"Too Big to Fail"

That quote not only describes the banks and the banksters who all but destroyed the world economy but also describes the sordid saga of disgraced former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong. He was so "big" that is why organizations charged with enforcing the doping rules looked the other way.

There was simply too much money riding on Lance to do anything other than condone the cheating.

If Lance went down, so did everyone else. Even those who are pristine will be tainted, of course, in the same way Johnson's fall in 1988 created scepticism in millions of minds about whether anyone at the top was really clean. As with most scandals in the political realm, the questions have turned from ''who did what'' to ''who knew what?''

Remarkably, there are some well educated and thoughtful people who believed that, since drugs are so endemic in certain professional sports, we should allow athletes to use them.

In this ludicrous scenario, we would have the ''drug Olympics'' and the Tour de Drugs. The logic is that this would make it fair for everyone.

Cycling's terrible history demonstrates the folly of this anti-prohibition argument, because that sport literally has blood on its hands as a consequence of the sport's culture of cheating.

In short, there have been too many people who have literally died from this.