“It is possible that in a sport overloaded with cheats Armstrong overcame cancer and utterly dominated for seven years, but is it really probable?”
It has come to this. If you’re tested and come up positive you are a immoral lout, a cheat, a disgrace. And if you’re tested and come up negative you must have come up with a way to beat the test.
The crisis here, as Wetzel actual gets to after a while, is one of the nature of sports and competition. It’s hard to see bicycling as more corrupt than any other, but maybe the physical pressures caused the many to turn to PEDs first.
In any case, with the IOC now looking to ban those tents that simulate high-altitude conditions endurance athletes use for training, but not high-altitude training itself, the contradictions are starting to come to a head.
Somehow calling athletes who cheat immoral seems way beside the point.
1. Did Landis really cheat? Are we not supposed to wait for the results of the second test? If he really was a cheater, then why only one stage of the event? Desperation? Do drugs taken the night before really work that fast?
2. If Landis is proven to have performance enhanced then good for cycling in driving the point home that no one is above the betterment of the sport.
If, however, the failed test is the result of some innocent behavior, then the cycling powers that be should beg, crawl, and pleade for eternal forgiveness for a) allowing an incomplete test to become public and b) causing the sport to seem not unlike professional wrestling in the eyes of the world.