Tour viewership declines for tenth straight year
July 22, 2022 Comments Off on Tour viewership declines for tenth straight year
Interest in the Tour de France continues to decline as fewer television viewers tune into the world’s largest sporting spectacle. With 150 million viewers across Europe in 2021, the 2022 edition of the Tour will have less than 110 million people tuning in, according to Nielsen Global, a firm that tracks worldwide TV audiences.
“In 2012, when the Tour was won by Bradley Wiggins of the UK, viewership was at an all-time high, with more than 500 million viewers. Next year’s projections are for even fewer viewers than 2022,” said Lacey Throckmorton of Nielsen.
The UCI, as well as Amaury Sports Organization, parent company of the Tour, have been concerned about the spiraling value of cycling’s marquee event. A joint study funded by the UCI and Amaury revealed some surprising answers to the question, “Why are fewer people following the Tour?”
The first and by far most important reason is the continued string of non-doping offenses, and its corollary, the visible decrease in over-the-top-doping that took place from 1904 until 2012. Cyrano de Bergerac, head of the study, says this: “People are sick of all the non-doping offenses. It has made an impossibly boring sport even more boring, if that is possible, which I suppose it is.”
Statistics show that since the retirement of the last Big Juicer to win the Tour, Sir Bradley Wiggins, interest has waned. “Wiggins brought a lot of fans, people who loved seeing a 6’3″, 185-lb. track specialist get so sotted with PEDs that he lost 25 lbs., gained the physique of a Michael Rasmussen, and went from winning 5-km track events to 4,000-km endurance races. That was spectacle,” says de Bergerac.
“Once Wiggins retired, Chris Froome was unable to sustain the massive and obvious drug use, opting instead for small amounts of mostly-undetectable drugs, although he, too, went through the radical body transformation that Tour aficionados love,” adds de Bergerac. “But with each passing year the riders simply got more credible as non-offenses kept piling up. And who wants that?”
Wim van Wim, head of marketing at the UCI, agrees. “Look at 2022. We have one guy weighing in the 130’s and another in the 140’s duking it out for the yellow jersey. They are skinny and short, easily mistaken for a prepubescent girl if it weren’t for those tight pants. You’d expect people like that to climb well, sprint poorly, and have to race strategically to win, and they do. Fans can’t stand it.”
Van Wim pointed to what he called the “heyday of hay days,” when George Hincapie, at 175 lbs., dropped an entire breakaway of newt-sized climbers and beat uber-newt Oscar Pereiro to the HC mountain finish at Pla d’Adet in 2005. “This kind of absurd thing that boggles the mind, spoofs reality, and confesses to the pharmacopia coursing through the veins of the peloton, this is what cycling fans want to see,” said van Wim. “Not some clean, snot-nosed kids who believe in sportsmanship, whatever that is.”
Unfortunately, drug testing seems to be effectively deterring the most blatant violators, leaving the peloton with not much more than smallish, light endurance athletes who are evenly matched. The UCI has convened a new committee, the Working Group on the Restoration of Full-Gas Doping, to look at ways to remedy this threat to the existence of cycling’s most cherished event.
According to van Wim, though, all is not lost. “If you still want to watch freaks do freakish things with every doping product known to man stuffed up their butts, I’d recommend you start watching gravel races. There is some great shit happening there,” he said.
END
One from the Vault
April 2, 2019 § 2 Comments
I went through a very short podcasting phase a couple of years ago. Podcasting is difficult, requires technical expertise, and overwhelmed me after my first couple of attempts. Hats off to Brian Co at the SoCal Cycling podcast, now in its fourth year and going strong. If you want quality journalism and amazing production values, he’s your guy.
However, one of my podcasts was about Lance’s upcoming trial date back in 2017. A reader transcribed it and emailed it to me, suggesting I post it as a blog. I’d done the whole thing off the cuff and didn’t have a transcript. When she sent it I thought it was dated and irrelevant, but then I read it and realized that I hadn’t posted anything in a couple of days, so here it is.
It’s long. Dated. No pictures. And it ain’t Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Lance’s Date with Destiny
Today is back to the future day, where we check in on cycling’s bad boy and eternal scoundrel, Lance Armstrong. I tried to figure out what in the world is going on with the lawsuit he is so afraid of that he kicked the trial date down the road some more. This guy is in no hurry to face the jury, he has been in litigation now for five long years, and it’s not over yet. Sometimes the Lance Armstrong saga feels like fighting the Medusa. You lop off one head only to find out you are locked in mortal combat with another one. Everytime I swear this is the last time I will ever, absolutely, positively EVER say anything about that fucking guy, he makes himself relevant again.
How, I hope you are wondering, can this jerk possibly be relevant? TDF titles: stripped. Cheating ban: lifetime. Public reputation: in the shitter. Significance to cycling: none. But actually, he is relevant. Very relevant. And I am starting to make my peace with his permanent installation in the constellation. He is relevant because if you are in your mid-forties to late fifties, he was the definitive character in your personal cycling history. Young riders nowadays don’t know about him or care, and they certainly don’t read Outside magazine, or read for that matter, but those of us who were racing when Lance was young will ever be bracketed by the events in his life. His name strikes a sour note that can’t be listened away, if only because the note was once so sweet. YOU say “He is old, slow, wrinkled, balding and gray.”
But guess what? So are we.
Lance’s latest foray into relevance was written about, and written about well, in the September 15th issue of Outside Magazine. The gist of the article was simple and written by S.C Guin. Read it. Storyline 2017. Lance is racing ahead with his life, he is surrounded by hangers-on. He is rich. He’s a family man. He’s atoning for his sins. And he is still an asshole.
But we can stepmother this fairy tale as Lance’s date with destiny on May 7th, 2018, the date set by Judge Cooper, on which his false claims act and fraud trial will begin in a Washington, D.C. federal court. If the worst case scenario comes to pass, Lance will get dinged with a 96.9 million dollar judgement that will vaporize almost the entirety of his personal wealth. Suddenly, he might have to struggle to pay for the kids’ college, just like the rest of us. Dither between e-tap and mechanical, check the tires again to see if they really need to be replaced …
And Lance is worried about his dance date, too. In the Outside article he sends a clear signal to the Department of Justice that he is in the mood to settle. The risk here is sky-high for Lance, but only marginal for the government. Lance is already $15 million down in legal fees, but the government has also spent a fortune on this case. And there is no reason to think they will win in front of a jury, given that they’ve been out- maneuvered at almost every turn in the pretrial phase of the case. As the pressure builds, and both sides start to calculate how much they could lose, for Lance money, and the government a big fat black eye and a couple of lead lawyers careers wrecked, a settlement seems possible.
