"Why?"

Debate on various message boards continues to rage over Floyd Landis and his postive TdF drug test. Some are in denial, saying that it has to be a set-up, others have written off their interest in watching professional cycling races completely as a result, others are calling for extreme sanctions against the athlete in question, and others just aren't all that surprised. Apparently the 'B' sample is due on Saturday, and I suspect it will all start again pretty much regardless of the outcome. Of course, a lot of people are simply asking themselves 'why?'.

One thing that hasn't been asked yet is whether anyone has had a look at the rest of society lately? Firstly this whole demand everyone makes on people to go faster and set new records every year -- how do you think that happens? More importantly, we can all sit here and pontificate on the way we expect sports people to be a virtuous shining light as it were, but with so many people in the rest of society taking all sorts of things to boost "performance" in other areas of life, is this a reasonable expectation?

When I was at university a few years back, it was generally accepted that all the rich kids (and anyone else who could afford it) were taking substances prior to exams to give their performance a boost. I even remember a professor commenting that he didn't have a problem with it as "they'll be using it out in the real world, too". No thought there about what it might have been doing to their bodies, and you can bet it runs deeper in the educational system than that.

There was a doctor here on the Gold Coast recently who made a fortune selling steroids and other drugs to wealthy old men who needed a way to keep up with their younger lovers "between the sheets" so to speak. Again, what sort of an example does that set? Particularly for high school children? And yet through all this we expect professional athletes (where a lot more is at stake due to higher salaries and shorter careers) to somehow detach themselves from all of this?

It's nice in theory, but it just isn't going to happen. And please, spare me the old "but cyclists are the only ones" scarecrow. Any professional sport that claims to be clean in this day and age is kidding itself.