Way too much of this stuff right now, but thought you might be interested to see the perspective of a Candian writer…
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050825/BRUNT25/Columnists/Columnist?author=Stephen+Brunt
In case the link doesn’t work I’ve placed the article here…
By STEPHEN BRUNT of the Globe and Mail, Aug 25th 2005
When George W. Bush turned to the subject of drugs and athletes in his State of the Union address a year and a half ago, he reduced the issue – as he’s wont to do – to one of blacks and whites.
Athletes who took things were bad. Professional sports that allowed them to do so were bad as well.
Those performers and those entertainment businesses had better clean up their act or face government retribution.
For the most part, everyone jumped on cue, various witch hunts ensued, Barry Bonds was made a convenient scapegoat, and Major League Baseball’s limited anti-trust exemption is safe for now.
But really, this is and has always been murky, morally ambiguous territory, especially when the business of performance-enhancing drugs is mixed up with the recreational variety as a target of the great anti-doping crusade (see Randy Moss, et al).
The larger American public, though, didn’t seem to fret about that, and didn’t seem to have any real trouble keeping its good guys and bad guys straight.
Or at least it didn’t until confronted with the tricky business of Lance Armstrong.
He is pretty much in every obvious way the living embodiment of that otherwise discredited fantasy, the athletic role model. Armstrong won a gruelling, physically and mentally challenging event, the Tour de France, more times than anyone in history, and did so after overcoming cancer that was supposed to kill him.
Operating in a hostile environment, in which he was anything but the favourite son, he finally won over the European cycling crowd, who this year, during his final Tour, were cheering the Texan to the finish. Gary Cooper could have played him in the movies: strong, silent, determined, humble enough, the All-American boy now the toast of Paree.
In terms of doping, cycling has been an exceptionally dirty sport, or at least a sport in which an exceptional amount of the dirt has been made public. Armstrong has always denied that he took anything, even as those around him loaded up, though those in the know raised eyebrows at his repeated protestations of innocence.
Back home, it was written off as the usual Euro-jealousy. What would you expect from France? The Yankees didn’t know much about the event or the sport or the context or the history, but they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that their boy, the one who inspired the yellow bracelets, was clean as a whistle.
And now they know, also, that a widely respected (though French) publication, L’Équipe, has reported that samples of Armstrong’s urine collected in 1999 contain the performance-enhancing substance EPO, which at the time was undetectable.
Cycling was lousy with EPO users in those days, and many were eventually caught. It’s certainly possible to imagine that in the interim, as Armstrong was winning Tour after Tour, the users’ cover-up strategies became more sophisticated even as the testers thought they were closing the loop.
Assume for the moment that the information in the L’Équipe story is true – understanding that that’s not an assumption Armstrong’s fans will be anxious to make.
So is Lance Armstrong a good guy or a bad guy? In the pursuit of fame and fortune, is it right or wrong to employ whatever means necessary, to benefit from ever more sophisticated science, to employ boosters that the sport’s administrators don’t even know exist? Does it matter whether everyone else is doing it? Where do you draw the line between legal supplements and illegal substances? Can you be a hero and a “cheater” all at once? What would George W. do?
Bonds, they were happy to throw over the side. Rafael Palmeiro, they’re happy to boo, and Jason Giambi, too. Randy Moss and Ricky Williams ought to be flogged for their dope smoking. Not so quick, though, to revisit Mark McGwire, or to look at the superhumans of the National Football League, and wonder if perhaps there are still some holes in the net.
The Americans could ask us Canadians for guidance. They could look at how we reacted, in our innocence, to Ben Johnson way back when. They could wonder, in the light of all we know now, whether the country would feel the same way if it happened today.
But that would suggest they noticed in the first place. Instead, this finally is their own moment of reckoning, in which there are no easy choices to be made. And this trip into the grey of real life they’re going to have to navigate for themselves.
