Quote:
Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
He should be defiant, if he'd been French no one would have cared about him, he got screwed pure and simple, every one else in the sport has been left alone, no one castigates Indurin or Mercx and they both doped, Armstrong has just become the scapegoat for a whole sport.
The thing I find interesting is he still protects the sport frankly, what he should say is 'this is how cycling was done when I started, I didn't do anything that the sport didn't condone one way or the other and the only reason anyone cared in the end is because the puritanical yanks started to take notice because I was American'
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The thing about Lance was he sued others and didn't give a damn about them at the time. Now, being reporters, frankly I don't care, but it's not like they make a killing reporting on things, so he took some away from them. I do get swayed by people's arguments, and I do think now after seeing this, that he probably paid too high a price, but signs pointed to him being a vindictive jerk and that came around full circle. Now, the fact that he spilled his guts and admitted to everything certainly changes my perception of him (quite dramatically), as that took a lot to be that completely truthful. With reference to the argument that he shouldn't be punished because the others didn't, I'm not fully buying that. He gained probably more than those other guys with his crazy endorsements, so while he did lose more than them, he gained more than them too. Sometimes you need the biggest to fall to prove a point. We could make the same argument about McGuire, Bonds, Sosa, and Clemens in the steroid era in baseball. The fact that they were jerks makes it easy to digest. They were the scapegoats because they loved the attention rather than benefiting quietly. These are sociopaths and sometimes those are the perfect people to make an example of. Lance coming out and being almost entirely transparent is a rare example of an enormous ego being crushed, and the documentary did a great job.