This is why I never understood the whole Lance Armstrong thing; sure, the guy was a giant dick, but he's far from the only "best of" athlete to be such.

It struck me as a massive hypocrisy that a sport that has long been so incredibly dirty would strip its best, only to realize it couldn't give the titles to anyone else, because the top 20+ in every year he won had either been caught doping or were so known to be users that giving the title to anyone else would look incredibly fucking ridiculous.

Perhaps the only greater hypocrisy in cycling is the claim that the Tour- or cycling in general- is now in any way "clean". The drugs just get better, the methods for detection avoidance more advanced.

As a general rule, if you are in sport, and you are in the top 1%, you're fucking doping. Even top darts and billiard players take PEDs to calm their nerves and steady their hands, and those are games of skill; it's not even a sport.

Yes, that means your sporting heroes are cheaters. All of them (and I do mean ALL of them, unless your hero was Eddie the Eagle) are using SOMETHING that enhances performance, even if the reason is simply to cancel the edge that their opponents are getting by doping to combat their natural genetic advantage (Bolt, Phelps, etc).

What, do you actually think that multiple doping violators Tyson Gay (age 36) and Justin Gatlin (age 37) are two of the fastest men in the world naturally, or that a pair of 6'0" tall men could legitimately and naturally challenge a 6'5" man who literally accelerates longer (Bolt accelerates to roughly 65m, while everyone else begins to decelerate around 55m) and takes (2-4) fewer steps to cover the same 100m distance? The math just don't hold. The only thing more hilarious than that is thinking Carl Lewis ran clean during the race Ben Johnson got banned for back in '88 (or any other time, for that matter).

This. Between doping and the ongoing debates about what constitutes a woman for purposes of competition I'm increasingly just disenchanted and bored the entire concept of contests based primarily on physical fitness. They all inevitably devolve into nothing but an extended debate over what constitutes a legitimate path to superior performance, and an endless parade of people (competitors and organizers alike) finding new and exciting ways to violate the spirit of the competition.

But then how will we know who's best at putting a shot?

They are? All this time I thought they were shooting the putt.

The "Icarus" documentary is an amazing example of organizers violating the spirit of the competition. If you haven't seen it, its about a reporter who's an avid- and clean- racing cyclist, who decides to see how much he can improve his performance by doing a full, Olympic-style doping schedule under the supervision of a doping doctor. Problem is, he can't find anyone who will do it, until he stumbles upon a Russian doctor willing to do so. Turns out, the Russian doctor is the head of Russia's ANTI-doping agency, and is responsible for perhaps the largest systematic cheating scheme in sporting history- Russia's epic cheating in the Sochi games.

By the time its done, several of the doctor's colleagues have been died/disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the doc has fled for his life to the US, where he is in WitSec. True to form, the IOC, despite being handed a shit-ton of evidence and testimony detailed the cheating, refuses to grow a pair, and allows Russian cheaters to compete, albeit not as Russians, but rather under the Olympic flag. The next year, Russia is fully reinstated, and, in the eyes of the IOC, the issue is resolved.

Happy days for everyone. Except the author, who, due to mechanical issues with his bike, actually does WORSE in the race while doping- IIRC, he slips from finishing 12th to 16th.