Sirened

Today, Danish rider and winner of the 1996 Tour De France, Bjarne Riis of Denmark admitted to using a cocktail of steroids during his heroic journey to victory. According to this article in the NY Times he even told cycling officials that they could come and take his yellow jersey from his home. But why?

It isn’t as if Riis is the only dude to win the tour while using steroids. Floyd Landis? Come on, what a fiasco that is. And there is even speculation that our hero Lance Armstrong may have been doping during his unprecedented 7 titles in a row. He never tested positive but the cloud is there.

Ironically, the guy who finished 2nd in the 1996 Tour De France, Jan Ullrich of Germany is currently being investigated for doping allegations. So it’s not even as simple as changing the books to make the 1996 winner the runner up, or even third place, as that guy was also involved in questionable doping activities. Tour officials are actually thinking to change the records to show that the 1996 race had no winner.

What? There was a race right? Someone won and his name was Bjarne Riis of Denmark. So he cheated, big deal, so has everyone else it seems. Once Floyd Landis gets officially stripped of his title, what next? Lance Armstrong and his 7 titles? That will mean nobody won the race for a decade!

Yeah sure, steroids may be bad for kids and that was the whole point of Congress’s investigation into super doped major league baseball. But if not for Congress, MLB was fine with Barry Bonds growing like a Thanksgiving day turkey and blasting baseballs out of the park. It was fun right?

Now cycling, like baseball, is being tainted with all this testing. But if they didn’t do the testing then everyone could take whatever they wanted and we would have an era of super athletes with records being broken every single day. And there would be no cheating because everyone would be on a heightened, level playing field. It’s time for drug labs to stop deciding winners and record breakers because that’s not much fun, unless it was televised perhaps.

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