Lance Armstrong has won his final Tour de France yesterday. Much is said about how he is one of the greatest individual athletes of all time, which I am not sure I necessarily agree (or disagree) with. He has certainly dominated his sport for most of the past decade. He has been accused continually of doping, and despite having been tested hundreds of times has never once been found to have cheated. Well, that isn’t quite true; they’ve found him to have cheated a few times, but each time they were either making stuff up or just wrong. The only time that he has used illegal substances (in the competitive world) was when he was going through chemotherapy.
My question is, how many times are they going to test him now that he is retired? Is there a statute on how long they can invalidate his win? Or if he says, “I’m retired, I don’t want to subject myself to this nonsense anymore” will they just assume that it would have been a positive test? Or is there a chance that he’ll actually be left alone and not forced to fill a cup every other day?
His 7th win in a row at the Tour was a great accomplishment. Only Eddy Merckx has worn the maillot juane more times; 111 times to Armstrong’s 83. I will miss reading about his races, but it is nice to see somebody determine a good time to get out of the game and is able to quit while they are ahead. I am sure that he could still be competitive for another year, but if he wants a chance to recover and actually have a life that isn’t dominated by his job for a few years, who can blame him?
You really believe just because he’s been tested hundreds of times that he’s drug free? Barry Bonds can be tested hundreds of times and be in the clear. Did you ever watch the ESPN special with the various interviews of Greg Lemond and Armstrong’s former associates? You feel the truth ringing in their voices.
I do believe that he is drug free, and until I’m given any evidence that he is not, I am going to assume that he is. He is just as convincing that he does not cheat, and I feel that he probably knows better than they do. Barry Bonds has admitted to being an idiot and is actually linked to a drug scandal, so I do not find it a stretch of the imagination to think that he is doping. Maybe at some point something will come out that Armstrong was cheating, but as of what I know right now, I do not think that that is going to happen. As of right now, he seems to be a character guy, and does a lot of good work for the cancer community.
I hope that he is clean. It would be a sad world that we live in if we had to believe that everybody cheated just because they excel at something.