But they aren’t there yet, and they may never be, because the sum will be large, and in the meantime, the trial date is real.
In order to understand why Lance is pacing the floor, you have to understand the legal guts of his case. It’s remarkably simple. His lawyers have pared away virtually every single issue in the litigation until only one remains: Did the US Postal Service get what it bargained for? In other words, even though Lance lied, did the government come out ahead?
Because, if they did, Lance wins. That’s the only thing left in this case. The government tried to set up the issue for trial differently, arguing the value of the sponsorship was zero, because they would have never signed up if they had known about the cheating. If they paid $32 million for something worth nothing, then the USPS’s actual damages are three times the actual $32.3 million in sponsorships payments. Since the damages are trebled in a false claims act lawsuit, Lance would be on the hook for three times 32.3, or $96.9 million.
Armstrong tried to set it up differently, contending that the benefits USPS reaped from having him as their poster boy demonstrably outweighed the cost of sponsorship, and that the government’s actual damages are zero in that they got what they paid for in terms of publicity and actual media impressions, and then some. In the single biggest pretrial wrangle of the case, both sides moved for summary judgment, essentially asking for the court to rule in their favor before the case goes to a jury. The court’s ruling rejected both arguments, holding that the case would have to go to the jury to decide whether or not the USPS had been damaged. And if so, by how much?
This was ostensibly a win for the government, but Armstrong’s lawyers still get to go to the jury with the best possible of weapons. They have experts that will try to prove that USPS was not harmed and they’ll have withering cross examination to debunk USPS’s methodology for calculating the financial value of damages. That shouldn’t be hard, because there is no methodology. At least none that will survive a Daubert challenge. The court said in the motion for summary judgment that damages in FCA cases are generally measured based on the “benefit of the bargain” received by both parties. Under this approach, the government’s actual damages are equal to the difference between the market value of the products it received and retained, and the market value that the products would have had if they’d been of the specified quality.
Applying this benefit of the bargain rule is often straightforward. In a typical case involving a governemnt supply contract, for example, the difference in market value between a conforming good and a non-conforming good can easlity be calculated, for example, computing the precise cost to replace a falsely branded tube in a radio kit supplied to the government. Calculating the benefit of the bargain becomes more difficult in cases where the market value of the product or the service involved is not readily ascertainable. This is particularly true for contracts for personal and professional services, like those provided by Lance’s cycling team. And the difficulty of this will play into Armstrong’s hand come trial time.
Armstrong buttressed his argument by attacking one of the government’s experts who attempted to document the value of the contract as well as a separate expert who testified about the value of the negative publicity resulting from the revelations of Armstrongs PED use. By striking these evidentiary claims, LA would have gutted the government’s ability to prove damages and would have won the case. Even if he were a bad boy, USPS could never have proven they had lost money on the deal. However, the judge held that both declarations did in fact have some bearing on the calculation of benefits USPS obtained from the cycling sponsorship, and thus were relevant to the actual damages. This doesn’t mean that a jury will buy the experts’ testimony, though. It just means that it will go to trial. Rest assured, the entirety of Armstrong’s defense will be based on demolishing these experts, and the fuzzy nature of their arithmetic means that he will likely succeed. As long as the jury understands the speculative nature of the experts’ calculations, Lance will likely win.
Armstrong’s claim that the USPS got more than it paid for has two parts: First, USPS said in documents obtained through discovery that it had obtained increased sales of $24 million over and above what it had paid for the Armstrong sponsorship. This seems to show that USPS clearly benefited. But the court said it isn’t increased sales, but rather increased “net” sales and USPS itself admitted that they couldn’t isolate reasons for the increased sales, which were affected by other factors in addition to the Armstrong sponsorship. In other words, the court said that the $24 millionnumber that Armstrong claims he increased USPS sales by was speculative, and therefore, the trial has to go forward on this point because it is a factual matter for the jury to decide.
Lance’s second prong in showing the benefits USPS had received was the alleged positive media exposure for being associated with such a cancer crushing, biking badass. If USPS had paid for all that good press, according to Armstrong’s experts, it would have cost $103 million, a number that far exceeds the $32 million in sponsorship. However, Armstrong’s own expert admitted that not at that time, or this time, or anytime, was anyone on earth ever going to spend $103 million on a cyclist for advertising a product. This strongly suggests that it’s what I call a unicorn number.
Think about it like this: Say you had a marble that cost a penny, and someone took the marble and smashed it into a thousand bits, then an expert examined the shards and opined that if someone were to manufacture each of those pieces separately and combine them into a single marble, it would cost $1000. Yes, except for the fact that no one would ever do that. They’d simply go to the five-and-dime and buy another marble for a penny. Even with things looking grim for Lance’s alchemist accounting, AND his astrological marketing analysis, the bottom line is that the government, who has the burden of proof, still cannot quantify how much it was harmed by the publicity surrounding Armstrong’s doping admission. And this difficulty is real easy to explain: The value of the bad press was zero.
Not a single person on earth thought worse of the USPS after LA flunked his Oprah exam with flying colors. And that’s not just because the sponsorship had ended five years before USADS’s Reasoned Decision and Joe Public had forgotten about USPS and its link to Lance in the first place. It’s because no one had a good impression of the USPS to start with. Americans may disagree on Trump, and they may disagree on Obama, but one thing they all hate in unison is the USPS. The USPS service hired Lance to provide services that no one could provide: the service of rehabilitating their horrible image. And the telling fact isn’t in their muddled claims about increased revenue, it’s in the fact the the USPS had, and has, an intractable PR problem that is created and maintained by Congress and the mechanism through which USPS is funded. Fixing USPS’ image with a few manorexic big wigs pedaling through sunflower fields in France, really? Uh, no.
There’s another huge problem with the USPS claims that the Armstrong deal was a money loser. The only way the USPS can make money on first class stamps, their traditional profit center, is this way: by people buying the stamps and not using them. That’s it, period. The reason is that no matter how much their sales increase, they lose money on every single first class mail transaction. The only net positive revenue they could have generated through Armstrongs publicity, or anyone’s publicity, was by selling first day covers or other collectibles that would have never been redeemed. Can you imagine a business model that depends on customers never using what they purchase in order to succeed? Can you say gift cards? What about lottery tickets?
