Things have been getting a little too serious lately on the Landis front, so as Bill Maher would say, “It’s time for … New Rules!”
New Rule: If you have a porn star name, don’t expect people to take you seriously.
Really, how seriously can you take the oral ejaculations of Pound, Dick Pound (ouch!), the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, who’s already blown a WADA credibility for his organ-ization. Whatta dumb thing to do, putting a putz like Pound in charge of an international body. WADA? Wait a minute … whada they doing with an obscene acronym like that, anyway?
New Rule: If you’re going to cheat in order to win, don’t be surprised if the athletes do, too.
After reading the correspondence between Floyd Landis’ lawyer, Howard Jacobs, and the counsel for USADA, Travis Tygart, it’s clear that the organization that’s supposed to ensure that sports are played fairly in this country won’t play fair, itself. USADA has access to documents that may be useful to Landis’ defense team. If USADA wants to make sure that athletes play fair, they have to play fair, too.
Look at a shining example of fair play: Our federal election system. We’ve never had a contested election, and goodness knows, we’ve never had a President elected who cheated in order to win.
New Rule: If you’re going to offer a conspiracy theory, make it really outlandish.
Dick Pound was on the right track with his suggestion that Nazi Frogmen must’ve wrestled Floyd to the ground and forced an injection of demon testosterone into his poor, wretched body. Tainted blood bags from blood doping gone wrong? That sounds just a little too logical to the casual observer. And it could never be just a mistake at the lab, or poorly cleaned lab equipment or staff who weren’t properly trained to perform their jobs that might account for an error. The science, as Pound and his allies have said, is “fool-proof.” So really, what else is there other than renegade Martians trying to take over the Earth by destroying the world’s biggest bike race?
New Rule: If you’re going to drown your sorrows after an awful day at the Tour de France, drink something produced locally.
Everyone knows that the reason American men are so, well, “manly” is the extra shot of testosterone added to every bottle of Southern Comfort and every bottle of Jack Daniel’s. So next time, Floyd, do what the locals do. Drink some cognac. Or some of that nice Fischer beer from Alsace-Lorraine. Or drink a nice bordello … er … Bordeaux. Or just spend some quality time with Lorraine, the … ahem … “masseuse.”
And finally, New Rule: Anyone who works for an anti-doping organization must have an IQ higher than a moron.
They don’t call it doping because the people doing it have an Einsteinian IQ. Only a fool would still try to chemically enhance his or her performance given the draconian oversight the sports federations and their proxies, the anti-doping agencies, exercise over the athletes.
It’s not like we expect professional athletes to have the same intellectual heft as Albert Einstein. We pay these people to entertain us, not to educate us.
The science behind the tests requires people capable of interpreting the results. In other words, the lab rats need to use a little bit of brainpower to figure out what the data actually means. So we can’t have people whose collective IQ is lower than the horsepower of a Yugo interpreting the results. We need people whose IQs top out at the same speed as a Ferrari or a Porsche.
