I’m only one cup o’ Joe into the morning and it just hit me. (The epiphany, not the coffee.) Why I am fascinated with the Lance Armstrong scandal.
It’s because Armstrong is the Bernie Madoff of sports. (You may prefer to insert Allen Stanford or Dietmar Machold or Chuck Ponzi or . . . ?)
Why, you ask?
Well, their involvement was international, the stakes were massive, they were the biggest players in their respective games, they defrauded vast numbers of people and their personal lives were immensely enriched by their fraud. Madoff and Armstrong were thieves who wore different stripes. Madoff stole money from people and charities that had worked countless years to establish and build reputations and fortunes. Armstrong (and his teammates) stole prized titles from athletes who had worked countless years to become top (non-juiced) competitors in cycling. (I won’t even address the millions and millions of sponsorship dollars those titles confer upon champions.)
Yes, we love winners. But we don’t love winners who win by cheating. (Because, as we all know, that’s not winning. That’s cheating. If you look closely, you’ll notice they’re different things, which is why we give them completely different names.) And the cyclists interviewed in this article, (Armstrong’s teammates), knew they were cheating, knew it was wrong and (eventually) wanted to come clean about what they’d done, and sweep the personal guilt out of their minds.
They knew they were cheating because the rules they had agreed to said it was cheating. Every cyclist in every race knew that juicing was cheating. If the rules had said juicing was okay, and nothing more than a personal choice of individual cyclists, well, that would’ve been different. But there are no cycling events with rules like that. At least not yet. And there are no rules of international finance that say it’s okay to “juice” the investment books. Two plus two still has to add up to four. So when you get caught cheating the people who’ve invested their hard-earned money, time, reputation and trust?
Well, sometimes the walls come crashing down.
