Category Archives: Lance Armstrong

Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong, Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL, PEDs, Ryan Braun

The Modern Arrogance of PEDs

As a society, it feels like we are always operating under the assumption that modernity is good, that being a part of a modern era means that we are advancing. Perhaps it is experience gained as we age, or perhaps it is because of all the technological and communication advancements made make us just feel so efficient, so intelligent, so very advanced as people.
Or perhaps it is just arrogance.
We find value in purpose if we convince ourselves that we are “better” people than those who came before us, those insufferable rubes we call our ancestors.
Just look at us now, with our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds, our Vine videos. We think we’re pretty special, taking pictures of our food with camera filters. We think people care to know what we think of the latest scandal in 140 characters or less.
But we’ve missed the point of the social media medium. It is not the technology that is too blame, instead it is how we use it. Communication and connection were made easier by these software applications – how we implement them is another manner entirely.
What does this have to do with sports, you might be wondering?
Really, it has everything to do with sports, especially right now, as the sports world as we know it sits bathing in performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Almost daily, another user is identified, another lab busted, another player suspended or under suspicion of use.
Are all of these men and women, accused or proven guilty one and the same? Most assuredly not. Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong and Ryan Braun are in a different world from the junior tennis player who took the wrong over the counter medication and tested positive.
We should all fear the kind of athlete, like Braun or Armstrong, who not only seeks to gain these advantages, but maliciously works to destroy those who stand in their path.
This is simply modern arrogance transferred into sports. We are scrambling to justify players using PEDs with a litany of fun excuses: hey, it’s just part of the culture of sports now; it’s really not that bad; does it matter if everyone is doing it; if they want to risk their health for my entertainment, who cares?
Rationalizing the use of PEDs in this manner is almost adolescent in nature, which is to say, does not make us very advanced.
Those excuses sound like lectures parents dole out on their kids during teenage years: if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you? What does it matter if my friends Johnny and Tommy are doing it as long as I am not? Hey, it’s just what the kids do now.
So many of us have grown weary of this issue, the collective groan could be heard on the moon every time another story breaks.
Speaking of the moon, how would we feel if we heard Neil Armstrong had taken something that enhanced his ability to get to, and walk on, the moon? Cheapened a little? Like maybe we believed in something that wasn’t entirely real? Here is a landmark in the accomplishments of man, a moment that people of every race, faith and stature can point to and say, “humans can do anything.”
With the asterisk: as long as we take something to enhance our performance.
Look, I get it. It’s a tired and seedy story. It’s a slippery slope. It’s an argument we’ve all had in offices, living rooms, sports bars across the nation. What defines the line? Wouldn’t any drink that isn’t water that replenishes nutrients faster be categorized as a performance enhancer? Are all supplements bad?
There is most definitely no easy answer. No real, concrete line. How do we justify taking prescription drugs or medicines that improve your health when sick, physically or mentally, but stand on a bully pulpit when it comes to PEDs?
After all, those drugs allow you to perform your job better and possibly get a raise. They hide your mental or physical flaws from the outside world, giving off a false image.
The only response I can offer is this: there is a big difference between taking those kinds of drugs, which allow you to get back on a level that everyone else is on, and PEDs. If you are depressed, for example, not everyone around you is. A drug that helps level out the chemicals in your brain to a normal range simply put you back on par and allow you to live a life close to what many others enjoy.
They do not falsify your accomplishments and put you above the rest of your peers who are not doing the same things.
But I suppose, just ask yourself, do you feel something isn’t right about drinking Gatorade? About taking daily vitamins? Probably not.
Look, I take supplements. Just not the ones that improve hand-eye coordination, increase my muscle mass considerably and allow me to recover faster than people who aren’t taking them. Whether or not you’re just trying to get back out there and you owe it to the team, using HGH does still imply you are gaining an edge. You can call it speeding up your recovery, if it helps you convince yourself you weren’t looking to cheat – but it is still an edge over every other injured player who isn’t using it.
And there’s the rub, really. This is why we call something cheating: doing something that someone else in a similar position is not. It’s not so much about the morality of right and wrong, we blur those lines all the time.
Really, this is another mixture of PEDs and our society. We distinguish all the time what we will tolerate and what we won’t.
Barry Bonds was a noted jerk, as now is Braun and Rodriguez. However, guys like Derek Jeter use “good” steroids like cortisone to recover and we cheer their gutsiness. David Ortiz was caught with a positive test, and we just smiled. He’s Big Papi, so he’s cool. And I’m sure it was just for a little while to recover from something.
And this says a lot about our society, too. What kind of person you are, or portray yourself to be, will largely determine how willingly we accept or forgive you for a future issue. Do what we expect, based on what we know, and we will react accordingly.
This war, this battle in sports on drugs and PEDs, is driven by the media, and by people like me, too. Sons of old school fathers, fathers to young athletes. The last thing I want my three sons and daughter doing is taking something that enhances their performance to gain an edge on somebody else.
Remember the Ice Cube movie, “Friday”? (Oh yes, I’m going there.) Ice Cube is getting ready to fight the dude who played Zeus in “No Holds Barred” and wants to grab his gun. His father begs him to do it without the aid of a weapon, outside his fists.
I’ll give you another example, from an episode of the last season of “Boy Meets World” (yes, I’m going there, too). Cory and Topanga are just married and living in a dump. The pipes are spouting brown water, the place should be condemned and there’s a screaming baby in the apartment next to them.
They beg his parents for a loan to buy their dream house. Cory’s dad firmly says no, with little explanation of why they won’t. Later, Cory fixes the pipes himself (without deer antler spray), takes a clear glass of water from the faucet and demands his father drink it.
Finally, Cory gets it. It’s not that they couldn’t help – or did not want to. But if they would have, it would have robbed them of something that can’t be completely explained, that sense of accomplishing it on your own, of figuring it out, or doing it.
My argument against using PEDs and my reasons for continuing to wish for a cleaner sports world cannot be explained much better than that, with a hokey reference to a TGIF show and a the only semi-serious part of a comedy starring Ice Cube and Zeus.
Call me self-righteous and tell me I am naïve. Tell me I need to get with the times and just accept where the world is now, that all the athletes do it and have been for 20 years. Call them gentleman’s rules, unwritten guidelines, or just fair play.
Without that, what are we doing this for anyway? Money? Fame? Glory?
If that truly is the case, then we are far from advancing our society and culture.
Modernity is a myth for us, or at least it will continue to be, until we actually fix the faucet ourselves.

