Cycling News to Lance Armstrong: "When you came into the sport, it probably wasn't to dope, it wasn't to cheat..."

"... but at what point, specifically, did you realize that was how cycling worked and that the governing body weren't dealing with the situation?"

Armstrong: "My generation was no different than any other. The 'help' has evolved over the years but the fact remains that our sport is damn hard, the Tour was invented as a 'stunt, and very tough mother f**kers have competed for a century and all looked for advantages. From hopping on trains a 100 years ago to EPO now. No generation was exempt or 'clean'. Not Merckx's, not Hinault's, not LeMond's, not Coppi's, not Gimondi's, not Indurain's, not Anquetil's, not Bartali's, and not mine."

Speaking of Presidents and nightmares...

I had a dream last night that I woke up, looked at my iPhone, and saw a terrible headline in Drudge. I tried really hard to yell it out to Meade, who was asleep. It was impossible to yell, which should have tipped me off that it was a dream, but it was so realistic — the dream of waking up in bed and doing something that you tend to do while still in bed — that later, when I really did wake up, I grabbed my iPhone, went right to Drudge, and I was so relieved to see the same headline that was there when I went to bed Friday night.

It's a particularly cheerful headline — "Stocks Hit 5 Year High" — with a picture of wine glasses splashily clinking, angled together in a position that parallels Oprah's hands in a picture just above and to the left. Oprah looks alarmed/outraged, but only because "He even lied — to Oprah?!" And how reassuring that is. The outrage of the day is Lance Armstrong, doping and lying, the same old thing, and it's something that only vaguely affects us. Thank God.

What was the headline I saw in my dream? I won't tell you. It's not that I'm superstitious, but ideas affect minds, and it's an image I won't put out there.

"Armstrong did not delve into the details of his doping, and Winfrey never asked."

"He did not explain how it was done, who helped him do it or how, exactly, he perpetuated his myth for so long. He said he was not comfortable talking about other people.... Not once did he look into the camera and say, without qualification, 'I’m sorry.'"

Oprah, too, should have looked into the camera and said "I'm sorry." What a terrible interview! The part I watched, anyway, before deciding it was a big waste of time. Oprah looked and sounded tired and uncomfortable, as if she'd forgotten how to be Oprah. Or they'd had some dispute off camera and she knew this was going to be a robotic exercise in nothingness that wasn't going to save her network. She was going to get zero warmth, zero psychodrama, just a dull little man. Little in every way, including the way that made Oprah look huge.

Oh! If only a second Oprah could have been there interviewing Oprah about what she thought and how she felt about the wee interviewee.

There's still Part 2 — and maybe Lance will look right into the camera and say, without qualification, "I'm sorry" — but will anyone watch? Did anyone, other than journalists covering the "story," stick with Part 1 all the way through? Or did you all snap it off, like we did, after about the third time he prefaced an answer with I know I'm not the most believable guy in the world?

"Maybe I'm naive, but I still don't think Lance doped."

Michael Ian Black.

"Lance Armstrong will offer more than the sporting world’s most long-awaited confession..."

"He’s expected to counter the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s portrayal of him as the mastermind of what it called the most sophisticated, professional doping program in the history of sports by saying that doping was endemic to cycling...."

"Cyclist Lance Armstrong considering public confession to drug use..."

Isn't that already a confession? But it sounds like what he's talking about doing is saying whatever it is he needs to say to get back into the sport:

The World Anti-Doping Agency code says athletes who fully confess to doping might be eligible for a reduced punishment. Armstrong hopes to compete in triathlons and other events, but many of those are sanctioned by athletic organizations that have agreed to the WADA code.

Should he get another shot... I mean... chance?

“Does he think people are completely stupid?” asked Betsy Andreu, whom the cyclist vilified as a bitter and vindictive woman because she testified in a court case that she had heard Armstrong tell his cancer physicians that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. Her husband, former Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreu, was denied jobs in the sport because he refused to lie for Armstrong, according to the damning report released by the United States Anti-Doping Agency in October that detailed the cyclist’s drug use.

“This guy is like a Mafia don,” she added. “Will he apologize to all the people who wouldn’t lie for him? Will he compensate people for costing them jobs and businesses? How do you put a price on lost opportunities?”

It's not hard to read between the lines there. Armstrong needs to hand out a lot of compensation to everyone he hurt, enough to make them back off.

“Will he pay Christophe millions of dollars for forcing him out of the sport?” Andreu asked, referring to Christophe Bassons. Bassons has said that Armstrong threatened him because he suggested banned drugs fueled Armstrong’s comeback from cancer.

“Will he compensate (Tour de France champion) Greg LeMond for ruining his bicycle business? Will he apologize to Emma (O’Reilly, Armstrong’s former masseuse) for calling her a prostitute? Forgiving doesn’t mean being a doormat. Being a Christian doesn’t mean allowing people to profit from their crimes.”

Armstrong needs to do the math. How much money does he have? How much money could he possibly make if he gets back into sports at his advanced age?