By hiring Armstrong to increase Joe Public’s awareness of the USPS, and to encourage Americans to go write more letters, the USPS was hiring Lance to provide a service that, had it been successful, would have lost them even MORE money. From 1998 to 2003, the lucrative first class mail business was mortally wounded and had turned belly up. The Queequeg that had stuck the harpoon in the belly was email, and the USPS was blocked by Congress from leaping into equal parcel competition with UPS and Fed Ex. The first class mail biz that had been their cash cow for over 200 years had become the mill stone around USPS’s neck. Some estimate that it costs the USPS about twice the price of a stamp to actually deliver a first class letter. Nor would a Lance-led PR victory have reversed this trend, even if he’d won a hundred tours, riding yellow unicorns that farted cancer clearing gas clouds through pediatric oncology wards. USPS’s other services, junk mail, overnight mail, periodicals and packages, were all subsidized by the incredible profits of the first class mail business. Make that the formerly incredible profits.
When Lance was winning his tours, USPS was a bottomless well of red ink. It’s amazing that Lance’s lawyers never identified this gaping gash in the government’s argument. Namely, that Lance didn’t cause them to lose more money, they were operating on a business model which guaranteed that greater revenue would lead to greater losses. The telling fact is this: USPS desperately wanted out of the sponsorship, much earlier than 2003 when the relationship finally ended and Armstrong was picked up by Discovery Channel. That’s the time when he was at the absolute top of his game, years before Landis outed him for doping. Management at USPS understood better than anyone alive that the Armstrong sponsorship was a bleeding failure, not because he was a doper and the value of his brand was zero, or because he had somehow besmirched their snow-white reputation, but because the more they sold, the more they lost. And every year they re-upped with team Lance, they were dumping millions of good money on top of the bad.
Long before 2003, USPS wanted out. What had started as a feel-good promotion for the stodgy old USPS, a kind of bargain basement expense on a nutty, niche sport, had morphed into the money eating Lance monster. The contracts for title and presenting sponsorships were reaching $9 million per year, and under the terms of a proposed new contract figure would bloat to about ten percent per year. And despite their fuzzy internal memos about $24 million in new revenue, and “We’re getting more from this relationship than they’re paying,” USPS knew better than anyone that they were getting nothing out of the sponsorship. This coincided with drops in bulk mailing contracts and budget crises that were coming to a head over USPS’s roughly $90 billion dollars in pension liability. $90 billion? What in the fuck were they doing spending so much as a penny on some shaved-leg asshole who raced his bike in France and was mean to people? And USPS had known from the very beginning that the Lance deal was stupid and meaningless, but, like every huge beaurocracy, once they got started it was damned hard to stop.
Not least because those were the heydays of the Armstrong bandwagon. You had to be there to believe the Armstrong feeding frenzy. Outside marketing people who wanted the deal to continue came up with all kinds of ways to turn the sponsorship into a net positive deal. But it took very little to realize that USPS did not give a fuck times a million. During the Armstrong era, post offices had every kind of tri fold and display, even at the lamest faux gift shops where you could buy postal themed crap. But you never, ever anywhere saw a US Postal cycling team display. No Sam the Eagle in a USPS jersey, none of those USPS themed action figure sets, where you might have a car and eight cyclists made of plastic or something like that. No posters, no caps, no jerseys, no rah-rah. No flat fucking nothing. USPS had checked out almost from the start because they were running a business based on losing money. Lance might be able to whoop up on cancer, but he was an impotent little clown show in the context of USPS’s debt. Did I mention the number $90 billion?
Even things as basic as Champs Elysees sales never happened. The vendors on the Champs Elysees as the Tour comes through make incredible money. Everything for sale is shlock, over-priced and ugly, dumb. But people want a memento. Do you remember those awesome USPS commemorative stamps that showed Lance and the team winning the tour? Lance in the yellow jersey? Lance and the guys doing a TTT in postal blue? Lance sticking a red hot poker up cancer’s ass? Remember those stamps? No? You know why? Because they never existed. USPS never even bothered with a vending truck near the finish line selling vintage USPS Lance commemorative stamps, items that would have sold by the book and by the sheet at ungodly markups. If there were ever a stamp someone would never use, it was a stamp purchased in France when they went over to France to watch Lance win the Tour. And not just win it, but crush it, leaving nothing in his wake but defeated dreams, empty syringes, howling Betsy and outraged Greg and Kathy.
USPS could have easily sold sheets of 50 cent stamps with a center image of the USPS eagle logo, and sold them as posters, or framed them, or framed and signed posters by Lance, or even Lance and the team. But nope! Nothing. Ever. USPS didn’t make money on Lance for the reason they never made money on anything. The first class mail cash cow had been slaughtered, skinned, butchered, packaged and sold at Safeway for pennies on the dollar. So the irony, here on the eve of trial, is that Lance’s best argument is the one he can’t use: USPS knew it was entering into a money loser and was defrauding the American public along the way by pretending that sponsorship deals of any kind were anything besides a breach of fiduciary duty to the taxpayers. The great news though, is that Armstrong can rest easy. Department of Justice lawyers may be clumsy in pretrial, but they are horrible in front of a jury, especially when they have to contend with top dollar private sector lawyers who are sharper than shark’s teeth. Armstrong’s team has, through relentless procedural mud fighting that has set Sir Lance back a cool $15 millskies, whittled the entire case down to a single issue: Did USPS lose more than it got? And by the time Armstrong’s lawyers get through with the fake numbers a dodgy calculations of the government’s experts, the case will be too muddled or too in tatters for a jury to do anything other than render a defense verdict. That’s my call.
Lance will still be able to hang onto his hundred millsky, his house in Aspen, his house in Austin, his bike shops, especially his tainted tour jerseys. Because even though close to twenty years have passed, no one from the years of 1999 to 2005 has stepped up asserting THEY raced clean, to claim them. You know what? No one ever will. Now isn’t that funny?
END
POSTSCRIPT: Lance settled with the government, paid a paltry $5M, and went his merry way.
End of an error
April 23, 2018 § 27 Comments
“I’m looking forward to devoting myself to the many great things in my life – my five kids, my wife, my podcast, several exciting writing and film projects, my work as a cancer survivor, and my passion for sports and competition,” he added. “There is a lot to look forward to.”
That’s the sound bite from Lance Armstrong expressing his satisfaction at shaking off the last chokehold remaining from his years as Public Doping Enemy No. 1, as he settled the government’s lawsuit against him that had threatened to crush him with a $100M civil fine. But like all sound bites that Lance crafts, this too was simply a mask. In my opinion, the heart of the matter is likely this: He is, for Lance, flat fucking broke.
