What about Lance?

What’s all this stuff about professional bike racers and drugs, anyway?  Sometimes it seems that professional cycling is even worse than professional baseball.  One winner after another has been accused of doping, and even Lance Armstrong’s name has been mentioned.  Is Lance a doper?  I don’t know; I like to think not.  Yes, I know it takes an immense amount of physical strength to do what he’s done.  But I also know that you can have all the physical strength in the world and still not be able to do what he’s done, because it also takes quick thinking, spur-of-the-moment strategy, and real high-end overall physical & mental health.  And I also know that he’s successfully passed more drug tests than most professional athletes will ever take. 

This issue bugs me.  Clearly some professional cyclists are dopers.  They’ve been busted.  They failed the tests.  And why did they do that?  Did they think they weren’t going to get caught?  But even if they hadn’t gotten caught, don’t they have any conscience?  Would they really have thought of their “victory” as a real victory?   How phony is that?  Could you really walk around as though you were the winner of something if you knew you had to do something that you had to hide in order to win it?  Ok, so some of them take the Barry Bonds approach—“I didn’t know he was injecting me with steroids, he told me it was flaxseed oil.”  Oh come on.  I think you’d be better off waving your hand like Obi-wan Kenobi and saying, “There are no drugs here.” 

Yes, this issue bugs me.  And I think that, as much as the dopers are hurting themselves, they’re hurting the sport much more.  They cheapen their wins, and they cheapen themselves.  But here’s the thing:  I still like cycling.  And I still like watching the Tour de France on TV.  It’s fun watching them make their breakaways, and watching the peloton reel the attackers back in.  It’s fun doing the same things on our group rides (only of course on a much, much slower scale). 

Part of me says that somebody really needs to get to the bottom of this and find a way to end it.  But another part of me recognizes the impossibility of that ever happening, so I just say those guys can dope all they want—it’s not going to lessen my enjoyment of the sport.  I say let’s ride!