Outside magazine reported this evening on the news that Lance Armstrong has announced he will give up the years-long battle he’s been fighting to fight doping charges.
On Thursday night, Lance Armstrong, who officially retired just last year, said that he has grown tired of fighting doping charges leveled against him by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and that he won’t enter into an arbitration process that he considers improper and unfair. “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough,'” he said in a statement released to the Associated Press. “For me, that time is now.”
It is assumed that the USADA will now strip him of his titles and ban him for life.
Ultimately, what difference does it make to Armstrong at this point? He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s done massive amounts of charity and helped countless people, and has huge hopes for his future in retirement. Is this a real punishment? Will it actually deter any other pro athletes from doping?
AP photo/Peter DeJong
This may be unpopular but I think that Lance Armstrong is 1) retired so leave him alone 2) too important to be crucified. He won seven times. Seven times. Seven. Times. That’s important to Americans as a whole that one of our own kicked so much ass on the world stage. Also, it’s important to popularizing cycling in America. I played just about every sport I could (or my parents forced me to) as a kid. I never got into cycling as anything other than a way to get my buddies’ houses. That’ s because cycling isn’t terribly popular in… Read more »
However you read it, it’s the end of an era. For some it’s the inevitable fall of an athlete who doped just like everyone else of his time, for others, it’s an unjust end to the reign of their perfect hero. For the record, I still believe Lance was perhaps the most devoted, hardest-training cyclist of all time, but that he was just doing it in a time when everyone around him was doping and able to cheat the tests. So I half don’t blame him for doing it, too, but I do fault him for continuing to allege the… Read more »