When you peer into the press photos, to say nothing of the facts, what you see is an old, beaten man carrying the haggard skin from his decades in the pro peloton, and the sunken eyes of a frightened defendant torn between pouring millions into the maw of his rapacious lawyers on the one hand, and living in terror that losing his case would mean complete financial annihilation.
Although various analysts have called Armstrong’s settlement a “win,” to his credit that’s a truckload of bullshit he doesn’t try to foist off on the rest of us. Better than anyone else, Armstrong knows that just because you didn’t get kicked off the team, it doesn’t mean you won the Tour.
Why did he settle?
The most common statistic I hear bandied about, and the one that jives with my own experience, is that less than one percent of all civil cases go to trial. There are three reasons for this: Money, money, and money.
Small cases don’t go to trial because they are too expensive. No one spends $25,000 to make $5 grand.
Big cases don’t go to trial because they are too expensive. No one wants to put their financial future into the hands of a “jury of their peers.” There’s always the chance that these are the peers who elected Trump, and everyone knows it.
That leaves, for the most part, medium-sized cases. They, however, only go to trial under a narrow set of circumstances. First, both sides must have a strong and viable theory of the case. Second, both sides must be able to financially afford a worst possible scenario outcome. Third, at least one of the two sides must be ideologically and irrevocably committed to their own sense of justice, so much so that nothing short of total vindication at trial will suffice.
Armstrong’s case was a big one. By the end of the summary judgment phase it was clear that $100 million in damages was never going to happen, but some lesser multiple of the $32 million that USPS had paid Armstrong was in play, and there has never been any indication that he could weather a financial Armageddon of that degree. More about the likely precarious state of his finances later, but he recently claimed that his doping travails have already cost him in excess of $100M. Various sources have said that before the fall Lance was worth $125M, and another similarly made-up amount puts his net worth at half that. If these numbers are even sorta-kinda in the ballpark, there is no way that Lance could have survived losing this case. Therefore, there was virtually no way the case would have gone to trial.
But even if it were a medium-sized case, it would have faced huge obstacles getting to a jury. Both sides did have strong and viable theories. Lance’s argument was that USPS got more than it lost, and he had expert testimony that would substantiate the claim. He also had the subsidiary argument by implication that a quasi-governmental agency accustomed to billions in annual losses could never prove that Lance’s doping had inflicted any meaningful loss to its bottom line.
The problem that Lance was going to face was the lineup of witnesses who the government planned to call, each one testifying, in effect, to the fact that Armstrong was a liar, a cheater, a bully, and an asshole. It is certain that Armstrong’s attorneys had exposed focus groups to the government’s arguments, and it’s hard to see how the average juror wouldn’t be disgusted by his personal behavior. That’s not supposed to sway the jury’s evaluation of the facts, but it invariably does.
The government had a good argument as well, namely that the negative dollar value of the bad press was greater than the amount they paid for the sponsorship. As long as the government could show they had a net loss of so much as a dollar, then Armstrong would lose. The government also has a nifty track record in False Claims Acts cases — 95%. Good odds, I would say.
But there were some turds floating in the government’s punchbowl, too. The feds have a terrible record getting convictions against doped athletes, and although this wasn’t a criminal case, seeing Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens walk likely played out in the government’s analysis as well. Moreover, Armstrong was going to level the howitzers on the government’s economic analysis, and you can bet neither their experts nor the witnesses for the USPS were looking forward to being cross examined about the state of that august agency’s financial health–before, during, or after Lancegate.
All of this is another way of saying that as far as their theories of the case, both sides had a strong and viable argument, and both sides knew that their own position had some some hair on it. A jury trial couldn’t be ruled out, as these are precisely the scenarios that go to trial.
But after eight years of litigation, one of the parties absolutely could not afford a worst-possible case outcome. That party was Lance. If you think this hasn’t crushed the life out of him, look at his photos. He has aged immeasurably in the last eight years, and the word “careworn” comes instantly to mind. He was highly motivated to settle this case because as he repeatedly said, a loss would “put him on the street.” Finally, neither party was ideologically committed to the righteousness of their cause. Lance has spent so many years admitting his wrongdoing that even though he still believes the case was “unfair and without merit,” there was zero fire in his belly. Lance the champion who always played to win had become the beaten down old man who now understood that sometimes you really don’t get a second chance.
Likewise, the government no longer seemed to much care about anything other than saving face, something that wouldn’t happen with a defense verdict. Even their wording was lackluster, as assistant U.S. attorney general Chad Readler announced the settlement by saying it “demonstrates that those who cheat the government will be held accountable.”
Given the amount of the settlement–$6.75M–and the amount that we’d heard for the last eight years that Lance was potentially on the hook for–$100M–the settlement demonstrates anything but. To the contrary, the settlement demonstrates that both sides were staying up late at night worrying about a bad outcome, and no amount of tequila was blotting out the demons.
Lose-lose
It’s impossible to conclude that the settlement was anything but lose-lose for both parties who were facing the potential catastrophe of Armstrongageddon. The U.S. government wasted untold millions because it swallowed the USADA lie that, with regard to Armstrong’s doping “The evidence shows beyond any doubt that the US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”
Kind of falls flat after you learn how to say “Grigory Rodchenkov” and realize that compared to the state-sponsored doping of Russia (not to mention East Germany), Lance’s antics were those of a third-rate bully in a fourth-rate sport. And it falls even flatter when you look at Chris Froome. “Lance Armstrong was the worst cheater ever until the next Tour champion,” may ring with something, but it’s not indignation or righteousness.
Anyone who thinks Lance came out a #winner is a bleeding fucking idiot. A quick look at the docket report on PACER shows no less than nine lawyers representing Armstrong’s interests, lawyers who presumably bill at $800/hour and up. Eight years of litigation involving four non-party respondents, a private plaintiff, the U.S. government as intervenor, and ten defendants would have cost Lance in excess of $2M per year simply to deal with the filings and appearances of the other parties, as well as litigating his own defense. A one-month trial in which half of the government’s witnesses were called could have easily cost Lance another million given the payroll of his legal battalion, and my guess is that they don’t take PayPal or IOU’s scrawled on the back of a napkin.
