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Lance Armstrong the Fraud


Harbinger

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If he had come clean without trying to vilify others, and lie repeatedly, while making himself rich in the process, I could buy your position .. I just have such a hard time with hypocritical self-serving "role models" .. sort of like when the anti-gay, GOP politician gets caught soliciting raw, gay sex in an airport washroom .. that kind of hypocrisy ..

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I am very saddened by this today. Lance was a huge role model to me when I was growing up and well into my adult years. When news of the doping came out I knew he was telling the truth. All the battles he went through and charity work he has done. He just didn't fit the profile. I learned I couldn't trust anyone at a very young age. I guess I should have known. I hope he loses all of his money, family and dignity from this. What a horrible human being.

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I am very saddened by this today. Lance was a huge role model to me when I was growing up and well into my adult years. When news of the doping came out I knew he was telling the truth. All the battles he went through and charity work he has done. He just didn't fit the profile. I learned I couldn't trust anyone at a very young age. I guess I should have known. I hope he loses all of his money, family and dignity from this. What a horrible human being.

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Wait, you didn't earlier realize that he was on performance enhancing drugs??

A level playing field would have been no one taking PEDs or perhaps EVERYONE taking peds.

"Of the 21 top three finishers in the Tour de France during Lance Armstrong's victory streak, only one has not been tied to doping, according to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency."

I read somewhere that they are not going to name another champion. Why? Because no one else that competed is above suspicion of using steroids.

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I don't care. There are thousands of big business people who make themselves rich off the suffering of others but no one is losing their minds over that.

The vast majority of people out there would step over your slowly cooling corpse for a better parking spot, yet they're vilifying a man whose done a great deal more good than they ever will. I don't agree with what he did, I just find the reaction amusing.

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Who cares, take away his accolades and get on with it, no need to patronize the guy.

Sure he lied, but he's done so much for cancer research and for charity, I don't see how people can be so hostile towards a man who has done so much good.

He's raised over $325 million for cancer research, I think I can forgive him for doping. Plus think of it this way, without his doping he wouldn't have been such an influence and his organization would have not been nearly as successful as it is.

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It almost begs to answer the question, if Armstrong doped yet still made all this money for charity, is that really ok ?

Is it right for a charitable organization to take money from lets say a drug cartel ?

Just saying, it seems like a real grey area.

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Lance Armstrong ‘did not come clean in the manner I had expected,” Oprah Winfrey tells CBS This Morning

Published 28 minutes ago

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Oprah Winfrey and Lance Armstrong

AFP/AFP/GETTY IMAGES A combo picture shows talk-show star Oprah Winfrey and former cycling champion Lance Armstrong. Armstrong's reported admission to Winfrey that he used performance-enhancing drugs likely means he will go down in history as the most brazen drug cheat the sport has ever seen.

Lesley Ciarula Taylor

Staff Reporter

Oprah Winfrey teased her audience Tuesday morning with a taste of her 2 ½-hour interview with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.

She told CBS This Morning she had 112 questions for Armstrong and he was ready to answer them.

“I would say he did not come clean in the manner I had expected. It was surprising to me,” she said.

Armstrong, after a decade of denials, has confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France. He apologized on Monday to the staff at his charity foundation, Livestrong.

Armstrong said to her: “Will there be a point where you lighten up?’

She said she had prepared by reading many books and documents but “he was forthcoming.”

The broadcast is scheduled to air Thursday and Friday on her network, OWNTV, and other channels.

“We have decided,” she said, “we are actually going to go for two nights. Impossible to cut 80 minutes out. To leave half of this on the cutting room floor after many people have been waiting for years for these answers would not be the right thing to do.”

Winfrey said she’s not sure of why he wanted to do the interview now.

“He was just ready. I had sent him an email a couple of months ago. He emailed back and said he wasn’t ready to talk.”

She stayed on in Hawaii over the holidays for an extra two days to accommodate a meeting with Armstrong, who was on vacation on a separate island.

She cleared out her house, sent a driver for Armstrong at the airport and they sat down to talk with the lawyers in a separate room.

“It’s certainly the biggest interview I’ve ever done” in terms of its exposure around the world, she said.

“There were a couple of times he was emotional. Emotional doesn’t begin to describe the intensity or the difficulty” of the interview, she said.

‘I think you will be satisfied,” Winfrey said of her interview.

Winfrey said Tuesday she had not planned to address Armstrong’s confession before the interview aired on her OWN network but, “by the time I left Austin and landed in Chicago, you all had already confirmed it.”

“So I’m sitting here now because it’s already been confirmed,” she added.

The session was to be broadcast on Thursday but Winfrey said it will now run in two parts over two nights because there is so much material.

Winfrey would not characterize whether Armstrong seemed contrite but said he seemed ready for the interview. “I would say he met the moment,” she said.

The confession was a stunning reversal for a proud athlete and celebrity who sought lavish praise in the court of public opinion and used courtrooms to punish his critics.

For more than a decade, Armstrong dared anybody who challenged his version of events to prove it. Finally, he told the tale himself after promising over the weekend to answer Winfrey’s questions “directly, honestly and candidly.”

The cyclist was stripped of his Tour titles, lost most of his endorsements and was forced to leave Livestrong last year after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency issued a damning, 1,000-page report that accused him of masterminding a long-running doping scheme.

The International Cycling Union, or UCI, issued a statement on Tuesday saying it was aware of the reports that Armstrong had confessed to Winfrey. The governing body for the sport urged Armstrong to tell his story to an independent commission it has set up to examine claims it covered up suspicious samples from the cyclist, accepted financial donations from him and helped him avoid detection in doping tests.

In Australia, the government of South Australia state said Tuesday it will seek the repayment of several million dollars in appearance fees paid to Armstrong for competing in the Tour Down Under in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

“We’d be more than happy for Mr. Armstrong to make any repayment of monies to us,” South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill said.

With files from The Associated Press

I honestly don't know (or care) enough about Lance Armstrong to feel strongly on this subject. Here's what I do know....every single sport seems to be suggested or revealed to have doping involved. So this story isn't earth shattering or isolated, but some of the reactions are like it is. I believe ego comes into play and that perpetuates the lie....he likely got so caught up in it that he almost starting believing his innocence. How do you unravel that ball of yarn?

I blame the sport as much as the person able to live the lie - he was a poster boy. Where were they along the way? If so many are able to compete while doping, shouldn't much of the blame be pointed toward those who either turned a blind eye or didn't do their job properly?

Again - I'm not a particular fan of Lance Armstrong but the outcry from people, like they themselves were wronged in this, is overblown to me. Yes, he used performance enhancing drugs. Yes he lied. Yes, the people who didn't dope were left out of the possible standings/limelight because of it (which is the biggest outrage). But the "OMG burn him at the stake" mentality is equally disturbing to me.

I'm with PC - moving on now. Until the next "big" doping story is out.

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Here's something to consider: there's no denying that Armstrong has done some great charity work, however, that was an opportunity that he was afforded because of his cheating. Now imagine there was a cyclist that didn't dope. And that same cyclist would have won if Lance (and others) didn't dope. Now imagine if that cyclist had a family member or friend that suffered from a certain disease, it doesn't really matter if it's cancer or not, and imagine if that cyclist, benefiting from the opportunities afforded to him by winning the Tour, was able to support their charity. That person was not just robbed of a Tour win, but everything that comes with it as well, including the accolades for charity work (which, really, is a pretty common past time for those with the means).

So do the ends justify the means? Not at all.

And let's be clear on something else, Armstrong didn't cheat just so that he could support his charities. He cheated for himself.

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