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blood doping, cycling, Lance Armstrong, Livestrong Foundation, Mark McGwire, PEDs, Sammy Sosa, Tour de France

Living Not So Strong


On its Web site, the Livestrong Foundation states that its mission is to “inspire and empower” cancer survivors and their families. The foundation has provided numerous people and families with the tools and resources to help overcome the emotional and physical damage of cancer. 

This country now needs a foundation to help us overcome the emotional damage of Lance Armstrong.

The foundation of the, well, his foundation, is built on the secrets and lies of the now disgraced hero and cyclist.
And the fallout from Armstrong’s doping admission to Oprah Winfrey this week leaves many of us feeling sick to our stomachs. We feel duped, cheated and lied to. The entire country spent the better part of a decade rooting for this man and fell victim to his charm – and his yellow bracelets.
No one cared about cycling before Lance Armstrong unless you were into cycling. No one cared all that much after he left, either. But you give football and baseball loving folks the story of a man who survived cancer, who sweats his way through France against all those cheating European bikers and overcomes all of it to capture every Tour de France from 1999-2005 and you’ve got an All-American Legend.
We can deal with flaws. Most of our heroes have them, even the fictional tales of Superman, Spider-Man and Batman showcase men who have their own secrets, weaknesses and fears to overcome. In some cases, they have strength, ability and powers not obtained through natural means. 

But Batman never blood-doped. Spider-Man doesn’t stick a needle in his butt.