If Lance started with something around $125M, and lost $100M including legal fees, it’s easy to see that the only money he has left are his two homes ($9.25M in Aspen, $7.5M in Austin), and the balance that he has stuck away in retirement accounts to insulate himself from bankruptcy should he really lose all the marbles. In fact, in his settlement agreement, he promises to make the payments within one year and to put a lien on his Austin home as collateral, guaranteeing that he will make the payments. Should the home sell before his settlement payments are made, he will collateralize his home in Aspen, again as a guarantee. I don’t think that Bill Gates would have to put a lien on his home to pay a $6M fine.
All of this strongly suggests that Armstrong is anything but cash rich. Far from being able to reach into his hip pocket to satisfy the settlement, he is plainly dependent on the sale of his Austin home to make good. And none of this takes into account the outstanding legal fees he surely has yet to reckon with. So for the Betsys and Kathys and Gregs of the world, you can all take solace in the fact that Lance is having to hustle for every spare coin under the couch cushions, pretty much like everyone else.
Landis, a pithy guy if ever there was one, said it this way: “Lance benefited the most, but he has paid the most.”
The real financial crunch is the one that’s coming
On the other hand, getting this beast off his back is only the beginning. Lance now faces that most pedestrian of life challenges, commonly known as “getting a job.” His press release points us to all the great things that lie ahead:
- My five kids
- My wife
- My podcast
- Several exciting writing and film projects
- My work as a cancer survivor
- My passion for sports and competition
I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but the five kids and the wife (minor detail: Lance is single) are definitely not going to help with the income generation part of the equation. In fact, accustomed as they are to a $7.5M home in Austin and a $9.5M home in Aspen, my hunch is that no one is going to be particularly happy when Poppa Lance announces “Beans for dinner!” for the third time this week.
Which brings us to the podcast. Inconveniently, this appears to generate zero revenue. More inconveniently, it sucks. I struggled through his first Tourcast last year before concluding that the “brash young kid” from Texas was now just an “annoying old asshole” blabbering from a trailer. You can package it any way you want, but no one is making a fortune off of podcasts, although rumor has it that one especially enterprising old blogger pays for his coffee habit with $2.99 subscriptions to his cycling-related blog. Said old blogger will be happy to offer Lance some advice. For a fee, of course, and unlike those other lawyers, this one does accept PayPal.
Of course the podcast idea lurches from ridiculous to sad when we read that Lance has “several exciting writing and film projects.” This has BOLD-FACED LIE stamped all over it. Why? Because no one in the history of the alphabet has ever found writing to be “exciting.” Drudgery? Sure. Compulsive? Absolutely. A horrible albatross? Every time! But if you think writing is “exciting” you have never come up against rejections, deadlines, editors, editing, audiences, markets, costs, advertising, reviews, critics, social media, and the discipline of churning out shit in the hope that it will somehow become, if not a diamond in the rough, at least salable manure in the garden section of Home Depot. In other words, if it is “exciting,” you are not a writer. You are a delusional moron with a word processor, which, come to think of it, is pretty much the same thing.
Work as a cancer survivor? My memory is dim here, but I seem to remember that Lance unceremoniously resigned from the cancer charity he created when it became clear that he had lied for years about his doping. What will the new foundation be called? Livesomewhatstrong? Livestrongish? And how will it generate enough money to add a loaf of white bread to the beans? Speeches and lectures? “How I ruined my career as a lying cheater, blew through a marriage, Sheryl Crow, Kate Hudson, a ranch, $100M on lawyers, disappointed a generation of cancer survivors, and came back to thrive as a champion of cancer survivors.” I hate to sound cynical, but this is exactly how cynicism sounds.
Last and least we come to Lance’s passion for sports and competition. Again, my memory is foggy, but hasn’t he been banned for life from cycling? And although he is now allowed to compete in non-cycling events, it’s hard to see him gaining traction in the shot-put, pole vault, or synchronized swimming. But you never know.
And in this case, neither does Lance, because his sports company, WEDU, is yet another known unknown. Or is it an unknown unknown? From the Washington Post:
He’s working on a sports-endurance brand he calls WEDU. Though a formal launch isn’t expected until later this year, the company has already staged endurance rides in Texas and Aspen, Colo., and sells hats and shirts on its website. It eventually could encompass training, a charitable arm and more original content, like the two podcasts Armstrong hosts.
I am afraid I read that right. Lance is going to rebuild his fortune staging endurance rides, and by selling hats and shirts. Now, then. I have a friend who stages an endurance event, singular. Note to Lance: My friend still has a day job.
Additional note to Lance: I also have a friend who makes a living selling t-shirts. He works about 50 hours a week DOING NOTHING BUT THAT. And as a side note, he’s been doing it for 30 years.
These #fakeplans beg lots of questions. What will the rest of the “WEDU” slogan be? “Drugs”? And I hate to call a non-sequitur a non-sequitur, but how is a charitable arm going to make money? I thought that charities gave money away? The idea that WEDU will “encompass training” is about as tantalizing and novel as the idea that WEDU will encompass an app that lets you track your rides, compete with others, enroll in premium services, and award KOMs and QOMs for segments.
And I suppose that when you are the Washington Post, on deadline, and getting paid to write non-sequiturs, you totally let it slide when Lance says he will have “more original content.” Never mind that a real journalist would have asked:
- Written about what?
- Written by whom?
- Purchased by whom?
- Purchased for how much?
- Delivered through what medium?
- Paid for through advertising, subscriptions, or a combination thereof?
Rather than wait for WaPo to, you know, do its job, I hustled over to the WEDU web site, and I’m sorry to report that it consists of a Shopify storefront with hats and tees, and a signup for a century ride in Texas and a 50-miler in Aspen, both of which have already occurred. This is either the sign of someone who a) isn’t serious about anything, b) someone who doesn’t need the money, or c) someone who doesn’t have a fucking clue. I’m guessing a) and c). Your opinion may vary.
In any event, I’m available to advise Mr. Armstrong should he need direction regarding how to generate original content. And my first piece of advice will be: DON’T.
END
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Doping on Team Lizard Collectors?
April 15, 2018 § 6 Comments
So, imagine this: A USAC licensed racer on Team Lizard Collectors comes up to an unlicensed rider and says, “Here, put this in your water bottle. You’ll go faster.”
Freddie says, “What is it?”
Doper McDopefuck says, “It’s like 5-hour Energy. It will speed you up.”
McDopefuck stuffs a handful of small packets into Freddie’s trusting hand and moseys off. Freddie mixes the powder with water and the next day takes off on a ride with a friend. Freddie notices unusual speed and power and extreme stimulation. After an hour Freddie’s heart feels like it’s about to rip out of the ribcage.
