Lance Armstrong, a Cheater? Oh, What Ever Shall I Do?

Can I be honest with you? I don’t care that Lance Armstrong took PEDs. What, you thought Armstrong was the 1 clean cyclist in a sport where seemingly every other athlete has been popped for doping at least once? Armstrong was stripped of his 7 Tour de France titles back in October, but does that even make sense? You can’t even give those titles to a clean participant in those races because everyone who placed, I don’t know, 2nd through 721st doped too. So, who cares?

Even Oprah looks like she's making mental notes of dinner plans during this interview.

No one even knew what professional cycling was until Lance Armstrong put it on the map. Let’s be honest again…the only reason Lance Armstrong is anybody is because he beat cancer and raised $400-plus million in cancer research. That’s no small feat, and regardless of how bad of a guy he is it’s impossible to ignore something like that. And whoa, was he ever a bad guy…

Cheating in sports is one thing. We have over a century’s worth of sports-cheaters to look back on, and most have been forgiven to some extent over time. Cheating is still cheating, but as the saying goes, If you’re not cheating in sports, you’re not trying, and Lance Armstrong definitely cheated…but so did everybody else…in a sport that no one really would have ever given 2 s***s about if it wasn’t for Armstrong’s work away from his bike.

But being a bad guy is another thing altogether. We looked the other way because he was beating cancer, setting records, raising money, and acting as a beacon of hope. We looked the other way a lot…when he dumped his wife who had stuck by him through his battle with cancer to date a pop singer…when he bullied, tarnished the names, and wrecked the careers of anyone who crossed his path…when he couldn’t take a joke about bikers that Tony Kornheiser made on his admittedly subversive talk radio show and strong-armed an apology out of him (oh yes, I remember)…and when he cheated to win races. Even this confession reeks of some ulterior motive. Why do it now, especially since most of us believed him to have used PEDs without him ever even saying a word?

So, if we’re really being honest, we have no one to blame but ourselves here. We believed in Lance Armstrong because we wanted to. We bought (myself included) millions of Livestrong bracelets and wore them because we supported his cause.

What bracelets? Ahh yes, those bracelets.

And we looked the other way at the sidestepping of the rules in his sport and his overall douchey-ness because that wasn’t as important to us as all the other stuff. Face it, Armstrong isn’t the 1st bad guy to do a good thing. Human beings are complex that way. So yes, Lance Armstrong is a cancer survivor. He is a champion in his sport. He is a cheater. He is a world-class a******. And he happened to help raise a buttload of money that went towards fighting cancer too.