I can not be quiet. Mr. Lance Armstrong is about to admit to participating and spearheading a doping ring that shunned those who would not participate in the doping and the coverup. Furthermore, evidence dictates that Mr Armstrong actually orchestrated that only these dishonest athletes would represent the USA and the USPS team. He and his team would freely use steroids and blood boosters and then engage in blood filtering technique where blood was removed from their bodies and replaced with their own previously stored and filtered blood so that when they were tested, no trace of doping would be found. Due to this doping system, he and the American and Postal Service teams won many, many races.
Mr Armstrong rubbed elbows with the most powerful people in the world, he dated many celebrities, amassed a huge personal fortune and generally lived a life that we all would have loved to live. Although he was given many, many chances to come clean, he continued to lie and attack those who questioned his honesty and ethics. Eventually his house of cards collapsed and almost every teammate testified against him. The doctors who participated also confessed and described how the doping scheme worked and how it was hidden for so long by Mr Armstrong's strong arm tactics (interesting unintentional play of words there). Mr Armstrong not only disgraced himself, the USA, the USPS and a sport which brought him fame, fortune and glory but put himself arrogantly above the sport which made him who he was thought to be. Yet he continued to deny any wrong-doing and continued to claim he was being unjustly persecuted.
Eventually the day came when Mr Armstrong was stripped of his titles, banished from the sport and had all his endorsement deals taken away. He even had to step down from his own charity because his involvement was quite detrimental to its future.
My primary complaint is that the punishment did not go far enough because he was allowed to keep the profits which he had reaped from all the years of his doping. So now we have a situation where Mr Armstrong will just not go disgracefully down in history but he will now confess and ask your forgiveness and hope that you feel sympathy for him. I am a charitable person but I am having a bit of difficulty accepting all of this. He does not need to grovel for my sake. He does not need my forgiveness. I would just like him to stay out of the public eye and to privately find a way to atone for what he did. I don't want him to become a bigger celebrity by going onto Oprah's show and making a national admission of guilt. It is my opinion that the time for that is long past. I have seen his character and I cant un-see it. I dont want him rewarded for his behavior anymore. Is that so wrong?
I whole-heartedly agree with the statement that was made last week by not voting Clemens or Bonds into the Baseball hall of fame. I furthermore was glad to see that no one would be inducted this year, if only because it said to me that the cheating in baseball was so widespread that the entire sport had been tainted. However, again, even though these athletes were publicly humiliated, they were not stripped of the financial gains that they were able to bank while the doping was occurring. It, to me, says a terrible thing to the youngsters who are watching whats happening. It means that you do not need to have integrity anymore, It means that whatever method you can use to amass your fortune is fine. You can cheat, lie and steal and in the end we will have a short memory as we Americans tend to do. But that doesn't make it okay. Perhaps we now live in a new America. Integrity, honesty and fair play no longer exist in this society. Maybe its all about money, glory and fame, even if the fame is really infamy. I dont like this new reality. I dont like what it says about us as a nation and what it says about ourselves as people. I am wondering just who it is we are seeing look back at us in the mirror, just a ghost of who we used to be...........That to me is unforgivable.
No comments:
Post a Comment