Freddie, who has high blood pressure, gets off the bike and lies down. Freddie can’t breathe and thinks a cardiac event is about to kick off. “What’s wrong?” Friend asks Freddie.
Freddie tells Friend about the powder and after recovering enough to make it home, goes online and checks the label on the packet. Surprise! It’s a legal supplement that contains a relative of DMAA that is on the WADA list.
Shit just got real.
Dopers in the mist
The first part of the problem is simple: What to do about Doper McDopefuck and any other buddies who are loading up on DMAA and its banned cousins?
Answer: Report them to USAC’s clean cycling program and get on with your life. They will hopefully be surprised one day with a pee-pee test and get run out of the sport.
And don’t tell me it’s the board’s job to out people. Only USADA/WADA/national anti-doping bodies get to sanction dopers. That’s why Chris Froome is still racing and about to enjoy a big win in the Giro and another in the Tour.
Recreational dopers
For those dopers who don’t race and who dope to win group rides or Strava, well, they are fucked up, but as Thorfinn-Sasquatch taught us, recreational doping is a very real thing. Pity the cycling club that starts to weed out its non-racing members who are taking drugs, because the vast majority of cyclists take some kind of drug at some point that is on the WADA list.
Inhalers, pot, ecstasy, amphetamines, viagra, testosterone, and a plethora of legal drugs are regularly consumed by members of your cycling club. So what? They may be using it to get an edge on the group ride, or they may be using it for the purposes that it was prescribed. The first purpose is hardly illegal, and the second may well be medically necessary.
Anyone who joins a cycling board and wants to play narc is going to find himself in a full-time Inquisition, resulting in a club roster of 1.
Pushers
The problem I have is with the Doper McDopefuck who pushes the drug onto the unknowing recreational rider. Those riders can suffer serious health consequences. The licensed racer taking a banned substance and passing it off to another rider deserves to be invited to go away and never come back.
Education
I’ve never heard of a club that has a drug education policy. We need one, and your club does, too. In the same way that we advocate for safety, for nutrition, for good training techniques, and for fair play, we need to advocate for drug health. That means talking with our members about doping, about why it sucks, and about why it doesn’t comport with the goals of our club.
The next time an unsuspecting rider takes a drug pushed off on him by someone who is doping, and that unsuspecting rider dies or gets horribly hurt, it won’t be enough to say, “We didn’t want to harm the reputation of our club.” To the contrary, doping is everywhere in cycling and in life, and we have a duty to educate so that people can make informed decisions.
For those who think that the reputation of their entire club has been harmed because they admit to having a doping problem, well, your reputation is going to be harmed a whole lot worse when someone dies or winds up with a USADA sanction like Meeker or LeoGrande. Tackle the problem head-on, don’t sweep it under the rug. It’s easy to be smug when someone on another team gets caught cheating, less so when it’s your own group of friends and riding pals.
For those who dope to cheat others in sanctioned races, rat them out and send them packing. There’s no shame in having lying, cheating, sonsofbitches in your midst. The shame is not doing anything about them.
END
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Justice!!!
March 16, 2018 § 3 Comments
Justice continues to be meted out with a firm hand in the great sport of cycling. Cyril Fontayne, 43-year-old masters mechanical doper, was criminally convicted of misdemeanor attempted fraud and sentenced to sixty hours of community service. In addition to his criminal conviction and sentence, Fontayne was banned from competition for five years and ordered to pay fines and restitution of 89 euros.
Lance Armstrong: No fine, no criminal charges.
Alberto Contador: No fine, no criminal charges, allowed to come back and win the TdF.
Chris Froome: No fine, no criminal charges, no suspension. If found guilty of doping will still be allowed to keep all titles in between the time of the positive test and the finding of guilt, meaning if he wins the Tour and Giro in 2018, he will keep both titles if his case is not resolved before then.
Etc., etc., etc.
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Low Fidelity Podcast No. 5: Lance’s date with destiny
October 7, 2017 § 8 Comments
My fifth podcast …
Bleak House. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. The lawsuit that never ends …
https://southbaycycling.podbean.com/e/low-fidelity-podcast-5-lance-armstrongs-date-with-destiny/
That’s what Landis v. Tailwind Sports is like, an epic mountain of paper, hearings, and court filings that is now a veritable Mt. Everest. Filed in 2010, the case has finally reached maturity. Scheduled for trial in November, Armstrong made a last-ditch plea to the court to kick the can down the road until spring of 2018, which will possibly give cycling’s perennial bad boy a chance to settle.
Make no mistake, delay is the friend of the defense, and Lance has spent an estimated $15 million defending this assault on his personal fortune, which remains considerable.
How will it all shake out?
Tune in!
END
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PS: Don’t forget the Wanky’s. As if you could. And I may have forgotten to mention that there is free food and beer for the first 350 guests, so get there early.
French Cat 3 dude wins asterisk
October 2, 2017 § 15 Comments
When I put on my headphones yesterday to listen to the news while I was frying up a pan of green coffee beans, I got a surprise: “Blah blah blah,” the announcer said in French, “cycliste blah blah blah” he continued, my ears perking up at hearing one of the only six works I know in that language. Then I got really excited when he said the other five, “velo équipé d’un moteur.”
I tried to pay attention to the rest of the blah blah blah but it didn’t work. The beans were starting to smoke, my grandson had landed and was scuttling the ship, and it was hard to concentrate and stir and block him from pulling out the carving knife from the drawer and jabbing it into my thigh.
Fortunately, a friend sent me a link to the TV interview, which allowed me to listen to it slowly and carefully, and after seven hours of review and Google translate I was able to pick up a couple more key words: “Cat 3.” Basically, a Cat 3 wanker (redundant) got popped for using a moteur electrique in a local bike race. And it made the national news. And the news guy asked, all in earnest, “If some wanker is moteur doping to win a local Fred fest, one must ask the question whether or not moteur doping is also occurring at higher levels du sport?”
To which I can confidently reply, “Non, non.”
The person accused of moteur doping, Henri Percival-Escargot d’Chatenay, was immediately available for a telephone interview with CitSB. I reached him at his chateau in Dordogne, a hellish little dump on the outskirts of Bordeaux known for some of the finest wine and cuisine on earth.
CitSB: So, did you really moteur dopage?
HP-EdC: Non, non, mais bien sur, non.
CitSB: So what was the deal with the moteur electronique in votre Cervelo?
HP-EdC: Eet was mistaken consumption.
CitSB: Beg pardon?
HP-EdC: Eet was mistaken consumption. I drink by mistake, pas d’idee que zere was moteur electrique in my water bottle.