"British paper sues Lance Armstrong for $1.5m over lost libel action."

"Sunday Times paid now-disgraced cyclist $485,000 in 2006 over claims that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs."

That reminds me of this news item from The Des Moines Register, June 18, 1959, reprinted in Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir" (p. 106):

A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by Mirror journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”

"Lance Armstrong stripped of Tour de France titles."

The president of International Cycling Union, Pat McQuaid, announces, saying "Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling."

"The UCI has tested Lance Armstrong 218 times. If Lance Armstrong was able to beat the system...." 

Shouldn't the UCI be stripped of something for missing the evidence? I'd like damages for all the time I've wasted paying attention to this sport. If all those races are now to be understood as phony, all of the money that anybody made promoting and presenting this sport was a big fraud. Stripping Armstrong of his titles doesn't restore what we've lost.

"When the doper’s code of silence around Lance Armstrong cracked, Sheryl Crow was obliged to sing."

"Crow, who was once engaged to the tarnished cyclist, provided information last year in a far-reaching federal investigation into the doping programs that fueled her former fiancé’s victorious Tour de France teams...."

***

Sorry about the tag — the Crow-David entity — but I don't like to add too many new tags, and Sheryl Crow already has a tag on this blog, created back in the day when she was operating as a single entity with Laurie David. Ever notice how Larry David called his wife on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" Cheryl, not Laurie?

Just as Sheryl and Lance are no longer an... entity. Larry and Laurie are now divorced. Here's something funny from Laurie's Wikipedia page:

In an interview with The Guardian in November 2006, David acknowledged that owning two homes on opposite sides of the country and flying in a private jet several times per year is at odds with her message to others. In the interview she notes "Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year, and I feel horribly guilty about it. I probably shouldn't do it. But the truth is, I'm not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don't expect anybody else to be perfect either. That's what hurts the environmental movement – holding people to a standard they cannot meet. That just pushes people away."

That article predates the David entity's split:

Larry's wife on [TV] is a meek woman who spends her days gossiping with friends and worrying about her wardrobe. Laurie, by contrast, is often said to be stubborn, confident and driven - thoroughly focused on the fight. Larry himself says of her, "She's a gal with a mission."

"How does an agency that is supposed to regulate drug testing strip a guy of seven titles without a single positive drug test?"

"How is it that an American agency can decide to invalidate somebody’s results achieved in Europe, in a sport it doesn’t control?"

"There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.'"

"The toll this has taken on my family, and my work for our foundation and on me leads me to where I am today — finished with this nonsense."

Lance Armstrong gives up.

His decision means he will almost certainly be stripped of his seven Tour titles, the bronze medal he won at the 2000 Olympics and all other titles, awards and money he won from August 1998 on.

"This Court is not inclined to indulge [Lance] Armstrong's desire for publicity, self-aggrandizement, or vilification of Defendants..."

"... by sifting through eighty mostly unnecessary pages in search of the few kernels of factual material relevant to his claims."

Case dismissed less than 7 hours after it was filed.

ADDED: Who knew a judge could decide tl;dr?

Hey! What happened to Architectural Digest?

I remember when it was about, you know, architecture. Gerard Butler, eh? Who is he, and am I really supposed to believe he relaxes like that, curled up in that velvet chair, in tight jeans and bare feet and a shirt opened just so? Plus! Sting and Lance Armstrong!

So, it's all about people now. And why are they all guys? I guess this is the real architecture we magazine readers (women) are looking for these days. It all coheres if you think of the right word: erection. It's what we want: a house and a man.

But something seems... off. It's so blatant. The bearded "Joy of Sex"-type guy. His name is Butler. I need a butler. And a lance. And a sting. Ha. Or is it that little girl's watch he's wearing?

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

"I’m sure there are some residents that are like, 'Wait a minute, why is my road closed down?'" said Lance Armstrong.

In Madison, yesterday.

Created for the hoped-for Chicago Olympics: "a 167-mile road course that looped through Madison three times before taking racers west and into the hills near Blue Mound State Park."

A NYT article about our fabulous bike trails.

“The steepness of the climbs are really what made this course significantly harder than other Olympic courses in the past,” [said Robbie Ventura, a former professional cyclist who was part of Lance Armstrong’s United States Postal Service team for four years].

“If you ride that course just to ride it, you can’t help to get excited every time you get to the top of one of those climbs,” Ventura said. “Even if you do just one loop, there’s a satisfaction of completing something that is not only incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly challenging.”

The article also mentions the the trails in Kettle Moraine State Forest, the Military Ridge Trail and the Capital City trail (which Meade and I rode 3 times in the last 3 days).

The beauty of advertising.

Here's a nice Metafilter discussion that starts off about the beauty of this Lance Armstrong-oriented ad. Be sure to click on the link at "At then there's this peaceful piece."

UPDATE: Chris astutely points out that the last link there ("peaceful piece") uses the same trick used in this old "What's Wrong With This Picture?" thing that everyone got a kick out of a few years ago.