The Lance Armstrong Rant

I ranted this over on Facebook in two back-to-back posts earlier. Here it is for your reading pleasure. I know that the paragraphs are long and probably should have been split up, but I just copy and pasted without editing.

I'm not convinced of Lance Armstrong's guilt until he says it himself or I get to read the full, unedited 200-something page report. They've tried him in the court of public opinion without giving us the actual evidence. If they have such definite, without-a-doubt proof that Lance doped, why won't they present it to the public? They owe it to his past and present fans and doubters to give us all t...

he information. That's the only way to save face for cycling at this point. Until they give us that report, his fans (like myself) who still don't believe he doped and even non-fans who just don't like the way that USADA, the UCI and all the other governing bodies have handled it will have bad feelings about the sport of cycling.

 

And to continue my rant, all sports, whether it's cycling, NFL, NHL, NASCAR, NBA, insert your favorite sport here, the lesson to learn from all of this is that honesty and transparency are the only way to handle a situation of cheating. Cycling has done more to tarnish their own repuation than Lance Armstrong has. Say he is guilty, why is the title being stripped 13 years after his first Tour de France win? It is the responsibility of the sport's rule makers to find and punish the cheaters. It looks worse that it took them so long to punish the cheater than it does that the guy cheated. Then on top of that to hide information from the fans who attend events, watch them on television, buy team merchandise and support sponsors makes the situation reek like back-room dealings. As their income-source, the fans of a sport have the right to know Person A failed Test B on Date C. We spend our money on the merchandise put out by the teams and on the products the sponser makes. That money is then put into the sport. But it starts with the fans. Without fans that are willing to spend their paychecks on products related to a sport, there would be no sport. They owe it to us, their cash-cow, to give us all the information that they have. On top of the fact that we pay their paychecks, when they are going to not only knock our heroes off their pedestals but smash that pedestal to smithereens, we should be told exactly why our heroes should not be idolized and respected. Complete and total honesty and transparency. It's the only way for a sport to weather a storm like this and come out on the other side with all the fans they had in the first place. Especially when so many of those fans only came to the sport because of the man they just demolished.