CitSB: No, no, you didn’t drink the moteur electrique. They found it underneath your boteille d’eau.
HP-EdC: Ah, oui, oui, le bidon, En francais on dit “bidon.” Masculin avec “le.” But someone puts le moteur electrique zere and I don’t know it, comme avec le tainted beef de Alberto Contador, vous savez?
CitSB: So you’re saying someone stuck it there on le Cervelo beneath le bidon and you had no idea you were doing the ol’ dopage mechanique?
HP-EdC: Oui, oui, comme ca. Et aussi I was, comme dit-on, un vanishing twin, exactement comme Tyler Hamilton.
CitSB: What?
HP-EdC: C’est tres rare, mais j’avais un vanishing twin and zeez ees pourquoi they have found le moteur. C’est definitivement le moteur de mon vanishing twin. N’est-ce pas mine. Imposible et sacre bleu et etcetera.
CitSB: Okay, so it was your vanishing twin’s motor, not yours. That seems un peu incroyable, as they say in France.
HP-EdC: And I must tell you, I have passe les testing dopage 500 fois. Neffer positive, vous comprenez? 500 foix ils ont pris mon pee-pee, et neffer, neffer un positive. Je deteste telle tricherie. Je suis un sporstman très, très honnête.
CitSB: I’m not sure what the passed testing dopage has to do with anything. This a moteur electrique we’re talking about, Henri.
HP-EdC: Et je vous dirai anozzer sing. I would neffer do ze dopage electronique par ce’que on ne sais pas que serais les effets a mon santé. In fife ou six years, peut-etre le cancer, n’est-ce pas? Ou, how you say en englais? Le acne.
CitSB: I haven’t ever heard of motorized doping causing cancer or acne. That’s a stretch.
HP-EdC: Anyways, je n’ai aucune motif pour cette tricherie. Je suis tres fort. Je fait le training tous les jours. Vous voulez savoir what I am on? Je suis on my velo, zat is what I am on.
CitSB: We know that you were on the velo, the problem is that there was also a moteur electrique on the velo. So you + velo + moteur electrique equals cheating masters d-bag.
[Noise in background.]
CitSB: You okay?
HP-EdC: Oui, oui, deux visitors ont arrivée. I must go now. Merci pour le entrevue.
CitSB: Hey, what’s that clicking sound? Is someone cuffing you, Henri? Henri?
HP-EdC: Adieu.
END
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End of an error
September 14, 2017 § 40 Comments
The era of organized bike racing is gone and it isn’t coming back. It has been replaced wholesale by Strava, grand fondues, club racing, and fun rides.
In unrelated news, the Kayle LeoGrande doping story got picked up by a news web site that focuses exclusively on Olympic sports. Kayle’s story is now running next to an article on the 2018 and 2024 Olympic host cities and a story about corruption at the very highest level of sport.
How the mighty have risen.
A friend sent me this incredibly sad post, which appears to come from Kayle’s Facebag page.
I think it’s sad because, if you read the story and the interview, you can see that Kayle is denying that he doped to improve his performance, something that the test results and his past behavior conclusively prove. A friend of mine who is a mental health expert and former bike racer identifies Kayle not as someone who should be pilloried, but someone who needs help and should be pitied. Perhaps he’s right. It’s very hard to read this without wincing.
In other, completely, totally, absolutely unrelated news, the last USAC crit of the year in Southern California, America’s hottest hotbed of crit racing, wrapped up last weekend. The men’s Pro 1/2/3 field had seven riders.
END
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PS: Don’t forget the Wanky’s. As if you could.
7 reasons I love Kayle LeoGrande
August 30, 2017 § 30 Comments
When USADA issued the official death certificate for the profamateur racing career of Kayle LeoGrande, it listed the seven banned substances found in his pee-pee. They were: Raloxifene, ostarine, ibutamoren, GW1516 sulfone, RAD140, LGD4033, and andarine.
The news came down about the same time I was lying in bed wondering how I would ever win my first Telo World Fake Profamateur Training Crit Championship. I had a host of fourths, a couple of thirds, but victory proved elusive, even with Frexit out of the picture.
It was 3:00 AM. The phone rang. “Hello?”
“Hello,” said a heavily accented voice, which I instantly recognized as Stanley O’Grande, the infamous doping Chihuahua. “You wanna win the Telo?” he said.
“Yeah,” I admitted quietly. “I do.”
“It’s gonna cost you.”
“I’ll pay anything.”
“You test positive I don’t know you, okay?”
“Anything.”
“All right,” he growled. “Get ready for the dark side.”
An hour later I was in a dark alley behind the PVE faux estate of palm frond manager Robert Lewis McButtchaps, Jr. It was silent except for the babysitting service which had come over to McButtchaps’s home to burp him and change his didy. I spied Stanley O’Grande next to a bush.
“You got the stuff?” I asked.
“Here,” he said gruffly, thrusting out his paw. I took the large plastic sack, tucked it under my arm and dashed away.
The next day was Telo. Before rolling up to the start I opened the plastic bag. Inside was the miracle tunic! One of Kayle LeoGrande’s old jerseys! I quickly shucked off my Team Lizard Collectors kit and squirmed into Kayle’s jersey, which was strangely damp.
At the bottom of the sack was a note, written by Stan: “This is the only miracle tunic left from the batch we custom fitted Kayle with. Straight from Shanghai. Zip that baby up and let the ointments in the fabric do their thing. Chapeau. Or sombrero, as we Chihuahuans say.”
As the form fitting garment clung to my skin I could feel the magical elixirs begin to soak in. In seconds I went from meek, compliant, fearful Wanky McWankster to Kayle Jr., a/k/a Cabbage. As the chemicals from the soaked jersey coursed through my veins, I knew it was indeed my day to win Telo.
Destroyer sidled up to me. “We’re on the same team now,” he said. “Me and Smasher will get you the win today. With that tunic, everything is possible.”
“Even for me? I thought you can’t turn a donkey into a racehorse, even with drugs.”
“A donkey, no. But a Wanky? Maybe!”
The race was off. Destroyer, Buckwheat, and G3 rolled and opened a massive gap. I sat easily on Smasher’s wheel, knowing that my new teammate would do anything to help me win. Eventually the break disappeared, but I never worried. Why?
Because the 1st reason to love Kayle was taking effect, i.e. Mr. Raloxifene. It immediately began selectively blocking estrogen uptake receptors, resulting in immediate flows of extra testosterone that would have otherwise been converted to estrogen. My legs were pistons of steel.
