I am the holder of many unpopular ideas. One is that Crocs are acceptable — more than acceptable, they are an exemplary form of footwear. Another, is that if we are going to get hysterical about Lance Armstrong’s indiscretions we need to put him in the context of professional cycling as a whole.

The context is that apparently professional cyclists are a bunch of cracked-out wing-nuts whose major athletic skill is crossing the finish line without total liver failure and both eyes pointing in the same direction.

Since before the Tour de France’s inception in 1903 competitors have been tweaking themselves as enthusiastically as rock stars at an after-party. A 1997 IOC report entitled the Historical Evolution of Doping Phenomenon cited a Welsh guy dying from drinking a mixture of caffeine, cocaine and strychnine during a Paris to Bordeaux race in 1866. According to The Guardian, the 1904 Tour de France saw competitors trying to get ahead by any means possible, including hopping on a train to get to the next stage. In 1920 — when trains stations were now being carefully checked for wiry people carrying suspiciously bicycle-shaped bags — a French cycling hero, Henri Pélissier, made the type of admission that would raise the eyebrows of hard-core ravers. In a conversation with a journalist from Le Petit Parisien he produced a phial from his bag and said, “That, that’s cocaine for our eyes…”

“We can’t sleep at night,” he said, “We’re twitching as if we’ve got St. Vitus’s Dance.” Referring to a compulsive dance ‘mania’ that affected only — curiously — a certain part Europe during the 14th to 17th century and was characterized by a chronic, sometimes fatal case of the boogie-woogies.

In 1930 the cases of drug-taking was so ubiquitous that the Tour de France rule book needed to explicitly state that drugs would not be provided by — not the coaches, not the managers, but by the organizers themselves. This is like needing to clarify that the police will not be giving guns to the general population during the next riot.

In the 1950’s and 60’s Pierre Dumas became the first doctor, and official partypooper, to actively campaign against naughty substances on the Tour. This is after such highlights as a French rider keeling over in 1955, apparently unconscious except for his feet still making pedalling motions in the air. In 1956 an entire Belgian team collapsed from eating ‘bad fish’. In 1960, during one of Dumas’s regular tour of the hotel rooms, he found another rider lying on a bed hooked up to an intravenous drip. In ’62 a German rider was found sitting at the side of road during the Tour in an apparent daze. “I ate bad fish at the hotel last night,” he said.

Eventually, in July of 1966, the first anti-doping testers arrived in Bordeaux to look at the competitors’ urine. This triggered a flight response amongst the cyclists who fled the hotel, many, oddly, without their bikes. In the long term the ban and the testing did little to curb the use of drugs on the Tour de France. What it did was create a blossom of creativity in terms of finding new and sneakier ways to put stuff in your body without being caught. It also ratcheted up awareness to the fact that no Tour was complete without the delayed realization that one, if not all of the top five finishers could have won just as easily on foot.

Eddy Merckx, for example, widely considered to be the greatest cyclist that ever lived, won 5 Tour’s during the 70’s. He was busted three times for taking stimulants. The 80s are riddled with more incidents of drug-taking than a Miami nightclub, and the 90s began illustriously with an entire Dutch team dropping out of the tour. In a show of awesome creativity they carefully constructed their excuse: “Bad fish.”

The 00’s saw blood doping, EPO (erythropoietin, look it up), human growth hormones, steroids, stimulants, gene doping, amphetamines, narcotic analgesics and diuretics in various cyclists’ systems. Sometimes one or two, sometimes all at the same time. A good decade to be a research chemist by anyone’s reckoning. Because, of course, forms of these drugs hadn’t been seen before. That’s how you beat the system.

Which brings us to Lance Armstrong confessing to doing very bad things all seven times he won the Tour de France. The confession wasn’t to the Supreme Court, or even a Congressional enquiry, it was to the US’s own Hague Tribunal for Celebrities; Oprah Winfrey. The press, in reaction to this poker-faced disclosure, appeared to react by taking performance-enhancing drugs of their own.

The Washington Post declared ‘Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey: Forked tongue, meet silver tongue.’ The normally nice Canadians turned nasty with a National Post article declaring, ‘I see great symmetry in this Lance Armstrong/Oprah Winfrey affair: The worthless admission and the worthless venue in which it was made; between confessor and confessee.’ The Irish Times, keeping an eye on established drug-use benchmarks, headlined, ‘Charlie Sheen slams Lance Armstrong, defends Lindsay Lohan.’ The British Sunday Telegraph took the scatter-shot approach with, ‘Liars and fakes: the fall of America’s modern heroes,’ ignoring the fact that no British person has ever considered any American to be a hero. The normally cycle-happy Dutch took a slightly unhinged angle with the Aglemeen Dagblaad stating in bold, ‘Bradley Cooper would not relish playing the role of Lance Armstrong.’ And, of course, there is the French who appeared to be waging medieval warfare against the man. Le Figaro said, ‘The axe has fallen. Some people will be furious but others will see justice being done.’ Le Monde went with, ‘Saint Armstrong, pierced with arrows, has finally succumbed.’

What they neglected to mention was that the guy that came in second to Armstrong on three different occasions, Jan Ullrich, got there with chemical assistance. Or, that the Spaniard, Alberto Contador, rode a needle to first place three times since Armstrong’s reign. They also shied away from the fact that Livestrong.org, Armstrong’s charity, is one of the most generous and effective anti-cancer charities on the planet. This of course does not excuse taking drugs to win, but in the case of the Tour de France, who needs an excuse?

The point is, when the media crucifies Armstrong on the days following the International Cycling Union’s planned ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commission before which he’s meant to testify, consider him within the context of the sport.

If you have to hate him, hate him because he ruthlessly pursued and sought litigation against his rightful accusers — something that takes an astounding amount of balls for a guy that only has one. Hate him because of his capacity to lie so incredibly well for so long. But don’t hate him because he cheated with drugs. You open that can of worms and then you have to pick through every other professional sport with a pair of latex gloves and a box of plastic cups. Don’t even hate him because he somehow debased cycling. He just got caught because certain journalists were pathologically annoyed that an American kept winning the thing.

As French reporter, Pierre Chany, who covered 49 Tours said about doping, “It existed, it has always existed.”

And definitely don’t hate him if he wears Crocs.

http://emajmagazine.com/2013/02/07/dont-hate-lance-armstrong-for-doping/