Anonymous wrote:Doping is such a difficult topic to make judgements about. First of all people make the mistake of thinking sports are actually important. Beyond personal health and learning teamwork skills sports are not important at all. Contemporary sports have become "the opiate of the masses". For some people their favorite teams and players have become their alter egos. Come on people . . . it's just sports!?!?

Wow .... Talk about first world problems!?!?

Do you have any idea how shitty life is for the majority of the human beings who live on this planet and we're obsessing about some guy in spandex took drugs to help him win a bicycle race through the French countryside. Whew ... Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid.

Geez ... don't people know that NCAA and Profession sports are only about money and the players/owners who win make the most money. Has ESPN become such a mind altering drug that people believe that our contemporary Sports Machine is anything more than a cash machine???

Of course he juiced just like Clemmens, Bonds, and hundreds of other athletes from high schools to the Gold Metal Stand at the Olympic Games. To me it's no big deal. I paid my admission price and I enjoyed the games. But for me, they have never been anything more than games and for the price I paid, I never expected anything more than to enjoy the moment.

Life must be good for us Americans if we can be so bored that we feel the need to so passionately assess the virtues of good and evil to mere mortals who ride bicycles really really fast.

Anonymous wrote:So all those people he sued... now that he's confessed, can they counter-sue? If his whole "case" against them was based on a bald-faced lie?

Anonymous wrote:I always wanted to believe that he wasn't doping but all the REAL hardcore cyclists I know said he was. It's just impossible to win the Tour 7x without at least blood doping/EPO, hGH, steroids... Something. It's just way, way too hard.
I'm glad Greg LeMond is the best American cyclist again.

It might seem odd to keep a lethal guard dog in the tranquil exurb of Medina, where the locals rarely get up to anything worse than foxhunting. But if you had the kind of enemies that LeMond has acquired over the last few years, you might consider getting some protection too. He has sued everyone from Tim Blixseth, the billionaire who developed the Yellowstone Club, to various sponsors and business partners. He has tape-recorded phone calls with business associates and friends, and, most famously, he’s tangled with Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, the only other Americans to have won the Tour de France. LeMond was among the first to suggest that media darling Armstrong might have used performance-enhancing drugs, and he testified at Landis’s doping hearing last May, after a Landis associate threatened to publicly reveal that LeMond had been sexually abused as a child.

By refusing to keep quiet LeMond has created a massive rift in the sport he left nearly 15 years ago. The Lance/Landis camp derides him as a “whiner” who’s jealous of all other American Tour winners and who may have even used blood boosters himself, while the pro-LeMond camp worships him as the greatest champion of all. “I’ve received death threats,” he says. “I’ve had people say I should have my teeth kicked out. I’m a lightning rod for everybody.”

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One positive... he sure looked good. If you could look past the "smarminess", he IS one good-looking fella; a la Ted Bundy only without that little thing called murder.

Really? I think he is thoroughly unattractive. His face looks like a squirrel or something. Very rodent looking.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think people are quick to through terms around. Who knows what Lance is really like. He really didn't do himself any favors. But to win the sort of grueling event he did, it requires laser focus at the expense of everything else. I don't like how he came across, but I respect anyone who is disciplined enough to compete at an elite level. I don't get why athletes are held to a higher standard than even politicians or company leaders who cheat all of the time.

Agree.

Anonymous wrote:As the wife of a cancer survivor, I really don't care that he used PEDs (although I think it was dishonest and stupid). He has done a tremendous amount for cancer survivorship, including publicizing fertility issues related to chemo and radiation and highlighting the need to monitor long-term cancer survivors for certain chemo-related problems. That is what matters to me.

He has always seemed like a ruthless jerk and a narcissist -- that comes through even in his first book. But I think people's disappointment in him says more about our tendency to put sports stars on a pedestal and then become unable to forgive their human failings. He was never "cancer Jesus," and he is not now a sociopath. He is not the first person who cheated, either out of a desire to win or a fear of failure. He is not the first person who has lied under oath. And he certainly is not the first person who has thrown his weight around and bullied other people to get ahead -- he just committed the sin of doing those things while publicly purporting to be a hero.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The characteristics of a sociopath

http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

He's a sociopath.

Thanks for the link. I've been called that too on DCUM. It's quite fitting I think but I don't see a big deal of being labelled as such.

-Jon250+

Jon, this thread is actually not about you and your 250+, it is about Lance Armstrong.

Anonymous wrote:I think people are quick to through terms around. Who knows what Lance is really like. He really didn't do himself any favors. But to win the sort of grueling event he did, it requires laser focus at the expense of everything else. I don't like how he came across, but I respect anyone who is disciplined enough to compete at an elite level. I don't get why athletes are held to a higher standard than even politicians or company leaders who cheat all of the time.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've disliked Lance ever since he left his first wife. No strength of character there. Do whatever is expedient to get ahead, that's his motto.

THANK YOU! Me, too, and IIRC, he left Sheryl Crow when she got cancer! I don't understand anyone who hasn't thought he was an emotionless dick.

Anonymous wrote:One positive... he sure looked good. If you could look past the "smarminess", he IS one good-looking fella; a la Ted Bundy only without that little thing called murder.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really don't demonize him for doping, if everyone was doing it and it was the culture, then it's really not a big deal. He did what he had to do to level the playing field. If he was the only one doping, that would have been a different story.

The part about going after his accusers is what I take offense with. Not idiots like Floyd Landers and his cohorts but innocent people like the masseuse.

I agree. Not every doper went after innocent people and tried to ruin them. Shoot, his former personal assistant, Mike Anderson, had to move to New Zealand to start over.

New Zealand is an upgrade.