It's over. Lance Armstrong has won his sixth Tour de France in a row and now I can get back to some more regular blogging.
If you hadn't noticed, I've fallen a bit behind in the past couple of weeks. This has something to do with general fatigue of reporting the depressing state of affairs these days, but has probably more to do with my getting up at 6 every morning and watching the Tour for an hour or two before work, time I used to spend catching up on blogging.
As for the race, it's truly incredible, like watching hundreds of guys run a marathon every day for 3 weeks. Lance authoritatively kicked all of their asses to become the first person to ever win the race six times. He not only won it six times; he won it six times consecutively. Impressive, to say the least.
People like to accuse Lance of using performance enhancing drugs, but I say this to those people, "Shut up already." He's never failed a drug test, just let it go. Also, while he did have over six minutes on the second place finisher this year, that's six minutes over 83 and a half hours. If we assume he uses drugs just because he wins, we'd have to assume that most of the other top ten or so riders are using drugs, too. If he was winning by an hour or two, I could see the argument, but he's well within the range of many other riders. They just can't catch him. Call me romantic, but I think the little extra he has may have to do with being very nearly killed by cancer and then coming back to be the top athlete in probably the most insane endurance event in the world.
Beyond that, I don't really care if all of them are using drugs. They should just let athletes do whatever they want. They can have a "clean" version of each sport if there's a market for it, but I suspect there wouldn't be. These guys do everything under the sun to enhance their performance: they have millions of dollars worth of research and custom equipment, strictly regulated and calculated diets, special supplements, etc. It's all "performance enhancing." It seems arbitrary to draw the line at certain chemicals but not others. Some of the newest banned substances are chemicals found in our bodies naturally, just like vitamins. So screw it -- let them take whatever they want. They're already superhuman as far as I'm concerned.
So, what's new in politics?
