Who is on the dope?

The way the world has treated the seven time champion of Tour de Franc Lance Armstrong in recent time is nothing short of despicable and clearly illustrates the kind of dangerous moral absolutism the world is coming to. In any sporting activity that stretches the limits of human endurance to the maximum like cycling in Tour de Franc, as a competitor you would want to have as much advantage over your opponent as possible. By taking some performance enhancing drugs, he was not doing anything outrageous or involved in cheating but he was doing as the term suggests, he was merely enhancing his performance to the maximum possible extent through the means of science and medicine. In fact, I would postulate that every sports person should be allowed to use whatever means available at their disposal to gain any kind on advantage possible. And let’s be honest, Lance Armstrong has not won the most grueling race in cycling for seven consecutive times because he was imbibing some kind of potion. He has done it because he is a fantastic specimen of a human being when it comes to stamina, endurance and the bloody mindedness to survive against all odds for lest anybody forget, he is a cancer survivor and anybody who’s got any idea about the nature of the illness will tell you invariably lose the will to survive but to not just survive but to overcome and triumph in the sporting arena is monumental and Armstrong is a living example of this.

I know that many people will jump at my throat and accuse me of encouraging cheating and match fixing by the same token. But where is the question of cheating in this? I accept that match fixing is different. Here you take money to under perform and throw away the match deliberately for pecuniary gains. That is a clear cut case of cheating and must be punished by all means. But in the case of doping you are doing your damn best to not only perform but over perform to ensure medals for your country and in the process anything that would help you marginally to be one up on your opponent should be par for the course. If anybody seriously believes that Mr. Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de Franc only because he doped and not because of his superhuman ability to focus and persevere is himself on some kind of dope! In this day and age, sport is a multi billion dollar industry and rather than being on some kind of faux moral crusade to cleanse every sport of drug use, we should focus our time and energy on making the whole thing more scientific and transparent so that the sports person are able to use it rather than abuse it to the detriment of their health. But the times that we live in, we have made a fetish of morally correct behavior like we see quite often in the shrill debate around  legalizing Marijuana. What we have seen in recent days and weeks is the utter shaming and humiliation of one of the colossal sporting figures of our time and in doing so we have also diminished ourselves a quite a bit.