I wouldn’t say that I have anything against Lance Armstrong (except the lying, cheating, megalomania, sociopathy and making me feel like a Goddamn fool for all those years I supported him and his teams as they doped themselves to the gills to win bike races). And I wouldn’t dare to say that Lance does–or ever has–smoked grass, done mescaline, high powered blotter acid, cocaine, or a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, raw ether or amyls.
But I do think that he obviously got locked into a serious drug collection and had the tendency is to push it as far as he could. Only his drug collection had more to do with EPO and the like rather than Hunter S. Thompson’s laundry list of illegal, mild to hardcore and dangerous, recreational drugs.
I hadn’t thought of Lance in ages, until I was on the trainer the other day listening to a live set by Stylust Beats (not my normal genre of music, but for some reason I tend to listen to such things when on the trainer or working out). One of the tracks in the set was a new one from his recent album R.Y.F.S.O called Blotter Acid.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/110081119″ params=”color=000000&auto_play=false&show_artwork=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
As I pedaled along and heard the sampled quote from the movie (based on Hunter S. Thompson’s book) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I imagined Lance, George, Floyd and the rest of the U.S. Postal team packing up the bus, reciting the list of PEDs and supplies needed to make their trip around France a victorious one– “We had 30 bags of blood, two cases of erythropoietin and a whole galaxy of testosterone, HGH and corticosteroids.”
I think I may have laughed out loud… then it pissed me off a bit. Then, like I often do, I said “fuck it” and just kept riding along doin’ my own thing. I rode bikes before Lance Armstrong and I’m riding them now (just as unsuccessfully I might add). There is no longer a debate on whether Lance (and a host of others) doped or not [they did]. There is no longer a need to defend the dopers to non-cycling friends and there is definitely no need to justify their actions [I don’t care that “everyone else was doing it”]… All I have is the need to just keep riding my bike.
Not that I condone it, but looking back on it all, I think it may have been more fun to watch Lance and his teammates totally tripping on “high powered blotter acid” as they made their way up the climbs, through the throngs of screaming cycling fans.
Can you EVEN imagine?? The idea of thousands of drunk spectators morphing into monsters and lizards and Lance swinging at bats sort of amuses me.
“Suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats with the face of Pat McQuaid, all swooping and screeching and diving around our bikes, which were going about 80 km an hour to Paris. Tyler was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals? My God, where’s Tugboat? Where’s my twin?”
Notes and credits: The first two and the last paragraph of this post contain some very liberal paraphrasing of the late Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. The photo of Lance was an AP photo that I found on the web. And before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, this post is light-hearted look at a very black mark on our sport. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, right? Oh, fuck it, just ride your bike. Oh yeah, and don’t do drugs. If you’re going to get locked into “a serious collection,” make it bikes.