It's not about the drugs

Remember something when you sit down in front of your television tonight with your can of beer and hot dog, ready to count the number of tears running down the cheeks of Lance Armstrong when he tells noted cycling journalist, Oprah Winfrey, that he took drugs: This isn't about the drugs.

Sounds strange you might think, for the words most people are most giddy about hearing is Lance saying, "I used performance enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France," but let's face it, if all Armstrong did was take drugs, we wouldn't even be here.

All you have to do is look through the annals of cycling history to see that. Drugs in some form or another have always played a part. It's only in the last twenty years that things have gone to a new and dangerous level in which the advantage gained by the drug really did finish anyone who wasn't willing to join in. And there have been plenty who took part in those days and who have been found out who are walking around without the same scrutiny as Armstrong.



To run through but a handful in rough cronological order: Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, Richard Virenque, Laurent Jalabert, Erik Zabel, David Miller, Ivan Basso, Alexander Vinokourov, Michael Rasmussen, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, Oscar Pereiro, Alberto Contador and Frank Schleck. Some of them are still riding, some are media commentators, one is a director sportif at the highest level. A man like Richard Virenque probably took the same doping products as Lance Armstrong yet when all was said and done and the newspapers that wrote about him became chip wrappers, he was restored as a hero of French cycling.

Why? Because it isn't about the drugs.

It's about how you carry yourself as a cheat.

For Virenque it took him to break down in tears and admit what he did. For Ullrich it took playing the roll of the plucky loser to big-bad Lance Armstrong. For David Miller it took a full confession, a showing of remorse and an unwavering anti-doping stance. For Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, it took writing a tell-all book.

And don't tell me it was all because Armstrong was the guy that won all the time. That he was the big name so he was the big fall. Consider a name that I haven't mentioned: Miguel Indurain, who won the Tour five times between 1991 and 1995. Indurain was implicated in doping by a former team-mate Thomas Davy, when Davy testified that he his Banesto team, of which Indurain was leader, had a systematic doping program. Like Armstrong would do himself, Indurain put several mediocre Tours in his early career behind him to start reeling off Tour victories. His sudden rise was timed nicely with a real push by the Spanish authorities at the time to improve their athletic achievements across many sports ... heck, they're still reaping the benefits today.

But any suspicion against Indurain got little mention -- certainly not the Armstrong treatment -- and the big Spaniard remains a revered legend of the sport. Could Indurain really have won five straight Tours clean, destroying all those around him who themselves were on drugs? Could a big-man really have kept pace as he did in the mountains? He had a huge engine, but so had the much smaller LeMond and by 1991, aged just 31, he was being blown away.

It wasn't the drugs, it wasn't the sucess that it roduced, it was the attitude.

Armstrong was a sinister, manipulative troll who burned bridges all the way to the top so that when it became time to fall, nobody was left to catch him. He thought that his ability to intimidate the doubters into silence would last forever and that nobody would be able to figure him out. But nothing lasts forever and tonight you'll see the realisation of that on his face and in his tears.

When you destroy reputations and careers of individuals who doubt you, and when you threaten to sue everyone and anyone who goes public about their doubts to the point of which few dared to question him, preferring to ignore the glaring facts for want of a good 'cancer victim comes back to glory' story, then you're never going to be left with many true friends once the story swings the other way.

Lance Armstrong will sit before Oprah on our televisions tonight not because he took drugs, but because of how he lied about it ... the way he lied about it ... and, ironically, because of how he broke the people who stood against him and who were no longer willing to back him once he finally needed them. Had he went through his career showing just a little class ... keeping his head down like Indurain, or displaying his charm like Virenque, he'd probably be sitting tonight as a hero to Americans as those two are to the Spanish and French respectively.