Lance Armstrong ESPN column

This loser is still in the news? Whatever. I hate liars. Especially ones that fed a lie for over a decade. I have had the pleasure of knowing some pathological liars over the years. Lying is all about self-preservation, for the fear that people will see the real you. Only wussbags that fear the responsibility of their actions and decisions will exhibit such behavior.

But at least he is happier than ever. Amazing what happens when you stop with your pathological lying and attacks on people.

+1. And of course, he wasn't brought down until he had zero remaining usefulness to the sport of cycling. But hey, thank god the world of masters triathlon has been saved from his evil doping ways.

Er... wrote:

Roughhouse Doyle wrote:

I don't care that Lance doped. Hell, the whole peloton was doped to the eyeballs when he was racing. I don't even care that he didn't show any remorse. What I care about is how many lives he tried to ruin (e.g., Greg LeMond, Frankie and Betsy Andreu, Emma O'Reilly) when they questioned whether he was racing clean.

^^This. Just extraordinary how willing he was to run roughshod over people he knew were speaking the truth.

Serious question: Does it matter if they were all lying/dirty too?

It's a good question. I'm thinking of people who may actually have been innocent and still were attacked by Lance. One bike tech and one masseuse come to mind, but I'd have to do research to pull up their names, which I can't be bothered to do right now.If you're asking me if I feel badly for someone like Floyd Landis, who was attacked when telling the truth about other people who doped, then the answer is No, I don't.

llort_vbo wrote:

Serious question: Does it matter if they were all lying/dirty too?

p.s. check out http://www.everymantri.com/everyman_triathlon/2010/12/photo-of-the-day-a-young-lance-armstrong-at-his-plano-east-high-school-cross-country-meet.html for an amusing photo of Lance running cross in HS.

dkny64 wrote:

+1. And of course, he wasn't brought down until he had zero remaining usefulness to the sport of cycling. But hey, thank god the world of masters triathlon has been saved from his evil doping ways.

What percentage of bros with $10k bikes and lots of disposable income are dirty?

vivalarepublica wrote:

This loser is still in the news? Whatever. I hate liars. Especially ones that fed a lie for over a decade. I have had the pleasure of knowing some pathological liars over the years. Lying is all about self-preservation, for the fear that people will see the real you. Only wussbags that fear the responsibility of their actions and decisions will exhibit such behavior.

So just to be clear. If the first time Lance was asked if he took PEDS in a sport where everyone else cheated and will continue to cheat would have just said "yes" you would have been fine with it?

If you DQ'd every rider who took PEDS for the last 20 years I think I would have podiumed at least a time or two...only because there was simply no one else.

dude, really? wrote:

vivalarepublica wrote:

This loser is still in the news? Whatever. I hate liars. Especially ones that fed a lie for over a decade. I have had the pleasure of knowing some pathological liars over the years. Lying is all about self-preservation, for the fear that people will see the real you. Only wussbags that fear the responsibility of their actions and decisions will exhibit such behavior.

So just to be clear. If the first time Lance was asked if he took PEDS in a sport where everyone else cheated and will continue to cheat would have just said "yes" you would have been fine with it?

If you DQ'd every rider who took PEDS for the last 20 years I think I would have podiumed at least a time or two...only because there was simply no one else.

How many racers admited to taking banned substances while they were still racing and not retired?

dude, really? wrote:

If you DQ'd every rider who took PEDS for the last 20 years I think I would have podiumed at least a time or two...only because there was simply no one else.

Sure. Keep telling yourself that. Why did Hamilton and White apologize to all the clean riders if everyone was doping?

wtfunny wrote:

Rick Reilly wrote:

The article is more about Rick Reilly, ...

All the rest of what you wrote may well be true .. or not .. but the article is not about Reilly, at all. Did you read it?

Yes, I read it, just like I read the article Reilly wrote the day after Oprah. In case you have no antenna for subtle obviousness, the goal of this article, from Rick Reilly's standpoint, is to publicly get back into bed with Armstrong without making himself look like a total hypocrite. The way he does it is to pose as a deep humanist, muse about his journalistic career. Take that away and you've got an article that says little more than "Lance is fine. He hangs out with his family." Yes, the article is about Reilly.

