Everyone is entitled to his heros.-
For the Op a hero is an overpaid dugged up media whore, for you the firemen that ran into the twin towers, for many people the guys that crashed the planes in those towers, and for me Angelina Jolie.-
In short: piss off.-
saying this is just like somebody saying, “you think you’ve got troubles? i lost my job, my wife left me, and my kids won’t talk to me. and my dog has cancer. don’t tell ME about troubles.”
heroes, like troubles, are relative.
I have a lot of heros. My former sporting hero was Agassi - a one-time talented punk that eventually ‘got it’.
Landis could have simply taken his bat and gone home after falling behind by over 8 minutes on stage 16. I actually tried to start a thread in MPSIMS about his amazing rebound the next day, but the board ate my post. After everyone had written him off, his determination the next day was simply amazing.
That’s partially why this is a pitting - if he was in fact cheating, he robbed me and a lot of others of an amazing experience. Does it equate to people running into burning buildings or chasing down criminals? Of course not. That’s not the point.
Most of us never face the kind of spotlighted pressure these athletes do. What they do isn’t the same as firefighters or police officers, or teachers, or the countless other jobs that people do every day that really make a difference in our society. Yet, we can still be impressed and awed by their accomplishments.
Anyone who enjoys recreational sports knows what pressure does to you, even at our ‘adult league’ level. Or those who have to give a presentation to the boss. Or pitch a contract to a client. Everyone faces various pressure situations, and we all know how it affects us. Now magnify that by about 1000%, because these athletes are at the very top of their fields - they are facing the very very best. Now put a few million dollars, and potentially your entire career, on the line. Then put a bunch of hecklers yelling at you, booing you, actively hoping you fail, in the room.
Then put it in front of a national TV audience.
How easy do you think giving that sales pitch would be?
When you understand the amazing feats these athletes are able to produce under the most impossible of circumstances and pressure…it’s why people watch sports. They aren’t heros in the ‘saving lives’ sense of the word, but they are heros in overcoming the pressures and weaknesses that all of us humans share.
It’s why we feel cheated when athletes cheat - our view of them is dimished.
In other words, DrDeth - Fuck Off.
Dunno about hero, but I’ve spent the summer recovering from a rather nasty broken right ankle and the last month stating that if someone with no hip to speak of left can win the TdF then I should be able to walk on my own two feet someday soon. Maybe not heroic but certainly inspirational and encouraging. I hope he didn’t do it, but at heart I think he may well have.
Actually, due to something called “Operacion Puerto” conducted by the Spanish police, most/all of the big name cheats were out of the Tour from the start – Basso, Ulrich, Mancebo, etc. And contrary to many predictions of gloom and doom, this was probably the most exciting Tour of the last decade, what with the winner decided on the final TT.
And now this. I can’t possibly imagine how Landis thought he was going to get away with it. 
Hell, even the Spanish rider, Pereiro, who finished second and would earn the victory, is a good friend of Landis (used to ride in same team)and had this to say:
PEREIRO: “PREFIERO SER SEGUNDO A QUE SE CONFIRME EL DOPAJE DE LANDIS”
“I’d rather be second as opposed to confirmation of Landis’ doping.”
Damn, damn, damn.
PS-Stage winners and the Yellow Jersey always get tested – plus two random riders from the peloton.
Ironically, due to the fact that some of the “stars” were missing, this was one of the fastest Tours ever. See, “strategy” basically went out the window, there was really no controlling team or rider, so everyone went out there and gave it their absolute best – again, leading to one hell of an exciting race.
However, if this story sticks, not sure how long its going to take for cycling to recover from it.
Oh darn, those poor sports stars- having to put up with all that, and for what? A measly 5-10 million dollars a year, and all the sports groupie pussy they can eat. The sacrifices! :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: They get heckled! :eek:
Whereas some firefighter risks his life for your worthless couch-potato ass for $50k a year.
Unhappy fellow, aren’t you?
According to this site, the average pro athlete in the US makes $27,000. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I don’t have a hard time believing it. The players in the NFL, MLB, NHL etc - those are the cream of the crop, the Disney CEO types that make hundreds of millions of dollars per year. For every A-Rod contract out there, there are dozens in the minor leagues of their sport barely getting by. In fact, I’d wager that given the amount of time they spend in training, they might not even be making an hourly minimum wage.
Further: the average athlete’s career is well less than 10 years. Hockey players last about 8 years, baseball players 5-7, and football players less than 4.
I’m not saying that athletes are on par in the ‘hero’ sense in terms of saving lives. But neither am I going to belittle their efforts or accomplishments. Neither am I going to belittle my career or my efforts at improving my ability to do my job.
So, I’ll just repeat: FUCK OFF
The credence many in this thread to passing drug tests is not warranted. There are numerous examples of sportspeople who have passed every test, but been caught in other ways. As I understand it, those accused in the Spanish sting never failed a test. David Millar never failed a test. Read up on www.cyclingnews.com, which has an article about how usage of testosterone patches is commonplace, but usually (if it’s done right) doesn’t result in a failed test.
Cite?
Agree with all of this.
The problem with so many sporting bodies is that they pretend to care about steroids while studiously avoiding any policy that would actually fix the problem.
If they are happy with drug-riddled athletes, that’s fine. I woldn’t even care very much. But the least they could do is be honest about it, rather than pretending to give a shit.
I have do disagree with your assessment of the UCI. Certainly, cycling is far from a drug-free sport but the organizing bodies do more than anyone to try and enact a useful system for catching drug cheats. Baseball, football, etc.'s testing programs are absolute jokes in comparison.
