the corner office

a blog, by Colin Pretorius

On Lance Armstrong

A conversation:

"What's the big deal about doping?"
"I think the argument is that performance-enhancing drugs are bad because they give you an unfair advantage"
"What, like having a good sponsor or being born in a first world country?"

(and it wasn't even me asking the question)

Lance Armstrong sounds like a nasty piece of work, and even more so after the Oprah PR exercise (is nonfession a word? How about nonpology? They should be), but what I dislike most about the whole affair is the fact that people paint the whole doping thing as a great moral issue when it's so obviously not. One cup of coffee with breakfast is fine, a caffiene tablet isn't. There's no clear-cut line between cheating and not, between having an unfair advantage and a fair advantage.

All you've got are a bunch of people defining lines - arbitrary and oftentimes ridiculously byzantine lines - and then daring people with crazy incentives and extremely competitive dispositions to find ways to bump, bash, nudge and squeeze around the hazy lines separating the awful "cheats" from the "great athletes."

{2013.01.19 22:44}

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