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PaperclipPerfector
1mo ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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How do you think sports leagues should handle past wild-west-type PED usage when discussing historical records?
My preferred competitive spectator sports growing up were baseball and football, with a sprinkling of MMA/Boxing. So I was used to the ways that those sports dealt with steroids. Baseball whinged about it, drummed Barry Bonds out of the sport over it, and everyone stopped talking about Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and the homerun record (suddenly people started talking about the AL home run record, which is theoretically clean), steroid users are mostly being kept out of Cooperstown, but it's still understood that records and stats accumulated by enhanced players "count." Football and boxing occasionally toss a suspension or a fine or a ban at somebody for steroid use, but mostly sweep it under the rug and ignore it. But those aren't the only methods!
Lately I've been enjoying recreational cycling, and listened to Nige Tassell's Three Weeks, Eight Seconds about the 1989 Tour De France while riding. It was exactly the kind of tightly written sports history book I love, from the title I knew it would end with a tight race, having no knowledge of cycling I didn't know who would win. The EPO era hangs over the historical narrative, looming "in the future" according the speakers who all deny that PED use was common at the time. Indurain and Lemond take star turns in 1989, between the two of them they carry the yellow jersey to 1995 and just before the Lance Armstrong era. But Lance has suffered complete damnatio memoriae from cycling authorities, and it's kind of fascinating how much cycling journalists and writers accept this politically correct erasure. Wikipedia lists the seven tours between 1999 and 2005 as having "no winner." And that weirdly Stalinist turn continues throughout cycling media, even in unrelated publications like the Wall Street Journal. This summer I followed the Tour casually, reading the articles in the WSJ, that kind of thing. Something I noticed was that people talk about Pogacar having the potential to match, and then beat, the record mutually held by Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Induráin of five tour wins. This ignores Lance's record of seven consecutive tour wins. Then they go on to talk about Pogacar being maybe the GOAT, surpassing Merckx or Indurain, with no mention of Armstrong. Tbh, on wikipedia, it's pretty hard to figure out Lance Armstrong's resume, because the sidebar with his "major accomplishments" just lists a couple relatively minor wins [Grand Tours: Tour de France 2 individual stages (1993, 1995) Tour de Luxembourg (1998) Tour DuPont (1995, 1996)] while refusing to list the seven consecutive tour de France wins. Indurain, by comparison, is listed in the first sentence as the only 5-time winner to win them consecutively. It just seems to be an absolutely bizarre way of treating the topic, and I have to assume that this is the result of some serious pressure from UCI to threaten any journalist who talks about Armstrong as a winner with such severe loss of access that writing about cycling would be impossible. Part of me wonders if this is the result of the European origin of TPTB in cycling lead them to particularly want to forget the period when an American came in and dominated the sport.
This seems like a bad way to handle things. Baseball fans acknowledge that Bonds lived and hit home runs, even if most of them hate him for various reasons. They might talk about the clean home run record, or the AL home run record, but they don't ignore the real home run record. My generation of fans, our memories are of Bonds and Sosa and McGwire and we're getting those memories back into play, I'm not sure why cycling fans don't feel the same way. Cycling fans seem to want to ignore the real TDF records, and make them impossible to compare, and pretend Lance Armstrong in particular never happened. I wonder if we'll see him readmitted to the fold if and when Pogacar wins eight, as then he will be a less threatening figure to cycling history and can be rehabilitated.
A third point for comparison: olympic weightlifting has twice shifted the weight classes in concert with new testing rules, so that the old records "don't exist" in the sense that the old records are from old weight classes and the new records are for new weight classes. We might be able to squint and say "gee they used to be a lot fucking stronger;" but there's never an unbreakable record for a current weight class the way no one will ever hit 80 home runs without steroids.
What method do you prefer? How should sports leagues deal with steroid records?
I think they should just be honest. Record the records, slap an * on it and explain in the notes. Assuming strong evidence; I've no idea what a sufficient level of suspicion would be to noteworthy though.
I’ve been thinking about a very similar topic to this one recently; the actual % of frauds in cheaters in every field, not just sports.
A man near me made a career in a certain field, climbing the ranks until he got to the top of the local version of this institution. It’s a public profession, and he was briefly in the news, so I want to stay vague to not compound his problems. His profession requires a 4 year degree and some professional certs, and advancing up the ranks generally demanded a masters, then a doctorate at the top. Not always, some get away with a master’s, but most of the people in the role around the nation have one. Turns out he didn’t actually have a phd, or a masters. He just self-studied the material while pretending to be in a program for the amount of time it would have normally taken. He’d worked in the doctorate level roll for over a decade before someone hired a PI to investigate the guy for some reason, and it all fell apart.
It seems like it was a lot easier to fake it in the past, before the internet. There were also fewer examples to make people suspicious. I wonder just how many people have to one extent or another “faked it”: PEDs in sports, fake degrees, fake job histories/references etc. Fake martial arts history or military claims were one of the first ones to really get exposed by the internet. I know more than one person who financed the launch of their successful, life-defining business with the profits of criminal enterprise, usually selling drugs. Is this even the same category? There’s also the currently hot trend of getting real advanced degrees and positions using fake (or plagiarized) scholarship.
Who knows how many skeletons are out there in how many closets. I think we are alive in a particularly fruitful time for discovering these stories.
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To attempt an actual answer, I think it's because cycling is an individual sport with clear rules and an adjudicative body. Armstrong not only broke the rules, but took active measures to conceal his rulebreaking. And there was no question about what he did. Contrast this with the MLB, where no one is discussing whether or not the wins were legitimate, rather whether the records should have an asterisk. And the only case where anyone is really talking about that is with respect to the Barry Bonds home run records, which already have their own problems. The Aaron record is the most defensible one to revert back to, but the McGwire one can't be done because he was juicing too, which takes us back to Maris, who had his own asterisk discussion because he had a longer season to work with than Babe Ruth did. Plus there's the issue that if you officially strip Bonds and others of home runs for record purposes, then shouldn't you make them not count for games, either? It gets complicated real fast.