Some, as I mentioned last week, just don’t care. One of my best friends has told me that my morality writing is some of my worst. This is due in part to his lack of regard for sports performance enhancing drugs. There are so many in the same state of mind: either it just doesn’t move the needle (no pun intended) and they don’t care what athletes do to entertain us and succeed, or it’s just a tired, drawn out storyline.
Essentially, why do we care anymore? If they all do it – and so many of our sports heroes appear to fall from grace nowadays in this very manner – then why do we bother with it anymore? We should just accept it as a new normal and move on.
But some of us can’t. I can’t. It does matter. And it’s bigger than just being a morality play or holier than thou attitude from the self-righteous.
The simple fact is, we all make mistakes. Ninety-five percent of Americans are just normal, average, every day people. And it’s inspiring to those of us in that 95 percent to hear and see others doing extraordinary things. It pushes us through our cold January mornings, slogging through traffic to an office. It inspires us to coach our children and instill a never-give-up attitude, a sense of hard work paying off and knowing that if you do, good things can happen.
When we find out our inspirational stories were missing some seedy chapters, it’s cheapened. We are cheated because they cheated. And it’s a feeling that doesn’t go away, no matter what is accomplished.
As many people have pointed out, what does it matter how Armstrong came to fame, but how he used that fame – to push for more cancer research and support the families afflicted by this terrible disease. There is truth to that, no doubt. But when the face and inspiration of the cause is found to have doped his own blood, and much of his success is now credited to gaining an edge on the competition not through determination, preparation and hard work, but through downright cheating – and then denying it for 10 years – it’s not so inspiring anymore.
In the summer of 1998, the home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa captured many fans, fathers and sons throughout the nation. My dad and I were no different. And at 18, I was in a strange transition time in my life. My father and I, always on good terms and already having a good relationship, bonded even more. We weren’t even fans of the Cardinals and Cubs, but watching these guys chase history, embrace each other and thrive under the spotlight was something we shared. We were watching history, together. And it brought us closer together, as sports so often has.
And then it became clear that something fishy had happened. All Dad and I could think about was McGwire talking about touching Roger Maris’ bat and touching with his heart.
“And a steroid needle,” I joked.
Suddenly, while Dad and I still had a deep bond and do to this day, our memories of it are tainted. It feels like it happened under false pretenses. And perhaps that’s where we get that sick feeling from.
That 95 percent of us want good things to happen. We want love, we want money, we want happiness. But many of us won’t allow ourselves to cross these moral lines and reach these things under false pretenses. If that makes me a righteous hypocrite that lives in a fantasy world of ethics that no longer exist, even to my closest friends, then fine. I don’t care.
Because for me, and for so many out there, I’d rather fail horribly by natural means and by my own weaknesses and failures than succeed through unnatural ways. I don’t want to win by doing what others aren’t, maybe because it means we know we went toe-to-toe with the other guy and were just better on that day.
This is precisely why it is so difficult for us to have heroes anymore. We don’t know who’s best is beefed up. What’s real and what’s a mirage?
Like Armstrong, we find out too many were not at all heroic in their means, but only their deeds. In Armstrong’s case, his end result as a record-shattering cycling champion, who’s own story of cancer survivor wove a heroic tale that all Americans could root for, was largely in part only accomplished because he manipulated his own blood in order to perform better.
No matter where we all collective reside in the discussion on PEDs, let’s all agree on one thing: that we’re not going to praise Armstrong for finally coming clean and admitting something he vehemently denied for years and years, legally and in the court of public opinion. Would a husband or wife call their cheating spouse of a decade direct, honest and candid when they finally admit to it only after everyone proved what a liar they were? I doubt it. Thou doth protest too much, eh?
I don’t care that he choked up when apologizing to members of the Livestrong charity. He didn’t Livestrong. He lived rather poorly in how he conducted himself – not just with the doping. And he’s only crying because he got caught, not because he’s sorry. That’s not regret or remorse. That’s self-pity for wishing he had not been exposed. Huge difference.
Heartfelt and sincere? Please. Colonel Jessup showed more accountability and remorse in A Few Good Men than Armstrong can fake at this point.
We’re partly to blame. We’re so thirsty for heroes that we’ll gobble down any story and trust anyone. And now we’re cynical as the years pass with our heroes. We’ve got to start standing for something more, or we’ll keep falling for anything.
After all, the U.S. Postal Service sponsored most of the those tour teams that Armstrong rode to victory seven times. I wonder where a government entity got their sponsorship money? Taxpayers perhaps?
See, no matter which way you look at it, in the end, really we all pay a price for “inspiration and empowerment.” Live strong, indeed.

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