There were no clean riders competing because clean riders couldn't keep up. Doesn't mean that they didn't exist and didn't deserve the chance to compete that they would have had if it weren't for the cheats.

801 dude wrote:

Tommy2Nuttz wrote:

So its ok that this man doesn't even do any jail time for probably the biggest case of fraud in sports history.

LMFAO. How big is Lance next to the Home Run dopers and their 100 million dollars of contracts and the perhaps billions of ad revenue soaked from advertisers during that "golden era"?

Cycling is a 2-bit, nobody cares sport, and I'm a former racer! No I was not a pro so don't ask.

EXACTLY!!! Braun, one year away from doing worse things than LA is receiving standing ovations at his home field.

SSDD wrote:

dude, really? wrote:

If you DQ'd every rider who took PEDS for the last 20 years I think I would have podiumed at least a time or two...only because there was simply no one else.

Sure. Keep telling yourself that. Why did Hamilton and White apologize to all the clean riders if everyone was doping?

"all those clean riders", oh yeah them...I think they were referring to me.

dude, really? wrote:

vivalarepublica wrote:

This loser is still in the news? Whatever. I hate liars. Especially ones that fed a lie for over a decade. I have had the pleasure of knowing some pathological liars over the years. Lying is all about self-preservation, for the fear that people will see the real you. Only wussbags that fear the responsibility of their actions and decisions will exhibit such behavior.

So just to be clear. If the first time Lance was asked if he took PEDS in a sport where everyone else cheated and will continue to cheat would have just said "yes" you would have been fine with it?

If you DQ'd every rider who took PEDS for the last 20 years I think I would have podiumed at least a time or two...only because there was simply no one else.

Not quite true. There's this guy.....

who endured hostility and animosity within the peleton for daring to speak out about doping at the time. When 3 riders tried to ride him off the road, he decided it was too dangerous to carry on and quit the sport.

Bassons had the strength of character to say no. Why the hell didn't Armstrong, who had 10 times his talent ?

Who's tired of him saying that he helped millions of people with cancer? No, the millions of people that donated $ (mostly Americans) helped millions of people with cancer. He rode on the backs of the donors and is still living a life he never earned honestly. There are a lot of cancer charities to donate to and not all of them paid for his jet fuel.

Nobody who knows and who followed cycling ever believed for a second that Lance was clean in the first place. They all made pretenses of riding clean and they were all doping. Tyler Hamilton says so in so may words.

Lance's "extra guilt" is not because he lied more than anybody else, its because he was more successful and more aggressive in trying to silence all the very legitimate doubters.

All of the postal-disco crew that came clean and got a 6 month winter-off suspension would have given an arm and a leg back in the day to have lance's success, and they used the exact same drugs. Don't think for a minute that any of them had reservations or qualms of the sort of - "ok, let's inject this but let's not inject that."

Lance was more successful, more dramatic, more interviewed, more commercial, more aggressive, more competitive... but he sure wasn't doing something that others weren't.

Time to let it go.

Ted Underhill wrote:

For the 1 millionth time, I think most people would accept the cheating in the context of the era in that sport. They seem more than willing for every other rider. I think it is hard for most people to get past the complete ass-holery that he continuously displayed.

This

Tommy2Nuttz wrote:

So its ok that this man doesn't even do any jail time for probably the biggest case of fraud in sports history.

You wouldn't say this about Barry Bonds, would you? Or any other person of color, would you?

Typical cowardly, testosterone challenged white male.

Have you ever wondered who trained you to be brainwashed? Who taught you to react in the same knee-jerk fashion? Ever wonder why you practically try to crawl over other groveling whites to show you're with it, that you're not racist?

I think you may be confusing a race with a chemical experiment. Everyone reacts differently to drugs. Everyone gets a different boost from the same drugs. So fairness wasn't the objective. And every time his teammates showed that they were capable of beating him, he did something to hold them back. That's why most of them left Postal.