Armstrong

There used to be a radio program called Jack Armstong, All-American Boy.  Much later came an American champion bicyclist, Lance Armstong, who won the Tour de France seven times and gave his countrymen a retro-feeling of national pride.  Now this hero is being stripped of these titles and losing most of his advertising sponsors because of doping (see: Fox Sports Story).

"Doping" means that Lance Armstrong remove small amounts of his blood and replaced them before key bicycle races to enhance his red cell count ... as well as a naturally-occurring hormone EPO (see: Wikipedia Entry) and thus his endurance profile.  Now these are both so natural that all the testing that Lance Armstrong went through never found them.  Nor were they apparently found in most all of the other cyclist`who were also doping.  It is generally conceded now that virtually all entrants into the Tour de France were also doping then.

What does this all mean? As suggested in the Fox Sports article, endurance bicycle racing has been so tainted that the Tour de France winners in the Armstrong years should be left blank. This being the case, I suggest that then they should also be left blank up to the present time since this doping has gotten even more sophisticated. Or alternatively, perhaps, Lance Armstrong and his doctors were better at this doping process sooner than the other competitors. Therefore, Armstrong and his team were in the vanguard of advancing the science of endurance performance … obviously an important development outside of the field of sports.

So then what were Lance Armstrong’s sins? Obviously lying is certainly major among them. But then most other cyclists were and are also culpable of this sin … and, as we have painfully learned from a phalanx of recent politicians, lying is now too often considered a virtue. Can we wipe the slate of all this doping and lying surrounding this cycling sport? I sincerely doubt it. And thus, just like we seemed to have swept all the steroid use in baseball (and other sports) under the rug, we might well consider doing the same with doping in endurance bicycle racing. After all, the long-term health effects of doping seem a lot more benign than that of steroid use. Is “doping” that much less fair that utilizing the latest materials technology in building the bicycle itself … or using a diet of specialized carbohydrate loading before the race?

Morality is often an elusive prey.