Thursday, January 20, 2011
Let’s End the Lance Armstrong Witch Hunt
Why is the witch hunt coming after Lance Armstrong? Evidence that Armstrong is a doper is mounting and the accusations are flying after Sports Illustrated broke a story full of growing evidence, but still lacking the smoking gun. Enough is enough. Someone needs to get on the phone with the president of sports to get this story killed yesterday. The Lance Armstrong narrative is too powerful and valuable to be tarnished. It's time for the sports reporters in this world to treat this story like a white-trash bar slut and pull out already for chrissakes.
Did Lance Armstrong use performance-enhancing drugs? No. That's the story and whether it's true or not does not matter. Move along. Go report on something else, like whatever fetish Rex Ryan is into this week or whichever athlete has his genitals in the news this week.
Cancer is a motherfucker. It kills millions every year and it ruins millions of more lives. Sure, sometimes it comes for people that have earned it through years of treating their bodies like garbage, but then it can come just as easily to an innocent kid that hasn't begun to live long enough to earn his cancer. And what it does to people just destroys families.
The Lance Armstrong myth is something cancer victims and their families need. They need to know it's possible to have cancer, be given a minuscule chance for survival, and beat it. They need to know someone has stared death in the eyes, fought back, and became a champion again.
What Lance Armstrong has done is invaluable. You know it every time you see someone wearing a yellow wristband. For a few years, it was a fashion statement, but now the only people wearing them are the people who have directly been affected by the bastardly disease. And it means something to them. A lot.
Sports are fun. They are a diversion. Most importantly, they are entertainment. That's it. When you get down to it, they aren't that important. Not more important than something like cancer.
Armstrong's Live Strong Foundation has done an amazing job in the past decade in helping cancer victims and in providing money, and lots of it, for cancer research. Because his influence has been so vast and completely transcends sports, he is arguably the most important athlete in his generation.
And we're going to compromise this? For what? To preserve the "integrity" of bicycle races? It's not even a sport, it's a mode of transportation. And everyone involved in the sport uses PEDs. Everyone. No exception. They all cheat. Most importantly, no one cares about the sport.
Reporters are treating this story with the same self-righteous vigor and timeliness they had with the baseball steroid scandal. It's nowhere close to the same thing. Baseball is America's pastime and is a sport that relies heavily on it's past and on records and stats.
Conversely, no one gives a shit about bike racing. That's all there is to it. It's like if the two most boring sports, bowling and the WNBA, got together and tried to have a kid. But then they realized they couldn't produce offspring because God didn't care enough to give them reproductive organs, so they were forced to scour the world for a super irrelevant sport to carry on it's legacy and ultimately adopted bicycle races.
I conducted an extremely unscientific poll via instant messenger and 95 percent of people polled could only name on professional bike rider: Lance Armstrong. The other 5 percent could only name Lance and Floyd Landis, who they only knew as the "cowardly jackal who tried to burn Lance." One respondent called him Lloyd Flandis, which really might be his name. I have no idea because he's too irrelevant to even fact-check his name on google.
Competitive bike riding is both boring and inconsequential. The fact that it gave us something as motivating as Lance Armstrong's narrative is a miracle. Lance Armstrong's story and his foundation are far more important than just about anything else in sports and shouldn't be subject to pointless "investigation."
And every journalist working on this story should just move on to something more noble, like eating a picture of Brett Favre's dick.