Why are we letting Pete Julian slide?

Waited at least 5 before posting wrote:

KTHXBAI-FU wrote:

This message board is a complete trash heap. If you are going to write things like this use your REAL NAME and provide us with some health history of your own. Maybe provide a picture of yourself, too. That way, we can put your life on public display and judge you as well. Wouldn't that be fun?

Calm down, Wilma. It was clearly a response to the question posed in the subject line. Many more people gave Armstrong a pass because of his cancer story. Julian's personal health is public knowledge because he talked about it to the press. Nobody's wishing cancer on him or saying he deserved it or anything like that.

And yes, this site is trash but you already knew that yet read this board all the same and that's a completely separate issue.

You're right. It obviously was a response to the question posted, but it's completely irrelevant. And, yes, Pete talked to the media about his diagnosis and treatment reluctantly at first (for the exact reason you mention above) and then realized that other people with cancer might benefit from seeing that it's possible to not end up in hospice. That doesn't give anyone the right to throw it out as a tool/rationale/whatever. It's a dick move, and anyone who has had cancer would agree. Buhbye, LRC. I won't be back.

Clicked & Continued wrote:

Somewhere in Doha, Scott Simmons is cackling and rolling a blunt.

Until he gets it done with American born athletes, whatevs.

Would you be able to post a link of that podcast?

Highly believable. If you don't think people think more kindly of him and give Julian extra benefit of the doubt because of his cancer story, you're out to lunch. Doesn't matter whether you like that notion. The strong victim lens applied in this response is perfect proof of the phenomenon. People noticably softened on Salazar due to his heart attack, too.

Because the mods are deleting any and all comments that say his athletes doped as well. So much for free speech. It’s too obvious. One of the most exclusive training groups in the world had two entirely separate teams. Sure.

wejo wrote:

I don't know Pete that well but have always considered him "one of the good guys of the sport."

We both ran the 10k around the same time and then he had his fight with cancer.

So I start out by giving him the benefit of the doubt.

You might be right. And I won't jump to conclusions. However, I do remember back in 2015 being at the Portland Track Festival right after the BBC documentary was published. Following Cam Levins' race (I can't remember what he ran that year) I walked into the building behind the track and Pete Julian was talking to Cam Levins asking what he told reporters in response to the questions about the group's doping allegations. In that moment, it seemed clear that he was involved in the PR machine trying to protect the group.

But only time will tell.

KraftMacAndCheese wrote:

Because the mods are deleting any and all comments that say his athletes doped as well. So much for free speech. It’s too obvious. One of the most exclusive training groups in the world had two entirely separate teams. Sure.

What are you talking about? I just looked at this thread. Not a single post has been deleted.

Please email me if you think posts in other threads are being deleted. We have always said people can make drug accusations on this site. We think it leads to more scrutiny and thus a cleaner sport.

YMMV wrote:

Julian is kind of like Rommel in WW2: good buddies with Hitler (not equating Alberto with Adolph), but the bad rep of being a Nazi washed off his back...he was a ""Good German" who was unaware of the Nazi atrocities".

And 70 years later, we look back and go Rommel might have been nice for a Nazi but there were an awful lot of sketchy things in his closet.

The hard part for people is separating Salazar the a-hole (i.e. it goes back to his collage days) who a lot of people don't like and Salazar the coach who may have broken the rules. I remember back in the mid 90s, Dr Dave Martin was suggesting that marathons should ingest some legal compound to help with dehyrdation in hot weather marathons and the US runners did it in either 1992 or 1996. When he did it, we all talked about how smart it was and how the athletes were doing a good job in preparing for the event. If Salazer did the same thing, we would all be talking about grey zones and cheating. How we feel about people can really affect how we view their actions.

I think that change in mindset has a lot to do with our changing perception on PED use in sports in general. '92 was twenty years before the Lance Armstrong and USPS allegations were finally confirmed and was a time when doping allegations largely avoided public conversation and stayed within the sport. I think the Lance stuff has had a major impact across all sports, wherein people tend to be much more skeptical of too good to be true stories in athletics nowadays. This also largely coincides with the skepticism that comes towards "cutting edge" training methods and sports science for sure too. Back then we viewed those advancements as these futuristic, next-generation training methods that would revolutionize the sport (this is a time when people were fantasizing about flying cars and teleportation).

Now I think a lot of fans of the sport can recognize that these MAY BE stepping stones towards grayer and grayer areas of dealings. The same way that Lance says his EPO use started originally with B12 injections, then with taking illegal amounts of cortisone and so on. People see someone testing how much illegal testosterone product they can use while maintaining legal levels, and it strikes a different chord with the general public than it may have in 1992. Same thing with British cycling "banning" non-medically necessary intravenous infusions in the 2010's: to the public, even if it was just a saline drip, seeing a needle in the arm of an athlete automatically screamed doping. That's not to say that there weren't skeptics back in the day as well, but I do think those skeptics were in the minority of public conversation at the time. So I don't think this is JUST how we feel about Alberto changing how we view his actions, I think this is how people view doping in general that's doing that.

The reality is, it's actually worse than that.

Sport is in a state of existential crisis not because we don't like technology or science, but because technology and science undermines the narrative of sport.

If it comes down to genetic advantage, or more generally any advantage that is not based on "gutsy determination and sacrifice," then its just a Frankenstein show and we're glorifying people who, say, won the genetic lottery with respect to the particular skill sets emphasized by contemporary sport (but even the human elite re still slower and weaker than nearly every other species of animal).

The whole issue of doping just reminds us of this uncomfortable reality. As Mulder said, "I want to believe." But, more and more, I don't even want to believe. Even the ability to work hard is merely a value that is a proxy for what we really want, the ability to get sh!t done, e.g., "work smart, not hard." This brings us to our even bigger existential crisis over the coming reality of AGI domination.

Modern man just doesn't know what to do with itself.