Is Lance Armstrong the biggest fraud in the history of sports?

By the time Bonds was breaking the HR records, was there anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention who thought he was really clean?

You'd have to think most everyone thought Armstrong was clean, or they wouldn't all have been buying Livestrong bracelets. I guess it's easy to say now that the entire cycling game was (and is) crooked, but I don't think we had any idea back in about 2002.

 

Bonds, McGwire, Clemens

This could be a very long list.

 

I think the point is that he transcended cycling. That's what makes his fall so huge. He was an example of all that is great in sports and life. Except he wasn't. I don't see any argument that he is not the biggest fraud in sports history.

 

Man people are naive when it comes to PED's. Did people really believe he was clean or just not give a shit? The dirtiest sport in the world and somehow he was dominating it clean.

 

I honestly think that fanbois in the public thought he was clean. A huge percentage of them honestly and earnestly believe that their heroes aren't just better athletes than us, but that they are the best people among us, too.

 

Not sure they thought he was clean, but once he became more than just an athlete, I think most people wanted him to be clean and kind ignored all evidence to the contrary.

 

Yeah, you're probably right. I'll go with it.

I guess it's just a personal bias but I have an especially hard time getting worked up about something I didn't care about before or after. Plus by the end I never thought he was clean anyway so I wasn't exactly fooled.

 

I never cared about cycling either, but there's no denying Armstrong made lots of people care -- about cycling, about fitness, about cancer. Making people care about something under false pretenses is high up on the list of unforgivable sins for most humans.

 

This ...

They - esp. people who have dealt with cancer, both directly and indirectly - WANTED him to be clean.

 

I think he probably is.

But I also think there's probably a bigger fraud out there who hasn't been revealed. Somebody mentioned Tiger on PEDs, that would blow Armstrong off the map. The "NFL cares about player safety" ranks pretty high too.

 

So many thread options so I'll post this here: reports say of the 21 riders on the podium from 199-2005 20 have direct PED links. Between 1996-2010 the number is 36 of 45