What a shame. Floyd Landis had been out of the public eye since his Tour de France victory and the fairly quiet announcement that someone had failed drug testing towards the end of the Tour.
Turns out it was Landis. And after his magnificent Stage 17 ride.
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It's a miracle anybody believes any news they read or see at all. Histories aren't exactly to be depended on either. I wish we were all still animists, so we'd be on a more level footing with regard to what we believe. I'd feel less hypocritical too.
Which news are you talking about here? Landis' victory or his doping?
I don't think it's cynical to say that most eveyone in the Tour is doping. I rode in the lead car on the final day of the 2004 Tour and spent time talking with Tour insiders. In private, they pretty much all took doping in the Tour as a widely-known matter of course.
It's about the worst possible thing you could put your body through. Tour riders have been doping since the inception of the Tour, although it used to be wine and cigarettes, then cocktails of heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines, then today our high-tech versions. I'm almost inclined to say, "let them dope." I think I'd still appreciate their accomplishment. It would be like reading Paul Valery's poems.
I meant the implicit news that he didn't dope and the explcit news just now that he did and his swearing that he didn't and whatever news may be to come on the question of did he, or didn't he? Today it's Landis. Other days it's about Cheney or Merck or the size of the harvest or about how many of our kids are above average. There just ain't nothing from nobody you can't be sure ain't a lie. Take it from me.
Of course, I left out Lance and Bonds who I was already heavily straining to give some benefit of doubt to. I guess I just feel stupid for falling prey to disappointment from the taint now stuck for good to Landis. I should know to be more cynical, and so as compensation I vow never to believe anything again.
I'm willing to entertain the question of why we should all be such a-goggle over doping athletes. Most of us on good days have a variety of chemicals coursing through our bodies for all sorts of afflictions real and imaginary. The point being that the cynicism here seems a response to an imaginary situation that perhaps never existed in the first place.
I don't think doping is per se immoral and I do think it makes all the difference if practically everybody else in the top tier is doing it, but I did not think that could be the case now, because I thought testing recently had gotten a lot more rigorous, that more investigating was going on to keep up with the latest substances to test for, that recently the penalties had gotten so stiff that athletes recently would have become a lot more leery of getting caught and finally that the most secret new doping scheme that the authorities have no idea to test by definition ought not to be known and available to every competitor. Anyway, I'm a goggle because this isn't American pro football or Wall Street trading or a presidential election in Florida, but the Tour, where I imagined a high honor code applies.
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