Feb
16
For some reason I was listening to ESPN Radio on the way home from work last night. The station usually only comes on during baseball season in my car. I guess I was still morbidly interested in hearing more about the latest scandal from the NBA: the Tim Hardaway “I hate gay peoples” reaction to John Amaechi’s coming out announcement debacle. Two points on this before I move on to what it is that I heard that prompted this post. The first is that it’s amazing that someone like Hardaway, who has been in the public spotlight for over 10 years, could make statements like his. It’s bad enough that he thinks that way, but the fact that he would make those beliefs public truly baffles me. My last takeaway on this topic: has there ever been a more articulate professional athlete than Amaechi? I don’t think it’s just his English accent because even reading some of his responses are impressive. His well thought out, reasoned comments and impressive vocabulary really stand in stark contrast to the all the typical banter from the likes of Hardaway and John Rocker.
So while trying to hear more about that affair (I’m tiring of the Anna Nicole Smith story…), the big story in the radio was actually about cheating in NASCAR leading up to the big Daytona 500 race. Being a big Formula 1 fan, I’ll admit to not getting NASCAR, but I thought that the parallels to the problem of doping in pro cycling interesting. There were several instances of cheating by the teams of some of the biggest names in the sport. Blogger Sprinter della Casa has a great analysis and explanation of what happened and compares it to the problems in our sport:
In the cycling world, if such things happened, the next time you’d hear about that racer in a race would be two (or four) years later.
Not NASCAR.
As you might expect, the response to the cheating has been in a typically American fashion typical of what we have seen in Football, and baseball. Amazingly, while the drivers have been penalized financially and pushed back on the starting grid, they have been allowed to start in the races in which they cheated to qualify!
Just in case you hadn’t heard about it, during the post race inspection (doping controls, if you will), one of the cars was allegedly found to have what they believe is illegal fuel additives in his gasoline. Even cars are doping, now…
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