I've put this here because it goes beyond sport, it's about cheating and deception over a long period of time and about remorse and accepting the consequences. Have you seen the interview? What did you think?

I didn't see it but heard the basic snippets, and should be held up as a massive example to the world not to trust any major organisation (as he was not working alone) on face value, and how whatever someone's profession they are just as open to utter corruption as any other, and vehement denial combined with long term exoneration does not mean it is not happening. And he has confessed, Libor were caught on the fiddle for many years before being exposed (requiring complicity virtually worldwide by top banks to carry it out successfully), the police who doctored evidence in Hillsborough not being busted for 23 years, and Bernie Madoff and Enron carried on unhindered for years despite a number of failed enquiries.

Armstrong represents an individual entering a culture of total fraud, and rather than be a man just saw the lay of the land and went along with it (nb before he had cancer, so that was not even a valid excuse). I don't know the proportion of potentially innocent people who will get swept along by what the criminal law calls 'ringleaders' and how many will resist, but however many it is it is happening and shouldn't. If anything else it must act to wake people up to society in general, large organisations can and have been shown to be corrupt throughout history, and for the few who get caught, how many others are either carrying on now doing the same thing, whether or not we even get to find out in the future, with many if not most getting away with it altogether. Vigilance, seeing the signs and setting the authorities onto anyone suspected like a ton of bricks- full forensic accounts, blood tests, whatever it takes, when faced with the guarantee of such measures every single time a whistle is blown it won't look so attractive in any organisation to cheat.

Now we know why there's a Tank as an image in the Genetics subcat! We must guard against the creation of human war machines.

ref: forum topic "Wrong picture for subcategory?"
http://www.funtrivia.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/961846

But as a society don't we tend to reward the cheaters these days. In sport look at how many drug takers are stripped of medals and records, yet a couple of years later are competing in the Olympics again, representing their country. When we tried to give a lifetime ban to Dwain Chambers he went to court to get it over turned, and succeeded. There seems to be no shame attached to getting caught. Shrug your shoulders, issue an apology, sit out the ban, and then get picked to represent your country again.

How many Bankers have faced trial over fraud. OK, some have had to resign, but they have walked away with a handsome pay out. The bank culture hasn't changed, they still get massive bonuses, they were even discussing a scheme recently that allowed them to avoid some tax until the media caught on to it, when they did change their minds. They see no wrong in what they did. The wrong was in getting caught.

Politicians - the number actually prosecuted over expenses fiddles is woefully small compared to the number who "inflated" their expenses claims - and most of them are still sitting MPs claiming expenses. The concept of Public Service seems to not exist any longer in the way it used to.

It seems to have got to the point where we expect people to be corrupt, to cover things up, to take drugs, to be on the take. It doesn't shock or surprise us any more. It's almost as if deep down we always knew something was going on, and the revelations only confirm what we always suspected.

We lack role models, men and women of utmost integrity who will always do what is right even if it does mean discomfort or financial loss for them. That generation is lost and it sometimes seems that no-one has come forward to take their place. There is no-one left to look up to (with the possible exception of the Queen). Until there are people running the country, sports organisations, banks, all corporate institutions, who are principled, painfully honest, whose word is their bond, then the corruption will continue. As I said earlier, there is no sense of shame any more. The only wrong is in getting caught.

You have summed it up Christina. Lance Armstrong represents 21st century culture. As someone who studied criminology I have started writing this up on my own website as basically the best weapon against the crooks is knowledge. They are extremely good at what they do, work together to protect each other (think 'mafia'), and I am certain these exposures represent the rare exception to the many who carry on without a ripple.

There are various signs in common, known by anyone dealing with the criminal law, and such clues are similar to knowing how magicians carry out their tricks, diversion, inconsistency, vanishing data etc, and when you see a few of those in any area you can be pretty sure all is not as claimed. All frauds rely on maintaining a huge illusion, and as based on falsehood should be far easier to discover than it is. I don't think most people yet accept fraud, but don't believe it's happening except for a few rare examples. But one like Libor which not only involves the Bank of England but have implicated government orders for carrying it out (which is probably not going to ever be investigated, I wonder why?) is all we need to demonstrate what is both possible and taints government and related authorities from the top down. The same goes for the sport authorities who have incredible power and resources, and appear to have given the green light to Lance Armstrong throughout his career, only taking a whistleblower at the end to confess themselves and drop Armstrong in it as a result from what I've read. In virtually all of these frauds the discovery has been more by accident than design, meaning those employed to fix them are actually part of the problem, as I say, just think 'mafia' and you'll understand them all.

The trouble is people like the Financial Services Authority who were supposed to oversee Bank regulation were all drawn from the very sector they were supposed to be policing. They were too close, had too many friends in boardrooms.

Sports authorities are the same. You only have to look at the IOC, they get treated like minor royalty everywhere they go, gifts, limousines, etc. Same with others, FIFA, all the governing bodies. They have immense power within their own sphere, and too much drug taking, corruption, doesn't suit them. In the main very high profile athletes don't get caught, Lance Armstrong never actually failed a drug test. Lower echelon athletes whose names are familiar will get caught every so often, as then the people in charge can point to them as examples that they are tough on drugs.

The major players in whatever walk of life you care to name are rarely the ones that hit the headlines for misdoing. There are some exceptions, mainly because, as you say, things come to light almost by accident. Phone hacking is I think a case of this. There are some high profile trials to come, but those would not have happened if someone somewhere hadn't got careless.

