Do we care if Lance Armstrong doped?
In an interview that was shot for “60 Minutes” and broadcasted on “CBS Evening News” on Thursday, Tyler Hamilton said he used performance-enhancing drugs with his former teammate Lance Armstrong.
“I saw (EPO) in his refrigerator…I saw him inject it more than one time,” Hamilton said. “Like we all did. Like I did, many, many times.”
Hamilton told “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley that Armstrong “took what we all took…the majority of the peloton.” Hamilton went onto say that there was “EPO…testosterone…a blood transfusion.”
EPO is a drug that boosts endurance by increasing the number of red blood cells in the body, which obviously would help cyclists like Hamilton and Armstrong. This is now the second time that a former teammate of Armstrong’s has accused him of taking drugs to improve his performance on the bike, as Hamilton’s accusations come one year after Floyd Landis made similar allegations.
People are going to believe what they want to believe, but the fact of the matter is that Armstrong has never tested positive for PEDs. The question in my eyes is do we care?
The thing about performance-enhancing drugs is that they allow an athlete to perform at the absolute best of his abilities. Granted, if I were to juice for a year and tried my hand at professional football, I’d probably get killed – same as I would if I didn’t dope. If your skill level was low to begin with, sorry, but drugs aren’t going to turn you into a professional athlete.
But they will turn a special athlete into a superhero, which is where the problem lies. Barry Bonds was already one of the most gifted baseball players to have ever played the game, which people tend to overlook when his name is brought up. People forget just how good he was before he started taking PEDs, which only made an incredibly gifted athlete perform to the max of his abilities. He could already hit major league pitching, but thanks to the steroids his bat speed never decreased, he was able to hit the ball harder and farther, and was able to keep playing into his 40s.
It’s the same concept with Armstrong. He was already a gifted cyclist. If he took them, all PEDs did was make an already gifted cyclist max out his abilities on the bike (which includes being able to ride faster, longer, etc).
Here’s my take on PEDs: I actually don’t have a problem with athletes using them. I have a problem with the fact that they create an uneven playing field. Guys like Bonds and Armstrong are already special and if they use drugs, then they’re creating an even bigger gap between them and the next guy.
I don’t mind the alpha male when it comes to sports. Tiger Woods has been great for golf for over a decade. Lance Armstrong has been great for cycling. The pure act of watching Barry Bonds hit a home run every 10 at bats in 2001 was fun.
But in the end, I want to see athletes go toe-to-toe with only their God-given abilities and their dedication to their craft at their backs. If Tiger puts on an amazing display to win a major, I want to know that what I watched was an athlete performing at his best not because he was on drugs, but because he was more special than the next guy on that given day. The same goes for Armstrong, Bonds or whomever.
So if Armstrong did dope, he was wrong. Again, I don’t care that the best cyclist in the world used drugs to make himself superhuman. I care that what I witnessed wasn’t natural. I want my sports to be 100 percent pure.
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Count me as someone who just doesn’t care. There are any number of advantages that modern athletes have over their predecessors, both in terms of the facilities and training available to them and medical procedures that didn’t exist 50-100 years ago. I don’t really see steroids as being particularly different.
Modern day athletes do have advantages over their predecessors, yet 71 years of progress in training and fitness could produce only 2 players to hit 60 home runs in a season. Then steroids allowed it to be done 6 times in 4 seasons from 1998 to 2001.
The only reason we don’t care about Armstrong is because cycling is not important enough in America. But if he had just hit 74 home runs in a season or 763 for a career, people would want him jailed. Unless of course, he played on your fantasy team.
snd_dsgnr, it’s not just the advantages players that use PEDs have over their predecessors, it’s the unfair & artificial advantages that they have over their current competitors. Even if you were to legalize it and say “everyone that wants to use PEDs can use it, so now it will be fair,” it still would be unfair to force athletes who do not want the harmful side effects of PEDs (esp. steroids) to have to choose whether to take them in order to remain competitive
If PED’s were legal and therefore monitored by team doctors, it stands to reason that their use would be safer and more regulated than it is now.
As it stands at the moment the primary goal of people who design and use these drugs isn’t to make them safer, it’s to make them harder to test for. Legalize them and those priorities immediately flip.
He doped. End of story. Sucks I had to watch the image vs feat.