Nice piece.

I am currently going through many notes of the Lance Armstrong experience from 2000 to today from North american sources which i hope will provide an academic article, a lengthy essay and shorter opinion piece.

As for should we promote those drug free in tour of france, nobody would ever really know who they would be. Most will swear they are clean until they are caught

Robert, you wrote:

< Armstrong cheated at cycling >

< What Armstrong did was unquestionably wrong >

and

< The doings of Armstrong were quite clearly wrong >

But you have not elucidated just what he did and why it was wrong when it comes to the actual regulations.

In the corporate world, in sport and in so many other ways, we are constantly pushing the margins, we are right up there on the legal fringe, looking for an advantage over our competitors and trying to work out just exactly what the boundaries are, what we can get away with, what our competitors are getting away with, and what the authorities will actually allow you to get away as it is not always the same as what is written in law.

So if what Armstrong did wasn’t clearly and concisely defined in the rule book as being wrong, then he should not be charged with anything. In fact, you could say that he was just being smart, tactful and right on his game in managing to find things that gave him an edge.

I don’t know what the real situation is. But I’m not willing to condemn him for flagrant wrong-doing until it can be shown to me that he has clearly and knowingly acted outside of the rules….. and that the authorities didn’t know about it at the time and turn a blind eye to it…. and that lots of other people weren’t doing similar things and getting away with it.

If the authorities knew about it and let it go on, then the rules had effectively been changed. If lots of other cyclists had been acting within this area between the literal interpretation of the rules and the regulatory regime, then one who didn’t was put at a distinct disadvantage, and you could hardly blame them for following suit.

So it is not straightforward. It could well be that the regulatory authority deserves to be seriously criticised here rather than Armstrong.

Lance was a passionate supporter of Cancer research and recent TV interview one cycling official said that Lance front man for publicity of a research agency that raised $500 million and its thats the case the value to cancer sufferers could be as high as one $billion. He also entertained a billion people on TV for years and promote National tours and mountain bike raising all over the world. So he has been a naughty boy as well, so what, after all to do that amount of positive good , is what he will be remembered

@ PEST:

The end does not justify the means.

Lance started out wrong and stayed wrong.

Who is to say that the best "clean" athletes, were they not cheated out of their medals by the Armstrong machine, would not have risen to equally great philanthropic achievements?

...I understood this article as one that raises the issue of Western morality. The stink of “Nietzsche” Is all over it! So I conclude that the author throws a “red herring” into the mix to reinforce an outcome.

...Using the popular “home-grown” boy and “folk hero” Lance Armstrong as a convenient subject matter makes a counter argument all too difficult!

...More realistic to use the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an event where morality was subjugated to the “will to win”: After all, we are expressing morality as it applies to an “extinction event” in the article are we not? I am onto it Robert McLean!

Personally my experience of cycling leads me to believe that no one can produce the effort required in some of these races without chemical help.

Dan I have never read anything quite so stupid. To suggest the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done as part of a game is rather crude.

Do you believe it would have been better for millions of Japanese to die in an invasion, which is what would have happened given their indoctrination, would have been better? Perhaps you believe that a few million allied service men should have died in an invasion, just to avoid using a new weapon. What ever it is, it's a warped outlook.

…Well Hasbeen, the moral question is well raised with a scenario using the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 with the use of nuclear weapons on innocent civilians. This is the sort of moral question that should be used to address the moral dilemma of survival in times of catastrophic events.

…Should we create a catastrophic event in order to save ourselves from one? Surely that addresses the moral question more so than a bike rider taking drugs to win a few races. To me, that simply trivialises the important moral question raised by this author.

The BIG question, unanswerable of course, is did Lance's drug regime cause the cancer? Given that steroids has a direct effect on that region of our precious anatomy I don't think the cause effect link is that specious.

However Lance was a driven man, operating in supportive environment (for chemical use) and he did what he did with implicit organisational approval and direct team involvement. There were no constraints.

These individuals who abandon the 'means' argument in favour of the 'ends' are useful in extreme conflict like war but are a challenge to ordered urbane society and need to be 'outed'. The US finance sector is a recent example.

<< …he did what he did with implicit organisational approval… >>

This is surely the critical point. If the authorities allowed him to do it, either actively, or passively by way of turning a blind eye, then he should be holding onto his seven Tour de France wins.

If the authorities allowed this, then the rules were for all intents and purposes that he could do what he did, regardless of what may have been in writing in the rule book.

His whole team contributed, and did so for years. This is pretty strong evidence that they felt as though they were behaving within the bounds set by the governing authority.

Many others in the game at that time were doing something similar. It was the culture of the day!

I really can’t see how Armstrong can be condemned for his actions. It is the authorities that should be copping the flack.

The main thing is to learn from it and have the rules clearly defined and regulated in such a manner that the rules as written are exactly the same as the rules in practice.

Armstrong should be welcomed back into the fray, with apologies and acknowledgement that it wasn’t he who had particularly badly stuffed up but that it was the whole game and the management thereof that deserves the greatest level of criticism.