That said, I think I will wait for more information before decrying Landis as a cheat. If it were another drug such as EPO, HGH, or IGF-1 I would be much more inclined to believe that he was doped, but the use of testosterone just doesn’t make any sense to me at all during the Tour.
First off, testosterone is an anabolic steroid that can cause people to gain huge amounts of weight, and although it might certainly prove helpful for a track sprinter or classics rider, it wouldn’t for a Tour contender like Landis and certainly not during the closing days of a race like the Tour.
Finally, the testoterone doping test isn’t a simple positive or negative like ones for stimulants or some other types of drug tests. Rather, it depends upon your ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone and if the ratio is more than six:one it’s considered a positive.
There are definitely people that have natural readings in this range, there have been false positives with this test before, and I think we should at least wait a week for a B sample.
You know heaps more than I do about this stuff, threemae, but here’s what I read:
From www.cyclingnews.com - the world centre of cycling
It seems the suggestion is that testosterone helps with overnight recovery.
From today’s edition of the (London) Times:
‘Landis has hired Luis Hernandez, a Spanish doctor who has helped other riders who returned test results showing high levels of testosterone. “In hundreds of cases, no-one’s ever lost one,” Landis said.’
They get prior notification in that they know the first three in a stage get tested. Additional testing is random.
There’s another person I’d like to mention here: Oscar Pereiro.
Last year he was in the same team as Landis. This year, he was supposed to be the “star’s almost-star helper” in a new team, but his star broke his collarbone at the start of the race (fragile bone, it’s like the 3rd time he breaks it). He wore the yellow shirt, lost it to Landis. In Paris he said, and either he’s the best actor ever or it was real, that being 2 was actually a better result than he or his team had aimed for at the beginning, that he was very happy with it and that he was very happy for his friend Landis to have won. This kind of attitude is a lot more understandable for Spain than for the US - not bashing you, just pointing out that around here “number 2 is the first loser” brings rolleyes and in the US hearty nods.
Yesterday he was saying that getting #1 disqualified is no way to win; that if the B test comes up positive it’s a terrible loss to the sport. He sounded like he wasn’t quite sure whether to scream or cry, I was just seeing him on TV and I wanted to hug him and make it right.
From the link in the OP–
Just needed to share this headline, currently up on MSN:
Landis: I Will Prove I’m No Doper
It should be noted (perhaps I’ve just missed it) that the testosterone levels didn’t test high, the epitestosterone levels were low, throwing the ratio off. Something’s off here, I’m reserving judgement.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been wondering. There should be tests available for comparison from Saturday’s TT, Sunday’s final stage, and a few tests from earlier in the race.
Whatever it is, I think we’ll be able to get to the bottom of this.
Also, Princhester, you may well be right about testosterone’s ability to encourage rapid recovery but my understanding of its effects was more in line with this Canadian doctor’s:
http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/10600.0.html
When you call him a hero, I think you’re doing just that. For a wonder, I agree with DrDeth. I sick of seeing the term “hero” devalued to mean, “Anyone who can do something I can’t.” Riding a bike doesn’t make you a hero. Riding a bike really, really well doesn’t make you a hero. Riding a bike after recovering from testicular cancer doesn’t make you a hero. It just makes you a bicyclist.
That still doesn’t make them heroes. A hero ought to be someone who does something incredibly hard, or self-sacrificing, or brave, for the benefit of someone else. I’m impressed as hell at someone who can finish the Tour de France. But they’re ultimatly doing it for selfish reasons: they like competitive bicycling, they like the attendent fame and adulations, and they’ve decided to do everything they can to be the best at it, and thereby get the most from it. It’s a selfish endeavour in the long run, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s nothing heroic about it, either.
Very hard, I imagine. So hard, I’d question wether it’s worth the effort of doing it, just for a lousy sales pitch. And even so, there’s still a far more tangible outcome from the sales pitch than there is from a bike race. So I’m supposed to be awed by someone who expends that much time, effort, and emotion on something that benefits no one and does nothing useful? Seems more pathetic than heroic to me.
Of course, I know that a lot of sports celebrities use the money and fame they get from their careers to advance a wide range of charities. And that is admirable, and maybe even heroic. But that doesn’t make their sports careers heroic, any more than a wage slave donating his earnings to the Red Cross makes punching a time clock heroic. And if Landis is doing that kind of work when he’s not on a bike, that’s heroic no matter how many horse steroids he’s injected into his jugular.
I think that “sense” of the word you cavalierly dismiss ought to be held central to the entire concept of the word.
Which is why it’s dumb to heroize athletes in the first place. Someone who risks their life by running into a burning building to save a life: that’s a real hero, and the way you can tell is, there’s no information you can learn after the fact that takes away from the act. There’s no “cheating” that kind of heroism. That’s how you know it’s the real deal.
The problem you’ve got isn’t that some bicyclist may or may not have cheated during a race. You’re problem is, you need to find some better criteria for choosing your heros.
Persuant to my last paragraph, might I suggest “able to take disagreement graciously” as one of those criteria?
I have an incredibly low opinion of atheles in general- hell, I’ll go on record as saying that the world would be a better place without professional sports- but I too would prefer to wait for more information before deciding whether to ignore this complete nobody anymore than I already have been.
Perhaps it’s time for professional cycling to give up and allow “doping”- and if any of the competiting athletes involved don’t want to use “doping agents”, then they’re welcome to try and win using their Mad Cycling Skillz™ alone?