Cheat, Cheat. Never beat.
Cheat, cheat...never beat. Or so says my boy B-dub's slogan on his now worldwide creed of DOPERS SUCK. Basso. What a p.o.s. I will discard my copy of Overcoming even though I love watching Jensy lay wood to the peleton.
Reading the news about Basso 'working' with the Puerto investigators to "relieve his conscience", I immediately went up stairs and brushed off the dust from my extremely limited Operation Puerto t-shirt (3 were made) and will wear it with pride. I put it away because it looked like this thing was a witch hunt. The design is hilarious and was done by my boy Ted at Anthem for (very) personal reasons, not for distribution.
Having Valverde in there as well was pretty prophetic too given the latest announcement. Here's another one of the shirts in action:
This boring waste of everyone's time has got to end. And yes, the pessimist in me says there'll be another wave of some new form of cheating but still my larger optimist side says the Slipstreams of the world will dominate. You didn't hear it from me but rumor has it that a very famous doper-come-clean rider who wears a distinctively yellow kit this season will be moving to the Argyle clad team for 08 to enable a Pro Tour slot and a ride to Le Grande Boucle.
But what do I know?
Dopers suck. Cheaters suck. My sons will know the difference.
Monday, May 7, 2007 at 1:46PM
Reader Comments (4)
"i'm innocent, i never met the guy, i never raced unclean, my mother had a goat farm which caused her to have a vanishing kid which made me flag a test three decades later..." blah blah blah.
they're all full of crap. go read the biography about tom simpson (put me back on the bike - or something really close to that), then see if you think that eddy merckx and his peers might have been sipping a little go juice. or a lot.
yah, then there was the mysterious, utopian, non-cheating period between tom simpson's heart blowing up on ventoux because he was wacked on speeders and festina 30 years later. suddenly, the cheating came back from the dead!
what absolutely kills me is the months (or years) of sincere, heartwarming declarations of innocence - then we get the sob story of someone needing to clear their conscience and lift the unbearable weight of guilt from their shoulders.
and we're supposed to think they're f'ing heros or noble characters. richard virenque, johan museeuw, TH (though he's still denying it), and a whole host of others can just piss off. and basso, too.
cheat if you want to, but shut the hell up when you get caught, for crying out loud.
something tells me that the list of those who don't might be shorter than the list of those who do.
basso sez...
"I am fully aware that an attempt at doping is tantamount to doping, but I am asking to be excused for this and that should be enough," he said. "All my victories were obtained in an honest manner and nobody can contest what I achieved in the 2006 Giro d'Italia no more than the other results I achieved during my career."
hilarious! i love the "and that should be enough" part. what planet are these people from??
i am asking to be excused from having to pay my mortgage and that should be enough.
hope that works for me.
"I'm so sorry 'dat I reached over da counter and grabbed da $20's out of da till at da Quicky Mart. My confession is enough, no? I now get back to my job. Grazi."
Pressure to cheat to win because of the job they chose? Do I go and scour USPTO.gov to look for patents and IP I can rip off to propel myself and my career? F no. I like to lay my head on my pillow at night and drift off to sleep with good conscience. I could give a crap that these farm boys were so poor and bike racing is their only shot out of the ghetto. Cry me a friggin river. A cheat is a cheat. Rich or poor. Life is hard and these guys feel it is their right to ride bikes for a living. I don;t know why I am wasting characters here typing this because these egomaniacs will do anything to get and stay ahead. It's the culture.
I sorta wonder 'bout the timing in the way these stories and events are brought to the fore. It's a bit orchestrated. And WE don't ever get the whole story, ya know. But it does make a fan wonder about the past.................
chuck
Santa Rosa