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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?
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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