The straight dope on cycling
To the editor,
“Some 20 years after a career as a professional cyclist, I am sad and angry,” said (Travis) Brown, who maintains he never used any performance-enhancing drugs.” (Durango Herald 1/16/2013) To me, this sentence is the legacy Lance leaves behind. It jumped off the page and gave me a familiar pang of aguish. I’m guessing it did Travis as well. Reporters are no longer willing to quote pro cyclists without this ugly asterisk.

 From the time I was a teen-ager I sat in drug-control rooms waiting to pee into a bottle alongside soviet block cyclists, their bodies displaying obvious signs of steroid use. No one ever came up positive.  

Lance never came up positive. The anti-doping agencies simply have no track record of operating effectively. I can’t see how they ever will.  

Science has rendered the line between riding clean and dirty more blurry than ever. Still we must try. Cycling is too beautiful a sport to give up on.

 

I’ve been harassed by coaches for refusing  IVs. I’ve seen bottles of Sudafed passed around the team van before races without drug testing and watched middle-of-the-field riders rise and have spectacular seasons only to admit later they used. I’ve known riders who speculated that teams may have been slipping them something against their will, unsure of there own peak performances and friends relegated to no-name race schedules in Europe for refusing to “get on the program.” The drug stories could fill the page. I consoled myself when young that I could beat doped riders anyway. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. I have seen rides and riders I knew were clean called into question just because of the brilliance of their performance. Yet another unappreciated tragedy of the drug problem.

Lance’s story is not really new and won’t be the last, but it was unusually brutal.

When he was first diagnosed with cancer I was sure he would come clean. Maybe go on a speaking tour warning children about the dangerous side affects of drug use as others had. Instead, he double and tripled4 down on the lie. Cranking up a legal machine to intimidate anyone who dared threaten him with the truth, some of them friends of mine. Until recently, I would parse my words carefully fearing it could come back to haunt me or someone I knew.

 

The question that drove me as an athlete was how good can I be? How good can this team be? Ned spoke of the money stolen by drug users but they took more than money from me. They stole the answer to the question I strived so hard for. The distortion of drug use can never be removed from race results.

 

Crowds will not be re-assembled  to cheer the proper winners of those races. “If you want to make it as a pro in Europe you have to do drugs.” I can’t remember not knowing this. As a teen-ager I accepted it as the way it was. Unlike Lance, I most likely would not have been able to have much effect exposing drug use in cycling but my biggest regret as a professional athlete was that I didn’t try.
That is my advice to young athletes and their parents. Don’t accept the world as it is. Demand that it be the way you want it. Don’t let dopers be glorified. Grab corrupt officials and anti-drug agency members by the scruff of the neck and tell them to do their jobs or you’ll find someone who will. Whether you finished first or dead last, it’s your right. There is a lot more life after an athletic career than you can imagine. Don’t compromise its joy for something that is ultimately just a game. To Travis, Ned and all the clean riders I know and all the clean athletes around the world who ate their vegetables and poured their hearts into their pursuit, I raise a glass of local Durango brew and salute you. Only you will ever really know who you are.

 

To Lance and his ilk, give back the money, make your apologies and go away. You are not welcome here.

– David W. Farmer* (*Who maintains he never used any performance-enhancing drugs.)

Our dysfunctional gun intelligence
Dear Editor:
I read Michael W. Goldberg’s diatribe regarding being a triathlete and a person that feels like a Jew in 1930s Germany. This all because he loves his guns and belongs to the NRA.

After reading his letter, I read about the father in South Carolina who aimed and accidentally shot his 8-year-old son to death. I further read about the manslaughter case involving an 8-year-old child named Christopher Bizilz whose father permitted a “trained fire arms instructor” to let the child fire a micro uzi capable of firing 20 rounds a second. The recoil was such that the kid shot himself several times in the head, killing him immediately. Of course this past week a trained retired police officer took his loaded shotgun to a gun show and it discharged shooting three people. And last but not least, a second-grader in Far Rockaway Beach took a gun and clip to his second-grade classroom.

Now let’s examine what I term “functional intelligence,” the common sense that goes with everyday living. If the gun instructor, the retired police officer, etc., are the “trained” professionals, then the untrained folks should realistically be something far below.

I strongly suggest that the Michael Goldbergs of the world and the NRA rank and file send their children to schools that teach Chinese. In fact the Second Amendment does not prohibit the government from ordering gun owners to learn Chinese. Why Chinese? Because these peoples’ intelligence level will allow them to only obtain jobs at Chinese factories, because America will have been in such a decline for a whole generation.

– Bob Krejci, via email

Baby Boomer Redux
A generation’s dream remained stranded in suburbia
while millions settled in comfortable conformity,
governed by routines and Disney dreams.
Some aspired to the myths of spiritual materialism
and upward mobility, while others rebelled.
Some, placated by propaganda followed the norm.
Praying with the poor, others marched
for civil liberties, while contrived wars
fed an insatiable GNP and lined pockets.
For decades good men and women died
for the best of our natures, never to be recognized.
Politicians popularized perfidy.
Situational ethics flooded the moral ground.
Secret agencies propped up dictatorships.
The desperate and impoverished
created an illegal, alley economy,
while Janus-faced congressmen
kept their long arms under the table,
pimped by lobbyists.
The accumulation of wealth accelerated for the rich
as jobs were summarily shipped to Asia.
Everything went as planned;
Nature fell, resources dwindled,
profits quadrupled, oligarchies ruled,
police actions replaced war,
and corporations became people.
The acquiescent, befittingly smug,remained glued to          
their tiny texts,mesmerized by cyber bites, as
bastardized science condoned the thaw.
Public education was dismantled for statistics
and ketchup became a vegetable.
All of this, insidiously planned by the “corporate”
to anesthetize and control the masses
under a purloined and hijacked democracy.

– Burt Baldwin, Ignacio