Lance

It was wrong but I can’t blame him.  Honestly, I can’t. Yes, it’s wrong on many levels, ethically, morally, legally…it’s all wrong. But I can’t blame him really, and here’s why.

I’m no better than he is. Just puttin’ it out there in extreme honesty.

When put in that same situation, can you blame him? Sure some of you will take the moral high-ground but honestly, put yourself in his shoes. Would you be able to withstand the temptation? Knowing full well that you are, at this point in your career, the best you will EVER be and it’s not good enough to get you where you want to be. Could you resist the temptation to cheat? Especially if you knew you could get away with it?

Think about it like this.

You bust your butt for years studying in college. Spend all kinds of money making yourself better, stronger, smarter; to be the best that you can be in your chosen career field, to be better than the guy in the cubicle or office next to you. You climb that corporate ladder, you want to be on top! You get noticed here and there by the bosses but nothing really that is going to get you that promotion or raise.

Then it hits you. From out of nowhere, you’re sick, really sick. Like,you’re going to die and leave your family with what(?), sick. You fight like hell to win this battle for your life and to be honest, it scares the hell out of you but you do survive.

You’ve studied so hard, put in too many hours to walk away from it now. This is how you support your family and make a living. This is all you know. You’ve struggled hard to move ahead in this game. You’ve spent years working long hours each day and on weekends, reaching for your goal but you know in your heart, you’ll never make it. Why?  Cause you know that the overwhelming majority of your colleagues are fudging the numbers on their weekly reports, rigging the quarterly matrix to make themselves look better to the boss and better than you. No one says anything but it’s happening. There is no way you will ever make it to that next level when they are cheating.

 

To this, I say to the majority of you reading, no. You would be hard pressed to resist. I, like all of you have the luxury of being on this side of it and we find it easy to judge and say, “I would never cheat.” But the reality is, given the right circumstances, most of us would.

The reality of it is that Lance is no better than the rest of us. We are no better than Lance when put in the same scenario.

So think about this before you judge him too harshly.

I am not advocating that if everybody is doing then it’s ok. Not at all. Wrong is wrong. There is no gray area in this matter.

I think why so many people are mad at him and hate him is that we believed in him. We want so desperately to have a champion to cheer for to lift high on our shoulders and say to the world, “I’m with him!”. We have these expectations of our heroes that are so ‘pie in the sky’ big, that the reality is that no one could live up to them. Seriously, the Tour de France is a race where we expect the bicyclist to race between 80 to 130 miles in A DAY and do this for 21 days in a row with maybe a day or two of rest in there somewhere. Seriously? Most of us would get saddle sores DRIVING that much much less pedaling our butts up and down mountains. 

Expectations ruin us all. Maybe that's why the Dutch are the happiest people in the world, cause they admittedly have no expectations of life.

He doped, he won, he got caught, he got banned for life, he admitted it.

Get over it.

What’s left for Lance is to make restitution to those who are legally owed. Morally is another question that only he can answer.

What’s left for us as fans is to view this through the appropriate lens. What you consider that to be is entirely up to you.