A heart broken kid......

WOW, that last two weeks have been brutal as a sports fan and Wednesday I feel the final blow was dealt. I'm left asking questions that range from the strange to the heart breaking. Am I actually expected to know what I know now and not ask questions about athletes likes Bo, Magic, Deion, Nolan, and anyone that played from 1970-today? Our sports lives as Gen X or Gen Y fans have been a big lie; a complete and total allusion.

Today came the harshest blow; Lance Armstrong announced he is suspending his drug testing program because it is to expensive and logistically challenging. WTF, pardon my French, I thought they were trying to screw him! If you have been swept up in the dream, Lance has told us that the French are evil and out to get him. And now this!

Today is easier for me than many of my friends who still have not come to terms with the fact that Lance had been cheating. Evidence you ask, well don't Google it, put it into ESPN, or pretty much any other web resource. His PR team should be praise and hired by A-Rod ASAP. Those searches would make it hard to think anything but that Lance is Super Man. So you ask for fact (and b/c I'm to tired to research it all here is the loose facts, prove me wrong), here they are:
1) Lance won 7 consecutive Tour de France's (in the meantime he was able to villeinize America's first cycling king of my lifetime, Greg Lemond)
2) In numerous consecutive years Jan Ulrich finished 2nd to Lance.
3) In 2008, the first year of HGH testing or for that matter any real drug testing of any kind Jan Ulrich was kicked out for doping.
4) Additionally 5-9 cyclist that finished behind Lance in those 7 years was kicked out.
5) Lance has been tied to tainted drug test before (insert Evil French chant here)
6) Lance retired after 7 b/c he was old and only won his last one by a hair........OK, OK, OK was just making sure you were paying attention,.....ready, he retired because new testing had been announced.
7) He takes a few years off, talks to other riders, figures out what they are doing, and says I'm coming back with drug testing by a third party.
8) First return event, gets his ass whipped and finishes 64th.
9) Once that leave the medias attention he announces that he is suspending his drug testing program (because Nike and his numerous other sponsors are paying him peanuts and logistics is really still an issue in today connected world).

I'm sorry, first Rose, then McGwire and Sosa, then Clemens and Pettite, and Palmeiro and Tejada...... Then this week we get A-Rod. And oh by the way while you were reading about baseball Lance stops his testing. I love the media coverage, ESPN has one paragraph and then it was off their front page in less then 2 hours. Even if you searched "Lance Armstrong" you had to put in "suspend drug testing" to find the story, now with a little more color I might add. Google his name and get nothing but praise. You would think this guy keeps the Earth on its axis.

Today I face the fact that sports as I know them have been a sham, and it breaks my heart. Shame on all of you and shame on you for putting your wallets in front of your virtues. You are no better than the bankers, brokers, and business men that tater the news in today's economic crisis. In my opinion you have been stealing from me every time I have bought a ticket, watched an event, or otherwise. Sports is just a microcosm of society people say, screw that, sports is a microcosm of the Madoff scheme.

How do you solve it? Start throwing people in jail like you do all the street thugs and petty drug criminals. Abolish the double standard, make perjury a real crime, throw in jail those that ran leagues that by not acting endorsed drug use, tell unions that this is not negotiable, and centralize all sports drug testing in one central agency so that new PED's can be identified earlier. Finally make one failed drug test an automatic life time ban and void any Hall of Fame eligibility. Put teeth in so that we as sports fans can go back to what we love; rooting for our sports teams and believing in a level playing field.

But like most idealistic things, I'm sure these ideas will be ignored and this kid will be forever heart broken.