Huh? I'm not nitpicking or calling out fairness issues here. This theory that "everyone was doping therefore the fastest person was still the fastest" is ridiculous, though. If that were true, they wouldn't need some of these rules since some of the doping isn't dangerous or illegal - for example, giving yourself your own blood transfusions isn't illegal in the real world, and if everyone did it in equal parts with equal safety, it wouldn't be that big a deal. I tend to agree that Armstrong might have been the best given a level playing field, but that's not something anyone can say with any certainty. Various and undocumented doping regimens are hardly a level playing field. If race car drivers were surreptitiously modifying their cars in arbitrary ways against the rules, but there was no detection of the violation and no consistent manner in which it was done, is the winning driver still the "best" just because multiple people may or may not have been cheating?
Also, the problem a lot of people have with Armstrong compared to someone like bonds or a-rod is that he went after anyone who accused him of doing any type of doping. I think I wrote a post a long time ago with links to articles about people who he sued and essentially ruined the careers of for accusing him. I know that with the extent of what be was doing you have to commit to the cover up or else it would fall apart, but even in that he went over the top. And always got the vibe that he used live strong partially to garner goodwill for the inevitable time when he had to admit to doping. Also, the score of the colts game doesn't really matter in this case. Just because it didn't help them win that game doesn't mean it isn't cheating. (I tend to think that it is a minor thing and they should've just admitted to it. Their attempted cover up and excuses look worse than the original "crime"). But there's nothing to say that they didn't do the same against the Ravens and they barely won that game so score shouldn't matter.
Here's what floors me. Roger 'I want to be a policeman' Goodell spends all his time worrying about off field antics and how teams deal with the players for such infractions. But get involved with regulating the actual balls used in the game? THE HORROR. Like it'd be so hard for the NFL to take care of and provide the balls used in THE FUCKING GAME HE'S COMMISSIONER OF BECAUSE IT OCCURS TO ME THAT THE BALL ITSELF IS PRETTY FUCKING INTEGRAL TO THE ACTUAL SPORT. Goodell sucks more ass than a male junkie hooker.
Vox dot com has a solid explanation of Deflategate/Ballghazi (I was pulling for the latter). Here are some excerpts:
I will say this though. Cycling is a pretty singular sport, as far as doping anyway, in that the regimens are pretty standard. It's not like Lance had a super secret lab giving him drugs that Jan Ulrich didn't have access to. It's mostly EPO, blood transfusions (as you mentioned) and test in conjunction with HGH in order to train harder. At their level it's not like they can just take random steroids as more muscle mass makes them more inefficient. Now is it a "level playing field"? No, and it never will be. People just have inborn advantages. God I wish I could remember the specific name but I remember an athlete who was banned due to having a high red blood cell count, but even the testing agency admitted he was clean, it was a bad combination of genetics and training at a high altitude. Some people were just put on this earth to be sprinters for example (see Mr. Bolt). I can do all the drugs and follow the most intense training program ever and I'll never be as good as the worst rider at the Tour de France. It's just the way it is. But we pretty much know the mechanisms for doping protocols and they are about the same (with a few tweaks here and there) across the board. At the elite level they're all getting top notch stuff. It's not like Lance was getting pharmaceutical grade EPO and the rest of the riders were getting shitty stuff made at some rinky dink lab in India.
I don't like cheating. I know it happens. I wish all of the leagues would take a real stance and define cheating and exact punishments for it. I'm not watching to watch someone cheat. I'm watching to see how good they actually are.
Phil Jackson says the NBA deflates balls too. Son of a bitch. Why won't people leave it alone?! Now we're gonna have to watch a presser of Coach Pop repeating "So I won't get fined."
This one QB who started 100 games across 7 teams said all teams do it. Blake: Every team deflates footballs Also, let's not forget the fact that this wouldn't have come out if the Ravens won. John H was so pissed the Patriots gamed him, he tattled on something that most likely half the teams do.
Wait, are you switching from "this is stupid, of course the Patriots didn't take air out of the balls" (Roger Clemens) to "well, everybody takes air out of the balls" (Lance Armstrong)?
I am just stating a fact. It's something that can get tossed around on anyone is what it looks like, true or otherwise. They still haven't found any solid proof that the Patriots did anything wrong and will most likely not.
