Tag Archives: BALCO

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Marian Jones vs. Lance Armstrong – Who wins

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  • Here’s a rant about fairness: Remember Olympic track star Marion Jones? She served 6 months jail time in 2008 for admitting to lying to a grand jury about using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). She lost everything – the respect and admiration of fans, her home, her gold medals, millions of dollars and more.
    After being a world champion, Olympic gold medalist and NCAA champion in two sports (basketball and Track & field), she’s anonymous, discredited and was severely punished.
    I believe that Lance Armstrong perpetrated an immensely larger fraud, massive cover-up and countless lies, threats of lawsuits and coercion of those who knew he used PEDs. The timing of his admission is suspect; the statute of limitations for prosecution passed – so there’s no threat of jail time for him for all the lying he did to grand juries and others. His public “admission” to Oprah is something we all already knew that he did. He had been outed and was apparently the last “clean” cyclist from his era.
    Everything about it is a cowardly PR move. His fake shame is galling. No doubt he is an unusual athletic specimen and I personally have great respect for his mental and physical toughness. However his allegations that “everyone used PEDs” so he was simply doing what everyone else was doing and “leveled the playing field” rings hollow. Lance then continued to lie while others took the fall. That is unheroic. He was simply the highest profile cheater and lied for the longest time.
    Marion was high profile, too. She shamefully admitted her role in the BALCO scandal, admitted to lying about it and served her time. Oh yeah, Marion had two toddlers at home during her federal sentence, but she did her time and moved on. No PR machine provided her a script – she tearfully admitted her participation (ironically also to Oprah…) and took her punishment like a….woman.
    Will Lance pay the price for his lying? Will he get a pass because of all the good he’s done with Livestrong? Not for me – his golden-boy image is permanently tarnished – yellow, but not in a champion yellow-jersey way.  Just yellow and cowardly.