soooo..... how about that Lance Armstrong guy?

[mjh94]

somebody had to bring it up today.

cycling: I think everybody calling him a "cheater" should step back and think about it... everybody in that sport cheats, period. he was just chinning the bar to get on everybody's level in the sport, in my opinion.

personal life: what IS inexcusable, is the way he apparently treated all these folks they're talking about, and the way he destroyed (financially) several lives.

cancer: kudos to him for using his name/image/story for the purpose of raising a HALF OF A 17ING BILLION DOLLARS for cancer research.

ETA a tweet from Paulie:

Paul Pabst ‏<s style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(187, 187, 187); ">@</s>PaulPabst
The Oprah/Lance interview will be played over two nights...one night to find OWN, second to watch interview.

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[Dawgzilla]

A couple things about that....

Although "everyone was cheating" is a little bit of a defense, there was a problem with Lance's timing and methods. After the Festina scandal in 1998, the UCI stepped up its testing methods, and WADA and its national organizations such as USADA were created. Cycling had an opportunity to attack doping and clean up the sport....instead, Lance (and others) totally stepped up his game and created the professional doping machine outlined in the USADA report, essentially becoming a pusher to the dozens of racers who teamed up with him on USPS. Rather than going along with the crowd and doping to compete, he could have been a leader in cleaning up the sport years ago.

He also made the situation so much worse by a)making 100s of millions of dollars off of cycling, and b) viciously going after anyone who dared to tell the truth about his doping. And c) as mentioned above, essentially being a pusher and requiring his teammates to subject themselves to the same doping procedures.

And, yeah, while his Livestrong foundation is great, I am not going to hold a man up for a hero just for his philanthropy -- which by the way contributed to his fame and his ability to earn money as a cyclist. There are plenty of philanthropists out there who are also good people. If you want to hold up a philanthropist as a hero, pick one of them.