Once the break was reeled in, a series of counter-attacks took place. In kicked Reason to Love Kayle #2, Mr. Ostarine. I easily went with the counter as my ostarine, which research has shown to have fewer androgenic properties, exerted less influence on the development and balance of my male hormones, including testosterone. While not yet approved for human use, ostarine did away with the negative side effects of steroids and effectively helped me avoid muscle wasting diseases such as osteoporosis, cancer, and hypogonadism. The peloton had greatly thinned. Thanks, Mr. Ostarine!
Now we were halfway through the race and there were a flurry of unsuccessful attacks. It was my time to launch, and thankfully I had Mr. Ibutamorin at my disposal. Reason #3!!! This non-peptidic, potent, long-acting, orally-active, and selective agonist of the ghrelin receptor and a growth hormone secretagogue, mimicked the growth hormone (GH)-stimulating action of the endogenous hormone ghrelin. By sustaining activation of GH-IGF-1 Axis and increase in lean body mass but no change in total fat mass or visceral fat, it allowed me to attack so hard that none could follow.
Soon I was brought back and would have been decimated were it not for Reason to Love Kayle #4, GW1516 sulfone, or Endurabol. This PPARδ receptor agonist, although abandoned in 2007 because animal testing showed that the drug caused cancer in several organs, brought my dead legs back to life much as the 2007 research showing that high doses of GW501516 given to mice dramatically improved their physical performance. Endurabol might cause cancer in lab rats, but Kayle and I were no lab rats, we were sewer rats, and I hung tough.
Catching my breath I attacked and bridged up to Hector Morales thanks to Reasons to Love Kayle Nos. 4-6, i.e., RAD140, LGD4033, and andarine. These three SARMs kept my testosterone hugely massive, better than Obama’s, and the break stuck for twenty minutes. Unfortunately, the race had twenty-one minutes left.
Buckwheat, Smasher, Destroyer, Rudy, and others hunted us down despite my best doped efforts, but proving that drugs are stronger than pan y agua, I miraculously outsprinted everyone but Buckwheat for second place with the help of a massive leadout by Destroyer.
Was it worth it? How did I feel about cheating my friends? What about my incipient ovarian cancer? Would I feel like an idiot when USADA put me on its Most Wanted list?And most importantly, could I keep the miracle tunic?
I don’t know the answers to those things. But I know I’ve learned to love Kayle.
END
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PS: Don’t forget the Wanky’s. As if you could.
Icarus, Wankarus
August 22, 2017 § 20 Comments
By now everyone has seen “Icarus,” even people like me who have never been to a Netflix theater. So I broke down and walked over to the PV Mall to watch it but when I got there the lady at the movie theater said they weren’t a Netflix theater.
“Do I have to go to Crossroads at Crenshaw?” I asked.
“You can go wherever you want,” she said, crossly. “Next in line, please.”
So I went to Crossroads where it was a different movie theater and they were about as rude. Finally a guy told me that Netflix wasn’t a movie theater, rather, it was an app for your phone.
“I don’t want a new phone,” I told him. “I just want to watch ‘Icarus.’ It’s a new movie only showing at the Netflix theater.”
“There ain’t no Netflix theater, man. It’s on your phone. It’s an app. Like YouTube. You ain’t never gone to no damn YouTube theater have you, man?”
“No.”
“Well shit, that’s ’cause there ain’t any. Same with Netflix.”
He explained it and then we downloaded the Netflix theater on my phone and I watched the video movie documentary. Everyone had told me that I had to watch it because it revealed global corruption reaching to the highest levels of government in order to dope the Olympics.
I don’t know about any of that stuff, but here is the story:
- Wanker does a grand fondue. Gets ass kicked.
- Wanker gets pissed at the dopers.
- Wanker decides “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
- Wanker does worse on drugs than he did racing clean.
- Wanker stumbles onto Russian doping program that led to the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine.
I can’t really comment on #5, but I can totally comment on numbers 1-4. First, the wanker Bryan Fogel, who is also the film maker, is completely delusional. Which makes him awesome.
He dresses up in off-the-rack Assos clothing, buys an expensive bike, and assumes full Superbikeman Wanker powers, i.e., gets a coach and flies around the world trying to win various grand fondues. So far, pretty normal for a delusional idiot. But his descriptions of the fondues and his competition are truly insightful as to the depths of his illness: “They could be pros!” he says, describing a gaggle of goofballs who look about as pro as the 3rd string baby seals on the NPR.
“It’s as hard as the Tour!” he exclaims as he labors slowly up a climb day after day, alone, unaware that when you are alone on a climb in the Tour for very long you quickly become what is known as “missed the time cut.” Also, they don’t let you in the Tour when your riding style approximates a pig romancing a football.
Most amazing is Bryan’s coaching. One shot shows him hooked up to a breathing tube and nailed to an ergometer while his coach says just the right combination of phrases to humiliate him while simultaneously making him hope there might be improvement, i.e. keep him writing those monthly checks.
The whole crockumentary was pretty sad, for me. I mean here was perhaps the world’s finest baby seal, with a freshly glistening coat no less, and he’d never made it to the NPR, or Flog, or Donut, or Nichols. What’s worse, the guy lives in L.A., on the west side, so the whole time he was drowning in visions of sugarplums he was just a few pedal strokes away from a weekly beating that would have saved him all that airfare. He wouldn’t have had to go to France to get clubbed; we’d gladly have done it here in his own back yard, bought him coffee, made him wear a Team Lizard Collectors kit, and taught him how to go to the front.
And of course it was sad to think that he had fallen into the bubbling vat of profama-soup and didn’t even know that you can’t really do the delusion thing right without a fake team kit and tramp-stamp butt sponsors. Off the rack Assos? Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.
But anyway, on to the real moral of the story, which is NOT that doping is bad. At least that’s not what I got out of it, even though in the film one guy was murdered, another given a new identity and spirited off to Utah or Manitoba, and a small country was invaded all in the name of better Olympiads through state-sponsored drugs.
No, for me the motto was that doping is horrible, awful, unmentionable in the extreme because unless you actually have talent and a team and bike racing skills and know how to train, doping will make you worse. It’s not the old saw of “You can’t make a donkey into a racehorse,” no, it’s more terrible: Unless done right it will make a donkey into a newt.
Which is what Brian became, at least in the world of profamateur grand fondue doping, a newt. A glistening, small, crawling, mostly brainless salamander in the subfamily Pleurodelinae. A fate worse than Kayle’s … by far. Sad.
END
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