THE ULTIMATE CON.
I'm angry with Lance Armstrong. Can I get back all those hours I spent reading about him, watching him, admiring him? He could've been a Nobel Peace prize winner for what he did. He fought cancer and went on to win 7 straight Tour De France championships AND led the Lance Armstrong Foundation which raised money for cancer research. Mother Teresa, step aside. And then it all came tumbling down. He's a cheater. He got away with it for YEARS. And it's not that he only cheated the dirtiest, filthiest sport on the planet, cycling. Who cares about those guys? It's that he cheated me and millions of other suckers who thought he was a great man. Not a great cyclist. A great MAN. A winner. A leader. A hero. There, I said it. Hero. We love our heroes, don't we? Brave souls. Courage of a lion. Those who fight for their country. Those who risk their own lives to protect others. Those who overcome tremendous odds and succeed. Those who give us all hope.
I wore that yellow bracelet for a couple of years because of Lance Armstrong. I believed. There are tons of pictures of me with that bracelet, believing Lance Armstrong was a man I'd really like to meet. In fact, he was THE man I wanted to meet. Heck, when he was engaged to Sheryl Crow, most guys just wanted to BE Lance Armstrong. But he was a cheater. He was a con man. He was a phony. And now the house of cards is falling down all around him. Nike, which gave A-Rod the benefit of the doubt after he ADMITTED he did steroids, did not want to be associated with Armstrong anymore. Had he come clean (pun intended), Nike might've given him a break too, the way they did when he developed testicular cancer in 1996 and stuck by him when other sponsors bailed. This time Nike couldn't do it. They knew he was dirty. They knew that any association with Armstrong was going to be a PR nightmare.
Armstrong has never failed a drug test, but that hasn't stopped dozens of former teammates and other first-hand observers from testifying that he did drugs and had the most sophisticated masking agents and such in the world. The suggestion that he was the mob boss of a worldwide doping ring does have some merit. After all, who else but the 7 time champion cheater would have the best drugs AND the best masking agents?
There are no comparisons here. Barry Bonds was a bad guy, a steroid user, a cheater and a liar. But I never admired him, and I doubt many others did. Same with Roger Clemens. Marion Jones, the U.S. track star who won 5 gold medals at the 2000 Olympics, admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs, and had to forfeit all her medals. Armstrong still believes he is the rightful owner of those 7 consecutive Tour De France titles, but he has been officially stripped of them and banned for life from the sport. Got that? Banned for life for what he did. Banned for life because he cheated us all.
His legacy will live on. "Livestrong", the bright yellow sportswear is worn around the world, along with the omnipresent bracelets, of which I own several. Make that owned. They're going into the garbage because I now see them for what they really are. Cheap and meaningless.
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