Why athletes cheat

The good ole boys of NASCAR used to have a saying, "our job is to cheat; their job is to catch us."

That's a philosophy that seems to have been adopted wholesale by the professional bicycle racing establishment beginning in the 1980's. There's a difference, of course. The NASCAR boys were tweaking their machinery.

The cyclists were chemically tweaking their bodies.

And it's all about winning. The first cheaters presumably had an advantage. Once cheating gains a certain level of ubiquity, it becomes a requirement just to get into the game. If you can't get into the game without cheating, how can you possibly win?

Contrary to what the fair-play crowd wants us to believe, winning continues to be everything in professional sport. The top athletes in any field, a Tiger Woods or a Lance Armstrong, achieve a celebrity status that makes them bigger than the sport that made them big.

They become icons in popular culture. They also become fabulously wealthy.

As long as winning is everything, look for the athletes and their management teams to seek out whatever advantage they can, legal or not.

Behind the scenes in the world of high-performance athletes is a well-established network of medical professionals ready and willing to compromise the ethical standards of their craft in order to give their clients an advantage.

Dr. Michele Ferrari, Armstrong's former team doctor who was handed a life-time ban by the USADA yesterday, apprenticed with the legendary Dr. Fransesco Conconi, considered the Godfather of blood-doping.

Conconi was hired by European sports authorities to catch cheaters. His insider status and intimate familiarity with drug-testing procedures gave him the perfect platform from which to create doping strategies that could beat the testing strategies.

Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral, the other former Armstrong doctor to be handed a life-time ban yesterday, has branched out from cycling and runs a sports medicine clinic in Spain. His association with a number of professional tennis players has led to speculation that the elite ranks of pro tennis are as riddled with cheaters as cycling.

Dr. Anthony Galea is another sports medicine guru whose brush with the law last year didn't get enough attention. Like Conconi, Galea spent years on the enforcement and detection side of sports doping.

His "it's legal in Canada" defense worked, at least enough to draw the eye away from the fact that his "sports medicine" practice seems to be very similar to what was going on in cycling, and in fact, many of the actual "medicines" are identical to what so many of Armstong's peers have admitted taking. Galea's clients included Tiger Woods and an A-list of NFL and MLB stars.

Being on the A-list is the objective. The top names in the NFL and MLB now routinely sign contracts worth over 100 million dollars. Armstrong's net worth is rumored to be well north of that, and Tiger Woods is widely considered the wealthiest athlete of all time.

As long as society rewards our sporting idols with that kind of wealth and fame, the pressure will remain on aspiring athletes to do everything possible, legal or not, to get to the top and stay there.

Noose tightening on Lucky Lance

It hasn't been a great week so far for Lance Armstrong.

Yesterday a judge in Texas dismissed the lawsuit that Armstrong tried to file against the US Anti Doping Agency. Not only did the judge throw it out after mere hours of deliberation, he scolded Armstrong's legal team for submitting a case that was long on PR strategies but remarkably short on facts.

That was followed by today's news that two doctors and a trainer with Armstrong's former USPS team have been given lifetime bans by the USADA. What's most significant about this decision is that the three accused did not contest the charges.

The question now facing Armstrong is how much of his money he wants to squander in continuing to try to convince an increasingly skeptical public that he was the only clean player in European cycling in the last twenty years.

C'mon dude, just fess up! The public will respect you for your honesty.

Setting new records for unbridled twattery

You've met this Jason Kenney chap before on this blog, but this has got to be a personal best for him.

Are people born imbeciles or is it something that happens when you go into politics?

Democracy raising its pungent blossoms everywhere

I was reading today where the citizens of Libya were "jubilant" about the   election they had on the 7th.

Jubilant no less!

Well, America has the big one coming up in November, and I think it's time to pay attention.

Ya, I admit the think tank here at Falling Downs was on top of things for a while, back when the Newtster and the Herminator were still in the game.

But when the "corporations are people too" twat took the game away from them... well, we kind of lost interest.

But we're in the home stretch now.

Democracy shamocracy!...

I see where last month Obama raised 75 million for his campaign.

But yowzee, Romney raised 106 million!

It's all about the money, apparently.

But I think America is worshiping false gods...

Corporations are not people.

America used to be the greatest country in the world.

Wake up!

North of Superior

Hope is alive on the North Shore.

Just this past week an American outfit announced that they intend to open a chromium mine just north of the Marathon airport.

And this past week, some Indian multi-national announced that they were buying the Terrace Bay pulp mill which has been shuttered for nine months.

Hope!

Comes a little too late for Buddy at the Esso out on the highway in Marathon. He's the guy I met last year, clerking at the variety store. Laid off mill-worker. Fifty-five years old, made a decent wage his whole life since being hired on at the mill at age 18. Then the mill closed.

Clerking at the Esso.

The Esso is part of a gas station-restaurant-motel complex on the corner of the Penn road into Marathon and the Trans Canada Highway. It's changed hands.

It's in East Indian hands now. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but these folks come with extended families. They don't need 55 year old laid off mill-workers behind the till.

So he's gone, and that motel has become a Travelodge.

And I wish the new owners well.

Times change. Owners come and owners go.