And add to that the much thinner evidence that Bonds was juicing. It's one of those things where people who were sort of paying attention to the scandal at the time are aware of the broad strokes, but no one remembers the actual evidence. Bonds never admitted doing anything illegal, and it basically comes down to a crooked doctor and that his head got bigger (which is an effect of HGH, which wasn't banned at the time). It isn't a 1–1 comparison but they do this all the time in auto racing for cars that don't pass post-race inspection. A few years back they disqualified the winner and the runner up of the Pocono race because they had an illegal piece of tape on the front of their cars. One can make the argument that this had real-world implications rather than merely historical ones because they lost the points they would have earned for the season and got zeroes instead, but that seems to be more severe than not being recognized on Wikipedia (which they aren't). And for what it's worth, the official NCAA coaching wins lists don't include wins that were stripped by the NCAA. For the 2004 USC team, it merely gives an asterisk, but that's understandable since the BCS wasn't run by the NCAA and the NCAA does not award a championship.
So wait, what system do you prefer or think is best?
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Even following your philosophy of just taking the result at the very second itvwas achieved at face value, Armstrong has to claim to being spoken in the same breath as Merckx.
Arnstrong cared only about adoration of normies, by focusing on the one race normies know. This is in total opposition to the old masters, who would race all year.
prestigelisten.dk follows your philosophy in treating Armstrong as a 7 Tour winner, and even according to it, he is merely 9th in the All-time list.
Edit: Armstrong is just the most-familiar-to-American-casual-fans-of-cycling of their memories of the moment of victory, not matching official records. Even the GOAT won his 3rd Il Lombardia on 13th October 1973, only to have it yanked from him on 8th of November 1973 when doping was discovered. Would have made it 20 total Monument wins, but nobody assigns him this win today.
If you want to apply your philosophy consistently, contemporeneous coverage cycling is key, not picking and chosing when to trust official results and when one's memory.
But examining primary sources is hard, thus Armstrong won 7 Tours (primacy of lived experience over post facto investigation), and Merckx merely 19 Monuments (few Americans today can say they saw Merckx win the 1973 Il Lombardia as it happened, thus they defer to edited results).
I don't actually have much of a position on who the GOAT of cycling is. I don't know much about the topic. I'm still not entirely sure what a domestique does that's so valuable exactly.
What I object to is that in trying to learn about the topic, most of the sources I would rely on for the question in any other sport, like Wikipedia tables or mentions in newspaper sports sections, they won't tell me easily that Merckx won in '73. It makes for a complicated and politically correct universe.
And FWIW, Ninth is pretty high. In NBA terms that's what, Magic Johnson or Larry Bird? That's the kind of athlete that gets discussed by fans pretty consistently. Not one who is memory holed.
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I think this is not a small part of it. After the LeMond-Fignon battle there hasn't been a French winner of the TDF. And oh boy, if you get one of the home fans drunk on the side of the road and ask them the right questions, 100% there's quite a few that are salty about it. It probably has hurt local sponsorship as well which isn't great give it's quite burdensome for the local towns to host. The dependence of cycling on Lance followed by his fall, was probably bad for the sport in net. Not unlike the Tiger Woods effect, but golf has arguably recovered better. I have no doubt Lance ruled peloton with an iron fist, but I also doubt anyone at Tour level was riding clean in that era. Ignoring the ethical question for a second though, to me his greatest tactical error was not having a plan to bow out gracefully. Lance had enough clout to tie up the UCI and quiet LeMond, but he left a void when he left the first time. There's no way the Tour organizers were going to let Floyd Landis of all guys continue the American domination of the sport. The crazy thing is Lance probably could have gotten away with it if he had just staid retired, and like did anything else. I doubt anyone would have cared about the B-samples if he had just chosen to slowly fade from public view. The UCI busting Landis and then Landis immediately outing him should have been his warning not to come back.
I do think it's strange people accept The Court of Arbitration for Sport/UCI/ASO committee decisions for who "won" a given race. Like the race is "won" when you crush your enemies and see them driven before you. Take for example in the 2001 tour. The experience of following the tour was that on the road Lance Armstrong won the day he gave Jan Ullrich "The Look" on Alpe-d'Huez and Jan couldn't follow. Sipping champagne rolling into Pairs or hoisting the trophy on the Champs-Élysées were just formalities after that point.
I know the problems associated with it, but I still think they should have brought back the clean and press when they redid the weight-classes in weightlifting. In its modern form the lifters are very explosive and athletic looking, but there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength. I for one am willing to sacrifice the 20 km walk from the program if it means we can have the clean and press.
As far as general principles on records go, I treat it like my head cannon when I don't like what they've done with a show I like. I just ignore the "official" cannon. It's not like they can forcibly reprogram my mind (yet) and it's not like I'm going to all Custer's Last Stand to argue with someone about it. I just nod politely if someone wants to talk about the official cannon, then promptly go back to ignoring it exits.
They didn't schedule the final stage as a time trial again until 2024, which I was honestly a bit surprised at.
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Race walking and clean and press suffer from the same problem, and I'd rather scrap both. At least with the race walking you can come up with some kind of shoe sensors that automatically disqualify runners, but with the clean and press? It will always be a cheater's sport.
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The clean and press is hella cool but if there's a clean in there it's not a test of static strength. And to be honest given the techniques they were using for the press it's not static strength either. Maybe someone could come up with some autistic ruleset for the press but who wants to see that? Just add a deadlift event and be done with it.
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