Word has leaked out that Lance Armstrong is being accused of using “illegal” drugs. Does anyone believe any more that any elite athletes don’t use drugs? The entire athletics world – I include cycling – has become a complete farce. Unfortunately, the farce is spreading slowly to major pro sports, too. It’s now simply a contest of testing labs and those who devise ways to confound the testing, a spiral that will always favor the confounders. Unfortunately, it’s money for a lot of people. Those who’ve made their careers out of pious posturing – step forward, Dick Pound, the testing labs and consultants, the drug testing bureaucracies, and, the drug makers. The confounders have upper hand for two reasons: testing protocols can never be water-tight; and, more decisively, you can only test for what you know and it’s much easier to slightly modify a chemical than to characterize, reclassify and test for the new chemical. In any event, Armstrong’s achievement is in no way diminished in my mind, at least. With the chemical assault his body has withstood to hold cancer at bay (i.e. chemotherapy) the technique(s) he may have used to compete with everyone else are chickenfeed.

No-one ever breathed a word of performance-enhancing substances for “Braddles”.