Dilemma

I’m at a loss ... I can’t decide which sport to ignore more ... baseball, ice hockey, football or basketball!

STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Baseball

Opening day ...

Over-Heated

The Miami Heat have won the National Basketball Associations (NBA) title for the second straight year … see: AP Story.  I haven’t been interested nor watched the seven games that it took, but have been enjoying the over-heated sports theater surrounding this series.  Clearly, the public has been caught up in the drama of the tense back and forth between Miami and the San Antonio Spurs and the TV stations and team owners have hit the jackpot with advertising, attendance, and sports paraphernalia revenues.  It’s capitalism at its very best.

But is it legitimate?  Clearly LaBron James is the dominant and determinant player and, I believe, could have, if he really wanted, caused the Heat to sweep the series in four.  But why try too hard when there is so much lucre to be gained from a seven-game series?  I predicted that this series would take seven games just as I predicted that Miami would win game seven.  This is reminiscence of the baseball World Series sham that developed during the early part of the twentieth century.  Basically, the players then were colluding and purposely extending the World Series to fatten their paychecks.  The baseball leagues and fans eventually caught on and, to cure things, players were only paid for the first four games … see: Wiki Answers.

Perhaps the equivalent will now happen in the NBA?  But I kind of doubt it …

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.