Sarah Palin in Spandex

i agree that lance can be hard to like, and his cock-surety can be really off-putting, even if it did help him win 7 tours. still, how can you not get frustrated and annoyed at the umber of doping controls he’s been put through, not necessarly compared to other cyclists, but compared to athletes in other sports? shawn merriman, after a positive steroid test, was banned for four games. in cycling, it’s two years. no other sport has a more aggressive anti-doping regime than cycling, or a star that’s been as repeatedly proven to be squeaky clean. nonetheless, cycling is still associated, in the minds of most people, with doping far beyond any of the major sports in the US.

one big reason, i think, is that the nature of cycling, being all about raw endurance, makes PED use more effective. as a result, the PED users become the most successful and well-known players of the sport. it doesn’t mean that PED use is more common in cycling, just that it’s really effective in getting you to the top level. jeremy giambi juiced like crazy, but didn’t have a lick of hand-eye coordination. there’s no pill for that.

of course, this then casts doubt on every top-flight cyclist. if you can beat guys that are doping in a sport where the returns to doping are really high, what does that say about you? surely you must be a doper! it’s the easy but brutal logic of the cloud of suspicion around lance. for me, though, it’s easy to overcome by looking at his earliest successes. he was winning adult national triathlons when he was 17, when he couldn’t have been doping. obviously he’s some sort of physical freak, which he is, with a heart more than a third larger than average. it’s true that just working hard can’t get you to where lance is, but you don’t need drugs either; sometimes you’re born with the assets others take drugs to obtain.

all of which makes the question of PEDs that much murkier. we don’t want to encourage drug use in our kids, or endanger people’s health just for a podium position. but does lance armstrong, just because he was born into a combination of biological, physical, and sociological circumstances, really deserve all that success, while others who were born into different circumstances don’t? is it really more fun to watch the best-born athlete win a race than the best-biologically-enhanced? i don’t know the answers to these questions, but they’re really interesting to think about.