The trip along the Trans Canada is a study in socio-economic change over the last half century. When I first traveled through here in the back of my family's station wagon in the '60's, there was a repair garage or a service station or a motel or a cottage court or a campground every twenty miles or so.

They all seemed to be doing well.

Almost all of them are gone now.

Even into the seventies new stuff was being put up.

There's a row of "new" stuff boarded up just south of Wawa.

Times changed.

Cars got more fuel efficient and more reliable. You can get from the Soo to Thunder Bay today in a day's drive on a tank of gas, and chances are really good you won't need any repairs along the way.

Or a night of lodging. Hundreds of Ma & Pa businesses have closed all along the North Shore in the last twenty years. Businesses that were the hopes and dreams of the families who started them up.

Air fare got cheaper and cheaper. Who needs to drive 36 hours just to get to Calgary from Toronto?

That Trans Canada Highway is just a ribbon of broken dreams now.

But there might be life in that Terrace Bay mill yet, and somebody wants to put a new mine in at Marathon, and Barrick is extending the life of their Hemlo mine, because Christ, who ever thought gold would go where it's gone?...

And anybody who has anything to do with those projects just might want to stay at the Travelodge for a few nights.

Hope lives!

Time rights a wrong

There have been times in the past when I have been left no choice but to leave a camping park under duress.

Like the time I inadvertently missed the site renewal deadline at The Pinery and all my camping gear was unceremoniously heaped behind the gatehouse.

Or the time I unfortunately let my drinking buddies know where I was spending the weekend with a new girlfriend.

Those are episodes from the distant past of course. I no longer have either drinking buddies or girlfriends.

So there I was, Sunday afternoon, enjoying a few pints beside my campfire. Yes, I know it's a waste of firewood to be having a campfire in the middle of the afternoon, but I'll let you in on a secret.

I was burning driftwood!

Now they have all sorts of prohibitions against that, but when you think it through I was doing them a favor. On this stretch of Lake Superior the driftwood literally clutters the beach. If it wasn't for helpful campers like me, the beaches would become utterly clogged with driftwood in no time at all.

I have no remorse about the burning of driftwood.

So there I am, just burned one, pint in hand, park 3/4 empty, and suddenly they show up.

At least two dozen of them.

And they're congregating at the very next campsite.

For fucks sakes!

Frat party? Kegger? Will we be dealing with drunken youth for half the night?

They pulled a trailer with a big BBQ unit into the site. The rest of the cars parked across the road and down the way. I could hear beverages being buried in ice.

For fucks sakes!

I sent the Farm Manager on a reconn mission. The nearest water tap is right across the way from that site.

Pretend you're fetching some water.

She comes back with strange news.

They're all drinking pop. I didn't see any beer.

Thirty guys are gathered around a campsite and there's no beer?

How is such a thing even possible?

Then she pointed out, there's no swearing either.

For fucks sakes! I realized immediately we've got a cult situation on our hands!

If that wasn't bad enough, it suddenly got really weird...

The entire crowd had taken their lawn-chairs down to the beach. Another reconn mission for the Manager.

She comes back ten minutes later.

You won't believe this but I think they're baptizing somebody. They're standing in a circle with their pants rolled up and they're dunking that young guy...

Bible thumpers!

I knew it was a cult!

Now, to be perfectly fair, there were no Bibles in evidence. But still, show me a baptism and I'll show you Bible thumpers.

They came back to their campsite and fired up the BBQ. I had to fire something up too just to make sense of this. As I was sitting there in deep ponderation, the Park Ranger and his side-kick cruised by in their Parks Canada pick-up.

And here's where time righted so many wrongs;

Mister Leahy and Randy cruise by giving me the friendliest of waves, and pull to a stop at the adjacent campsite.

There they proceed to give the Bible-thumpers proper hell for parking in campsites they haven't paid for!

The entire cult was out the park and down the road within the half hour!

I sat there with the Farm Manager, by the light of our driftwood fire, pondering the miracle of Karma well into the night.

The annual pilgrimage

This is the time of year we like to head north for a few days.

We camp on the north shore of Lake Superior, along the Schrieber - Marathon stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. We have a campsite where we can see the lake and the CPR line that cuts overhead along the steep Canadian Shield cliffs.

This is an area that always knocks you out with it's natural beauty. The rocks, the trees, that great inland sea. For me it always draws me into history as well.

The history of the CPR for example.

It's everywhere up here. In fact, it's everywhere all over the country.

The Scottish investors who were behind the CPR got $25 million cash and a land grant of 25 million acres for building the railway.

The history of the CPR is in flux again. Some New York hedge fund manager figures he can milk a few billion out of the old cow. He's just parachuted an American CEO in after winning a proxy battle to get rid of the old management.

Nothing new in that. After the first year of construction of the CPR, the owners turfed out their senior management and brought in an American. He made himself rich building that railway.

That railway and the subsidiaries that have been spun off from it have made many people rich over the past 130 years, so maybe there's enough juice left for this latest crew of paper-shufflers.

None of which takes away from the achievement of those laborers and blacksmiths and miners and carpenters and engineers and surveyors who actually made that rock cut we're looking at, and put the tracks up there.

But don't get me started... I come here to get away from thinking.