mcycle wrote:
Slowman wrote:
i am comfortable that when it comes to anti-doping, there is no anti-doping ardency that trumps mine, notwithstanding those who think otherwise. and yet i'm sympathetic to the view that lance should keep his titles. i understand the argument. i don't think it's pro-doping, or soft on doping, or naive, to hold that argument.
I think it's understandable for someone to be sympathetic to the view that Lance should keep his titles (or any athlete for that matter who has been banned for doping)- whether it comes from a fan, friend, or follower, etc. of an athlete or the sport. However, when it's a business colleague that's also a competitor- indirectly supporting a rule breaking method to win, that's the dividing line in my mind that I have tough time going over that hurdle. If I decided to start a website,
http://www.sometimesfasttwitch.com and copied and pasted a lot of slowtwitch articles without permission, would you support my endeavor, even though I was ripping you off? That's sort of how I see it, when a sporting peer supports another peer about their banning (and still keeping their wins through illegal methods), when they were ripping off their peers (or ripping off at least some of their peers). I think that is an important element to my opinion about Tejay. Now if everyone is on the hot sauce, and they're all playing by the same rules (maximum dope without getting caught- in a sense what Dev eloquently wrote above)- then I can fully understand why peers would be supportive of other peers in that 'bubble' world.
I have seen these "bubble worlds" in many different environments from sport to government to business to academia. Humans end up pushing the envelope of their bubble they are placed in and the behavior inside the bubble sadly starts becoming the norm. The outside world often does not have a good window into what happens in the bubble, but the people who have set up the bubble try to limit the outside world's knowledge, because it is in their interest that the bubble does not burst. The players inside the bubble, once they become part of that society do whatever they have to do to win inside the bubble. It's not right, but think of all the bullshit vendor financing during the tech bubble of 1999/2000 to make revenue look a ton bigger and cook the books. Everyone figured out "inside that bubble" how to "win" (even though we see now that the buyers of the vendor financed goods would never really take delivery nor pay it back). I just picked that specific example which is well known to illustrate how players inside a bubble will play to "stay alive and win"....well until the bubble is burst or someone makes the bubble tighter and more stringent and where you can't get away with highway robbery.
Go to the Pearl River Delta today and see what is happening with manufacturing. That's another type of bubble, where everyone is doing whatever they can to get away with paying close to slave labour, and polluting the environment to make cheaper goods that we in the west buy. We're blissfully ignorant while being complicit in making it happen with our demand for cheap good...like right here on this forum buying made in China parts all the time. You just have to look at the sky flying into Hong Kong or Shenzhen, to know that something really is not right....but we keep moving on, because we, nor the Beijing government want to prick the Made in China manufacturing bubble.
It's all the same stuff. Lance and his crew were one set of players in one bubble, but there is a different set of players maximizing their success in bubbles everywhere. The only way to change behaviour of the players in each bubble is make the rules for the bubble tighter and enforce them harder.
Maybe the best example close to home was drafting in Kona 2013 vs 2014 when Jimmy and crew clamped down hard in the latter. The players, who are our peers, many on this forum did exactly like what Lance and Hincapie did...they maximized what they could get away with inside their bubble.
Now having said that, there are different degrees of "wrong ness" inside the various bubbles, and we might all say that the Kona drafting bubble is less "bad" a behavior set than the "UCI world tour doping bubble", but I bet if you asked Vinokourov, he'd say that doping for a pro tour cyclist is exactly like drafting is for a pro triathlete. Stay as close to the edge of the box as you get away with without being penalized.
I know from our vantage point, one is worse, but so is dumping chemicals into the Pearl River delta, yet daily each of us probably buys products that were made in that manufacturing flow. So who are the guilty parties here?
What Tyler, Lance, Vino, Jan and crew did was wrong, but mainly wrong to the guys who did not get the pro tour contracts. Once inside the Protour bubble, their behaviour is not unlike what we see in all sports and somewhere in the food chain in most business segments. Fortunately, most of us live and work in less cut throat worlds were we don't have to slip down that slippery ethical slope, but I have been to too many competitive triathlons to watch right in front of my very eyes, honest guys who slide down the exact same slope with their front wheel 3 inches off the back of the guy that just passed them and for far longer than 15 or 20 seconds.
Whenever there is enough money, ego or sheer survival on the line, humans will slide the slippery slope to do whatever they have to do to win inside their bubble. As I said, fortunately, most of us don't live in bubbles like that and have the comfort of middle class existences, where you can roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty doing honest work, cut a decent pay cheque and be done. Or as many of our dad's said, "the dirtier your hands get from doing the grunt work, the more honest your paycheque". There is something to be said about that, which is why many choose not to get too high up the corporate food chain cause they don't want to get caught in those bubbles and the politics and cut throat aspects of those bubbles.
