Lance, yet again.

As many of you know, I am a huge Lance Armstrong fan. He is the only person, in my opinion, who can make the Tour exciting. When he doesn't race, I can understand everyone else's opinion about bike racing being like watching paint dry. But when he races, I'll get out of bed at the crack of dawn to watch a stage where he is going to make a move, go flying up a climb, and fight past people to cross the line first.

The most recent issue of Sports Illustrated had two separate articles about Lance, the first basically talking about how Lance is a giant hypocrite for not admitting that he dopes. It talked about how many people dope, about how in Europe its pretty much agreed upon that all of them dope, and that Europeans don't care that much, get caught, serve a supspension, all is forgiven. It hammers Lance for pages about how ridiculous it is for him to think that anyone would believe that he could be that much better, and not dope. The second article talks about the following commercial.



The person who wrote the second article took Lance to task for what she saw as almost unforgivable arrogance in trying to tie criticisms of him to the fight against cancer. She argued that he was making it impossible to critique him without coming off as being an opponent of what he stood for. Finally she finished with saying that he should be less forceful in his tone about his critics.

Thats a load of crap.

In the same magazine that she spouted that tripe, her editors felt the need to put in pages denouncing Lance as a fraud, and a doper, and a hypocrite. His tone seems to be right on the money to me.

There are many who claim there is no way he could be as good as he is, so automatically assign him to be a doper and a cheat. I find it amazing that the same label is not automatically put on Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Lebron or Kobe. No one claims that Barry Sanders must have been a juicer to run like he did, especially with the sieve of an offensive line that the Lions had. No one says you must be blind and naive to think that Joe Montana, or Steve Young must have been cheating to have the success that they saw.

You want hypocrites, look to the people who, because cycling isn't America's pasttime, are so quick to denounce someone who dominates the sport when they don't hold their sports heroes up to the same standard.

Is it possible that Lance has taken some performance enhancing drugs, of course. Of course it is possible that he has access to drugs that are impossible to detect over literally thousands of tests given at completely random times with more scrutiny that any other athlete in the history of the world....its possible. But it is out of the realm of logic to make the claim that because doping exists, that because people in his sport have doped, and because he has beaten those same people consistently for years, that he too must be guilty absent any and all evidence to back it up.

I'll still be excited to watch him win the Tour this year, and make no mistake, when they finish in Paris he'll be wearing the Yellow Jersey. The critics can continue to say whatever they want, this guy actually makes it exciting to watch men race bikes for hours at a time, tell me one other professional athlete with that kind of charisma.