Past Catches Up with Lance

For while now it's been one of the highest forms of American-secular blasphemy to disparage our very own cancer surviving, Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong. Seven consecutive wins! Against the most doped field of athletes ever! How amazing!

Throughout the years I've been reading bits and pieces about professional cycling. One of the earliest things I remember was about how other cyclists disliked Lance Armstrong. In pro cycling, a sport that doesn't really move the meter in States, until the Tour de France (and maybe a little bit out here with the Tour of California), there are many races during the season. There are races in Switzerland, in Denmark, in Italy, in Germany, Spain, and even here, Stateside. The crown jewel is the Tour de France.

The article stated that many riders resented Lance because he never bothered with any other race. They bitched that if you focused and trained for just a single race every year, that you should be winning it, and his victories were proof of their conjecture.

Of course that was before it came out that pro cycling was one of the most completely dope-fueled sports in the history of competitive athletic ventures, with a likely higher percentage of users than even baseball in the late '90s. Seriously, it threatened the very fabric of the sport. That's pretty well documented.

Years later I was reading an article about designer steroids and how they were never detected early on, but later, after testing got better, it would be possible to detect the new steroids in urine samples. Whenever they got new tests, they would go into their vault, as it were, and test some of the old urine samples, just to calibrate the test. Occasionally when athletes would supply a urine sample that tested clean, it would get kept to be used as a control for future test calibrations.

Only a few times trying to calibrate the new steroid test for EPO, one of BALCO's finest designer steroids, the testing agency started to come up with dirty urine. Some of these "clean" samples weren't clean at all. Well, shit. Of course there're no names on the samples, only numbers, and, it turns out, some of the numbers corresponded to Lance Armstrong.

Uh-oh.

Things start to make sense while other things start to sound incredulous. I'm fairly skeptical...and let me say this out loud just so we both know what your're asking of me (us): You're asking me to believe that one cyclist could so handily dominate a sport that has been shown to be absolutely rife with steroid use and doping, but did it clean?

How do you explain the failed test?

Now, this is one of the things Armstrong is suing the USADA (US Anti-Doping Association), that his rights were violated when they tested his old "clean" samples. I'd be pissed too if I'd come up clean, only to have it retested years later with a new test showing off which designer steroid I took.

They were not out to get Lance Armstrong. The guy was a fucking national hero, and in Texas he's an institution, especially when Bush was in office and the winner of the Tour de France get's their country's flag to fly from the major scene of the final festivities, and lance would always have them fly the Texan flag.

They were checking a new test with some old samples for calibration purposes.

I haven't been following so closely lately, and I'm not very sure how much evidence the USADA has amounted in their case to ban Lance for life, and strip his seven Tour de France titles. Does that sound like they're just messing around with hearsay?

The other day a judge threw his first complaint against the USADA out, telling him to stop grandstanding and be clear about what the complaint and lawsuit is about. He resubmitted the next day, and we see his talk about his violated rights.

Three men who were close to the US Postal Service and Discovery Channel teams Lance raced with over the years have all been banned for life. That was the outcome for a trainer and two doctors that made sense from the evidence the USADA had. That doesn't sound good for Lance.

One of the doctors, an Italian named Ferrari, had been banned for life in his native Italy in 2002, right during his tenure with Lance. How come we never heard about that, eh?

Well, then we get to this strange conclusion: If everyone is on steroids, then isn't it a level playing field? Shouldn't we still revere Lance Armstrong as being the doped up top-banana in the world of doped up two-wheelers?