Gyroscopic Investing

TripleB wrote: I for one am happy that as a world, one of our top news stories is whether or not a guy who rides a bicycle is taking drugs. Because that means the sun isn't about to explode, an asteroid isn't about to hit the Earth, and a new monkey zombie virus hasn't been spreading.

MediumTex wrote: And America will get to see on Thursday and Friday just what a liar and jerk that he really is.

It ought to be fun to watch.

MediumTex wrote: And America will get to see on Thursday and Friday just what a liar and jerk that he really is.

It ought to be fun to watch.

TennPaGa wrote:

doodle wrote: I dont think any cyclist was drug free during that period of cycling history....so in that respect it was probably a level playing field....just at a higher drug assisted level

This has nothing to do with my point.

I'm not claiming that Armstrong was an outlier in his drug use.  I'm not claiming that the playing field in which he competed was not level.

I'm saying that a big part of Armstrong's sales pitch for his product, "Lance Armstrong", was that he was drug free.  But the sales pitch was a lie.

For this, I think lots of people (including me) are going to judge him harshly.

doodle wrote: The first thing that comes to my mind when I see a sales pitch is "LIE".... I dont know why they even call it marketing and advertising. They should just call it "lying". I have a lot of friends in this industry and the deception that goes into selling a product is astounding. They are all aware that they are stretching the truth or just outright deceiving in order to pitch a product. There are also a lot of deceptive semantic games that go on...especially in the food space. What constitutes a natural product? What does "organic" really mean.

doodle wrote: The vast majority of our athletes are on drugs....whatever you want to define that as. There seems to be an arbitrary line between what constitutes legal and illegal performance enhancement. Our society pushes people to do this because of the incredibly outrageous compensation and lavish fame we bestow on these people. Im just saying....look in the mirror before you start casting stones. The man lied....and so does almost every other person in sports today.

MediumTex wrote:

doodle wrote: The vast majority of our athletes are on drugs....whatever you want to define that as. There seems to be an arbitrary line between what constitutes legal and illegal performance enhancement. Our society pushes people to do this because of the incredibly outrageous compensation and lavish fame we bestow on these people. Im just saying....look in the mirror before you start casting stones. The man lied....and so does almost every other person in sports today.

I just don't recall any other athlete who did it on quite such a large scale (basically pressuring his whole team to do it as well) and lied about it for so long and with such self-righteousness.

I'm not casting stones.  I think that the whole thing is very entertaining.

Last week, just before the news broke that Lance Armstrong had decided to walk away from his battle with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and accept the likely loss of seven Tour de France titles, Betsy Andreu gave an interview to Bill Strickland, an editor-at-large for Bicycling magazine who has written frequently about the allegations that Armstrong doped. Betsy, the wife of one-time Armstrong teammate Frankie Andreu, has been a public critic of Armstrong’s for a long time, starting back in 2005. That year she and Frankie both gave depositions saying that in 1996 they heard Armstrong tell doctors in an Indianapolis hospital room that he’d used EPO, human growth hormone, cortisone, steroids, and testosterone.

Armstrong has always denied that. As often happens with him, the denial has been accompanied by harsh attacks on the messenger. So, in his telling, Betsy wasn’t just mistaken about what she said she’d heard, she was a liar and a shrew, motivated by “bitterness, jealousy, and hatred.”? In fact, her motivation was straightforward: she was subpoenaed to give a sworn statement in a legal dispute between Armstrong and Dallas-based SCA Promotions, which was trying to withhold a $5 million bonus payment to Armstrong based on allegations that he’d doped to win the 2004 Tour de France.

Strickland asked her what it was like to be blasted for speaking honestly. “What’s the upside been, going up against Lance?”? she said. “To be publicly and privately portrayed as an ugly, obese, jealous, obsessed, hateful, crazed bitch?”? She pointed out that crossing Armstrong wasn’t exactly good for her husband’s career arc in bike racing. “We've dealt firsthand with very real threats to our economic well-being because we refused to be on the lie-for-Lance train.”?

Andreu isn’t alone in being vilified. Others on the list include David Walsh (co-author of the investigative book L.A. Confidentiel, who Armstrong once called “a fucking little troll”?), Greg LeMond, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, Emma O’Reilly, Richard Pound, Travis Tygart, and me.

dkalder wrote: Just see him talking once and you realize what an utterly narcissistic scumbag he is - he will do *anything* to get "ahead" in life, giving even most politicians a run for their money ...

Reub wrote: If he was cheating then why did ALL of his tests come back negative?

Pointedstick wrote:

dkalder wrote: Just see him talking once and you realize what an utterly narcissistic scumbag he is - he will do *anything* to get "ahead" in life, giving even most politicians a run for their money ...

That may be a good second career now that his first is in the toilet. I see he already has all the qualifications!

Reub wrote: Listen, there is not enough EPO in the world that would enable me to race a bicycle up huge mountains for 21 days against juiced up competition. Let's give the man a little credit (but not too much).

MediumTex wrote: I thought that was a pretty good interview.

Armstrong came off looking like a pathological liar and had the cool detachment of a psychopath, but I enjoyed hearing the story he had to tell.