In the end, all the speculation on who's cheating, and who's lying and who has better masking agents is pretty tiresome, especially on the heels of all the government scandals (from misuse of reconstruction funds to lavish vacations paid for by lobbyists, to lying to grand juries), to the huge corporate fraud of a few years back. The whole world has gone mad with cheating, and accusing of cheating, and it's almost impossible to sort out what's what. Maybe it's always been that way, or maybe it's getting worse, but it's just giving me a headache. We don't know any of these things with 100 percent certainty, everyone has their lawyers spinning it a different way, and it just gets annoying after a while.
Congress investigating steroids in baseball is as absurd as a panel of McGwire, Bonds and Palmeiro investigating illegal campaign contributions. Do we have rules to make the game better for everyone, or do we have rules to entice the suckers to follow them while the fiercest competitors break them whenever possible? Did Landis cheat? Who the hell knows? I don't even want to watch or listen to it. I don't care. It just makes me not care or want to follow the Tour de France at all ever again. The steroid scandal in baseball makes the question of whether Bonds catches Aaron boring. Who cares? The great list of Aaron, Ruth, Mays, Robinson and Killebrew I looked at growing up is dead. You've got guys like Palmeiro muscling in there, so it's over. It's gone the way of the baseball card. If baseball and cycling and a few other sports where cheating is rampant don't fix it quickly, they're going to go the way of the heavyweight boxing division which no one cares about anymore.
The problem is that no one seems to care about winning fair and square - they care only about the glory. The end justifies the means, and then once you've made that choice, you lie to defend it. One solution is to allow steroids in sports and consider it just a part of being a pro. The other is to have bans that are scienfically air tight, that can't be beat and that leave no doubt. Barring that, I agree with Pete Schoenke that they might as well suspend the rules until they get the enforcement down.