I didn't hear all of this blather about the importance of Nancy Brinker's cause for curing cancer when her SGK Race for the Cure came under fire. Yet somehow Lance gets a pass. It's true he could have died from his disease and courageously came back to compete, but all of that is irrelevant if he is a cheat.
Lance Armstrong is not a Secretariat, a freak of nature. You just simply don't win all of those TDFs while everybody else around you is doping and claim you are clean. You can't compete in the top echelons of this "sport" if you are clean, apparently. Ask Greg LeMond about that. He had to retire because he couldn't keep up with the cheaters when doping became rife in the 1990s.
Armstrong, of course, denies all the charges. I don't believe him. He says he is clean and innocent -- just as Barry Bonds was clean and innocent, just as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Marion Jones and Shawne Merriman and every other too-good-to-possibly-be-true athletic freak was clean and innocent, too. He is a victim of the media. A victim of jealousy. A victim of haters. A victim of sport inconsistencies. Why, he's passed 350 tests and, even if the testing system is a complete joke, well, hey, he passed.
Ludicrous.
What Lance Armstrong is allegedly doing -- what all athletes in his shoes seem to do — is beyond damaging. Across the world, millions of people believe in Armstrong's narrative. They love his wins, yes, but what drives them and inspires them is the way he faced cancer and battled back from a near-death experience. Young children in pediatric care have been relayed his story, have been told that one day, if you stay strong and fight and believe, you, too, can be just like Lance Armstrong.
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