The world of professional cycling is coming unglued. The past years have been an abomination to the true fans and everyone involved. As the events of the past weeks have unfolded, I’ve read quite a bit about it. It’s no secret how I feel about professional sports in general, but as an avid cyclist, LanceGate has really hit home. The following is an excerpt from a Bicycling Magazine article that seems to sum up the disgusting mess the sport has found itself in:

Cyrille Guimard, former team manager who directed riders to seven Tour de France titles, from 1976 to 1984:

“So Lance Armstrong has been stripped of all of his victories. OK, that’s fine; he clearly doped. But he was not alone: There’s a whole mafia-like system in cycling that facilitates doping, and we have to get to the bottom of it, even if it touches the highest level of the UCI. OK, Armstrong doped, but what about the money laundering? What about the rest of the Italian investigation in Padua?

“We need to put in place a system of amnesty so that everyone can come clean and we can truly start from scratch, because the real problem is, where do we go from here? We have to go to the end. Armstrong is not the only Tour winner who doped. We will have to go back to Indurain, and perhaps even beyond.
“Right now there is so much hypocrisy. You have a guy like Levi Leipheimer who speaks honestly about his doping, and he not only gets suspended but he also loses his job. That’s a sort of double indemnity—and it’s scandalous! Mr. Lefevere [Leipheimer’s boss at Quick-Step who recently terminated Leipheimer’s contract] has been involved in some ‘affairs’ himself and it is just scandalous that he fires Leipheimer.”

And I agree. The entire sport is a toilet flush at this point. They can’t bequeath Lance’s titles to anyone else because most of them doped as well! In the seven years that Lance won the Tour de France, 20 out of the 21 riders on the podiums those years have either confessed to doping or have been convicted of doping.

“Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling”