On Jul 26, 9:57 am, SLAVE of THE STATE wrote:
On Jul 26, 2:24 am, "
wrote:



On Jul 26, 1:58 am, Burt wrote:

I anything, the fact that cycling actually catches drug cheats and
kicks them out adds credibility to the race.

Imagine if, in football, soccer, baseball, hockey, etc., after the
game you handed everyone on the winning team a cup to pee in. What do
you think would happen.

If anything, the doping controversy makes cycling MORE credible.

A lot of these come from sportswriters. Sports writing
is all about suspension of disbelief; even for those
writers that are skeptical, a necessary element of the
craft is to mythologize actions that are meaningful only
because we invest them with significance when played
out against arbitrary rules. In real life, there's
nothing wrong with making part of a 26-mile trip on
the subway; it's only cheating in a marathon, and we
only care because running all the way seems important
by the rules of the game. For the first marathoner
in his run from Marathon, of course there were no rules
and it wasn't a game.

Kicking racers out of the Tour doesn't make the Tour
less credible. It makes people who yesterday were
writing about the heroic achievements of those same
racers seem less credible, and understandably, they
resent it. It's partly their fault for forgetting
that it's only a game. But we the readers eat up the
mythology they feed us, so it's our fault too.

Ben

I always thought the sportswriters were simply dumbasses that had to
write something rather than nothing.

My explanation is simpler, easier to remember, works in theory, and
works in practice. Therefore it is a better model than yours.

Luftmensch,

Your explanation doesn't explain why the sportswriters
write the specific dumbass thing Burt complains about.
I think it is a subset of my explanation, but it is
indeed simpler and easier to remember.

However, the only way to know which of our explanations
is a better model is to see which brings a higher price
on the open market.

Ben