The non-election of any big names to the Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame this year by the electors (sportswriters!) is definiely a reaction to the mis-use of drugs in that sport.
I consider the use of hormones and other body-alien drugs to be cheating. I don't see how re-injecting one's own blood can be considered drug use or cheating even though it does give an advantage to the practician. That's natural stuff. If a person waits a year in the mid-teens to participate in a sport just to be a year older and stronger, is that cheating?
Then there's the question of amateur versus professional athletes. Maybe the distinction should be made along those lines: amateur goes drug free; pros use whatever they can to acheive goals. There's where the French in la Tour and the IOC in other venues go screwy. Tell us Lance wasn't a pro athlete.

Are there any true amateurs in top line competition any more though. Most have some form of sponsorship even if only at a fairly low key local level, and the top flight ones sign deals that make them mega rich.

My reactions to Armstrong are complicated. I was being treated for cancer when he won his 1st TdF; so obviously he was a huge inspiration for me. Since then my primary service activity has been working with other cancer patients and their families, and he has undoubtedly been a similar inspiration to them. For many years I couldn't get my head around how he could risk his cancer recovery by fouling his body with PED's such as steroids which have a very strong correlation to cancer; so I believed him when he said he was clean. On the other hand I was aware that another of the doping agents he used, EPO, was also a key supportive drug for chemo patients (I've taken it myself). So: massive cognitive dissonance.

However, I've come to believe that more than as a cancer patient/survivor/role model, Armstrong sees himself as a competitive, world-class athlete. No other role in his life means or has meant as much to him. It was this single mindedness which served him so well in his cancer recovery; not the other way around. Such athletes live their entire lives by the win-at-all-costs code. This is true of the cheaters/dopers in all sports. Parenthetically, it also seems to make them rather loathesome as people in other dimensions of their lives - Armstrong was a serial womanizer, vindictive, dogmatic, and a liar. So are/were Barry Bonds, Roger Clemmons, Alex Rodriguez, Marion Jones, and don't get me started on the drug cheats in the NFL: who in their right mind would want their kid to become Bill Romanowski?? In the end, it's the desire, even need, to get back to competing that drives the cheats to "confess:" thus Armstrong tells all to Oprah; Mark McGuire confesses; Marion Jones does her tearful courthouse-steps mea culpa. I think this can even be applied to what we know so far about the Very Strange Case of Manti Te'o, even though PED's don't seem to be a factor there. The cheats may say they got religion or that it's for their families; but in the end it's all about their getting back in the game.

I wonder though how much of Lance Armstrong's charity work was a sort of "payment" for his wrongdoing, a justification in his mind. I dope, I win, I can do this with the money, something like that. I think the same thing applies in the Jimmy Saville situation. He raised a massive amount for charity, but was that because doing so gave him access to the very facilities where he carried out the abuse, or was it, in his mind, some sort of payment or pay back for what he knew society would condemn. In his own way he was as single minded about what he was doing as the various sportsmen and women have been about winning.

Sadly, I'm at the point right now where I believe Armstrong did the whole Livestrong thing partly because others identified HIM as the best possible figurehead for a cancer support activity and he in turn believed it was the best way both to sell his image AND to elevate himself so far above reproach that no one would dare to question his motives or methods. It worked for an awfully long time, didn't it? As for Saville: well, I kinow very little about the particulars of that sorry situation; but I do know that diehard pedophiles, which Saville certainly seems to have been, allow nothing and no-one to get between them and their prey/victims; and that they believe in the core of their beings that they are doing nothing wrong and thus have no feelings of guilt or needs to atone. Many of them are crafty enough to realize that OTHERS will condemn them for their actions and so appreciate the need to keep their activities under cover and to marshall all the forces of misdirection and obfuscation at their disposal.

In both casess it worked well didn't it. Both had such a high public profile, were so looked up to, that pretty much no-one ever questioned what they were doing. I know much more about Jimmy Saville's public personna than I do Lance Armstrong, and he ran marathons for charity, was a volunteer porter at a hospital, was always visiting children in hospitals and mental institutions, arranging outings for them, that sort of thing. We know now that all of this was a cover for his activities, but the charity work, coupled with the fact that the BBC had made him a massive TV star, meant he was completely above question. Yes, he had a somewhat eccentric way of dress and lifestyle, but that was seen as part of the charm, weird but harmless.

One of the libraries here in Sydney is moving some of Armstrong's books to the fiction section, lol
The sign was put up in the library by a part-time worker, without the library's authority.


Interview with Wendy Ford, and a copy of the sign:
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cycling/when-fact-becomes-fiction

His actual confession has made absolutely no difference to me whatever. It was already painfully clear as to the extent of his deception when the testimony of various others was released earlier in 2012 and to be honest even earlier than that there were always people that had spoken out against him but been hushed by being sued etc.

I knew deep down that he had been doping for a couple of years now but there is the temptation to just try to believe the best of him. Basically, most of the top riders of his era were doping and many of them had already been caught so it was becoming inconceivable that he could remain so dominant without cheating himself.

Back to the confession... I think this is little more than an attempt to salve his own conscience as it does very little for anyone else. At least if he'd kept his mouth shut forever then there could have been some very small doubt over the claims everyone else was making. He will now face numerous law suits I would imagine as various companies and people try to get back what he has taken from them over the years.

I just don't care very much, cycling was a joke back then since everyone was at it and the media is very quick to put somebody on top of the mountain full of hype and exaggeration. He's not the first and won't be the last, particularly not in such a demanding sport. (I found it difficult to be happy for Vinokourov who won the cycling road race at the Olympics last year since I'd watched him win a stage of the Tour de France a few years earlier with a seemingly superhuman effort only to find out when I tuned in the following day that he'd been caught blood-doping and was booted out and then subsequently banned for a couple of years. These are not the guys I want to see winning things when they are allowed back in)