Sports Illustrated will come down hard on Armstrong
 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/201...ong/index.html

Why should Armstrong be held up as a paragon of virtue, and triumph of the will, while his competitors derides as cheats IF IN FACT Armstrong was ALSO CHEATING?

Yet, he defenders would have us believe that all the top guys in cycling were cheating, except for him, and somehow he managed to top them all.

OK.

It's interesting to see what the power of subpoena and and threat of perjury does.

or the prospects of being on the lecture tour?

I don't fault his competitors for cheating if that is the standard within the industry. I fault a waste of government funds investigating this.

You would think they would have something better to do with their time and our money.

Remember how you thought Armstrong's run was a fairytale? Yes, indeed, it was.

I think history will be especially unkind to those athletes that lied up to the very moment that final nail was hammered down.

Roger Clemens comes to mind.

I know you're a cynic about all things good. And in most of your endeavors of cynicism I am your older brother. But in this, Armstrong has stood the test of time and I hope the US government has egg on its face and that Armstrong nets a 100 Million Dollar award against the government for malicious prosecution.

Do I think it would be great if Lance was clean? Yes.

I just happen to not believe it. There is so much smoke here, that if there isn't any fire, then we may have to rethink what fire and smoke are.

So what's the further defense of Lance? That he is a nice guy? By all accounts, he is not. He is a prick. Rumors abound that he cheated on his wife, and thus left his kids to be raised in a single-parent home, just like.....hmmmmm....his despised father. Was he nice to his fellow athletes? No. Was he petty and vindictive? Yes.

But he raised money for cancer! Yes, he has. I'm sure Judas did a fair number of nice things too. Back in the day.

Let the truth come out, whatever it is.

And the truth is this: just about every remarkable cycling peformance in the Tour, in recent history, has been due to PEDs. You know, that moment, when a guy bursts away from the others at an ungodly speed? Guy gets busted, and the next year he is #70 in the pack. The sport has no credibility. And the guy who was on top, over it all, is slightly suspect. Justly slightly.

ESPN with some in-depth legal analysis:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/n...ory?id=6054645

Frankly, this could be the sports trial of the century.

Here's the major deal.

The other culprits ended up testing positive. Lance never has.

And so I see others being all too happy to bring him down. Let's not have anybody clean, none at all, because you lament, they're all dirty so let's destroy the last one.

First, I don't care if they use enhancing drugs or not. They should play by the rules in place.

Second, there are de jure rules and de facto rules. The de jure rules say, "don't use enhancing drugs."

The de facto rules say, "don't get caught using enhancing rules."

Lance didn't get caught. So bribing or threatening others to apply new standards after the fact bother me.

He won according the rules in place.

He was an ass. Some competitors are that way. I doubt Judas did anything similar. I'm surprised you didn't pull a Nazi or Stalinistic example.

We should not use our money to glorify some asshole prosecutor. This is not the transit of harmful illegal drugs. This is not murder. This is not vote rigging. This is not stock manipulation, mortgage fraud. This is about racing.

I find it outrageous the US government endorses this. I hope the prosecutor dies of brain cancer.

Lance Armstrong, should he have cheated, has made how many tens of millions (hundreds?) off of that fraud?

He talks about running for office.....do we want that too?

Sorry, I don't buy the "it's ok because he didn't get caught, that was the rules of the game." That makes you the cynical one, not me. You want lies to prosper--THAT is cynicism.

Lies do prosper. Case in point, Obama. They always will.

In the field of sport, he was more honest than the next guy. I see it more like hooking your guy in basketball, whatever the guys get away with is the de facto rule. This is not a question of moral ethos, positive law but rather normative law.

The SI article was not that good. It recycled several old stories and had some pretty bad inaccuracies that really should have been caught or never made by someone who was supposedly following what was going on. Moreover, some of the most damning claims relate to his career before cancer. Do we care that much if a pre-cancer LA doped in order to win the stage following casartelli's death?

The guy said he never doped period. If it can be proven that he doped at some point in his career, it destroys his credibility.

If half of what Landis says is true, there are going to be a bunch of guys sweating out the possibility of perjury charges when they are subpoenaed.

It wouldn't surprise me if one of them is wired and ends up having contemporary conversations with Lance where Lance incriminates himself and gets an obstruction charge.

There is no question that is what the prosecutor will try to do: threaten the other riders with perjury charges. SO far it appears they are holding tough (No rumors came out of Popo's interview with the feds even though they coordinated with the Carbinieri who supposedly found drugs in pop's apt, which popo denies). One of the interesting things from Landis' claims is that he says he never personally saw LA use durgs. IOW, even if Landis is truthful, and LA was doping, Landis only knows by inference and circumstance. This will make it harder for other guys to directly implicate LA if they never actually saw it themselves.

It's not an enviable position to be in.

If you "rat" on Armstrong, he will use millions if not tens of millions of dollars to destroy you (he has attacked every single person that has said anything that implicates him), and even then, he gets away with it.

Or face a federal perjury charge.

I'm not going to have any sympathy for anyone found to have perjured themselves.