Pat's shrivelled balls Ha ha ha. In this article: But in this article: So, where the hell did all this "down by 2 psi" nonsense come from? How does Walt Anderson deem 11/12 of them "not approved" and not bother to write down the numbers?
Deflated balls aren't like doping where there is a physical danger to participants that the sport doesn't want to be necessary for success. If the players all really think these balls are better to play with, why isn't that the standard ball?
Not everyone does. For example, Aaron Rogers likes an over-inflated ball because he thinks they throw better. Defenses are going to prefer them properly inflated as well because a soft football is easier for the offense to hold onto.
Armstrong is a complete scumbag. Pretty much every rider in the 90s peleton was on something but some come out looking a lot better than others. I think once he went down a certain road he had to stick with his story and it got out of control. Others got caught, kept quiet, served their ban and came back. Armstrong is still whining to the press about how he's not really that bad and should be forgiven. Someone earlier posted how one of Lance's tactics was to pretend he wasn't home. Another great one was building an incredibly long drive to his house so after the testers buzzed at the gate he'd have about fifteen minutes to sort his shit out before they got to the door. I think cycling is unfairly spotlighted when it comes to doping, partly because you gain a huge advantage for it and partly because it publicised its problems by actually trying to clean up its act. There are two sports which come to mind that are heading for an inevitable fall sooner or later. 1. Tennis. Another individual sport where endurance and power play a big part. The testing is ridiculously lax. Serena Williams was only tested out of competition once in a two year period. The time they did come to test her she locked herself in her panic room. There was no penalty for this missed test. Andre Agassi tested positive but the result was swept under the carpet by tennis officialdom. Tennis has seen what's happened to cycling and decided it would rather live with cheats than sort itself out. USADA only conducts about sixty tests a year on tennis players. 2. Soccer. This is a sport which has a long and glorious history of taking banned substances. The vast majority of fans simply don't give a fuck though. Names like Maradona, Romario, Deco and Guardiola were all cheats but nobody really cares. Eight members of the Algerian 1982 World Cup squad have severely handicapped children as a result of what they were given by team doctors. The Marseille team which won the first ever Champions' League in 1993 not only bribed referees but also took banned substances before the final. I can't really mention Guardiola without talking about my dislike for Barcelona. They were found to have broken the rules on signing players under sixteen and given an 18-month transfer ban. They appealed, during which they signed enough players for eighteen months rendering the punishment fairly moot. This of course was paid for in part by the millions they get from the Catalan government each year despite already being the richest football club in the world, and millions of their Spanish fans being unemployed due to the drastic economic conditions they face. They also took out adverts explaining eleven reasons why they should not be punished, none of them amounted to "we didn't break the rules" and instead mostly read like "We're Barcelona and should be allowed to get away with it." This all from a club that, like Armstrong, has a very polished white knight media image of being "more than a club" made possible by the fact that decades ago they were not quite as bad as their rivals. Still on soccer, Glasgow Rangers managed to go ten years without paying any employers tax contributions. Instead of paying players a wage, they simply "loaned" them lots of money out of the goodness of their hearts. This enabled relative no names like Stefan Klos to be paid only slightly less than David Beckham. A few years ago the whole house of cards came tumbling down and the club was liquidated with debts amounting to one pint of beer for every man, woman and child in the UK. Onischenko is a cheat I always remember being told about when I was young. In the 1976 Olympics he modified his sword so that he could register hits by pressing a button on the grip. A Brit complained, his sword was checked and he was thrown out, disgraced back home, hauled before the authorities and like so many former great sportsmen ended up working as a taxi driver.
How bad is baseball these days? It's not a sport I follow, but their punishments for drugs use seem to have been pretty pathetic previously.
In regards to MLB, I have thought a lot about whether players who have been linked to steroid use should be admitted to the hall of fame and I am still on the fence. At first I was against it, but now I think that the "just accept that the steroid era happened and let the best players from it be recognized for their achievements" has some validity. He may have taken steroids, but it is still hard to ignore Roger Clemens' 7 Cy Young awards. There are also other arguments, like some players can gain advantages in other ways that is perfectly legal but not "natural", like when they come back from Tommy John surgery better than they were before. There are also reports that use of PEDs goes back much eariler than the 1990's. I do think that it is ridiculous to keep out guys like Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza, who have hall of fame worthy numbers and are suspected of having juiced but were not named in the Mitchell Report or been definitively linked to steroid use.