I'm a big believer in choice.
I honesty believe that professional athletes should be free to choose to use performance enhancing drugs if they want to get bigger, stronger, or faster.
At the same time I honestly believe that we as the spectators should be able to choose to watch, cheer and/support the athletes that use or do not use these drugs.
In other words, we should know exactly when an athlete has chosen to use drugs and when they are drug free.
I bring all this up because of what is going on in California at the Floyd Landis hearings. I'm so sick and tired of the debate that is raging both within and outside of professional cycling.
Did he or did he not use steroids to win the Tour De France (TDF) is really the question that has everybody scratching their heads, jumping up on the their soup box, and shaking a defiant fist in the air on one side of the debate or the other?
Anyway, bodybuilding has somewhat solved this doping problem in a very simple way. They now have two different competitions. There are the “Natural” competitions and than there is the Mr. Universe competition.
The natural guys look like Tarzan did in the old black and white movies when he was swigging through the trees. These boys and girls sign a pledge not to use performance-enhancing drugs and they are vigorously tested all the time.
The Mr. Universe boys and girls are wider than they are taller. They are spooky big. You can only really tell the men from the women by the fact that you can actually see the outline of the breast implant in the women’s chest. Otherwise your guess is as good as mine as to the gender of the athlete.
Why not do the same for cycling? Let’s have a natural TDF and a Uberman TDF. The natural boys can struggle up the mountains and collapse on the way, while the TDF boys just adjust their shorts, pop a super-pooper pill, and ride right over the top of the exhausted natural cyclist.
Now I’m sure that’s something that even the big networks would televise.
And if they do, we can choose to cheer for either the natural boys or the Uberman.
Now that's a choice I can live with.