Originally Posted by patentcad

Hey, I've always been a Lance fan. But I'm a fan of his near death experience followed by his brilliant cycling comeback. Anyone who thinks that was all due purely to doping (assuming he was doping) really doesn't get it at all. Made possible by doping perhaps, but in an era where the entire peloton was juiced, so all of it: the riding, the tactics, the team selection, the training, etc., all of that is what won those Tours. The EPO and doping just leveled the playing field. In other words, a remarkable story no matter how you slice it. The sordidness here was endemic to the sport itself, and has been for decades, it just got amped up by newer phrama technology in the last 20 years.

But I've never been a fan of his take no prisoners tactics to enforce this whole Lance Code of Silence thing. In the end that was always sort of doomed to fail. Ultimately it's a testament to how focused and smart Lance is that he got away with it and kept the whole thing under wraps so long. But the hubris inherent in thinking the truth would never come out is clearly evident. The big monkey wrench in the whole machine is that the primary sponsor during those years, Postal Service, was a U.S. government entity. Were it a private corporation, no government connection, no Fed investigation, and the wall would have remained intact. So as smart as Armstrong is, he didn't figure that one out.

The Lance haters are as imbecilic (moreso even) than the Lance fan boys. The real truth of course lies somewhere it between. It always does. Truth is rarely black and white. It's almost always grayscale. I do believe that truth and the light of day and transparency are good things. And if Lance has to crash and burn so the sport can have that at long last, that's the gamble he made when he first took PEDs as a competitive cyclist.

Time to pay the price.