade, but eventually this house of cards came tumbling down. Lance Armstrong is now the winner of nothing much more than a public shaming by Oprah Winfrey. At least James Frey showed a little humility when he got caught lying to the most powerful woman with her own magazine. Lance? Not so much. 
"If you take me back to 1995, when it was completely and totally pervasive, I would probably do it again. People don’t like to hear that." In this case, "it" would be doping and the "I" stands for Lance. You might argue that there is no "I" in Lance, but I would counter by saying that that is the only thing there is in Lance Armstrong. It is truly a shame that this person that was once held up as a standard for living, nay surviving, should have been brought so very low. Now he's just a poster child for arrogant cheats. Speaking of himself in a mix of tenses and persons, Lance Armstrong continued: "I would want to change the man that did those things, maybe not the decision, but the way he acted," he said. "The way he treated people, the way he couldn't stop fighting. It was unacceptable, inexcusable." 
And his tires were probably underinflated too. 

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