A-Rod to fight steroid charge; will have more chance than Armstrong did

Today’s Daily News reports that New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez is challenging his 211-game ban in connection with the Biogenesis scandal.

One thought about this: I’m no hard core sports fan and not so knowledgeable about the steroid ban. But it occurs to me that, while A-Rod is threatened with suspension, his case and those of the other MLB players are being handled with more fairness than that of Lance Armstrong (to whose case the article compares A-Rod’s).

A-Rod is threatened with suspension, but not, as far as I’m aware, with an effort to completely strip him of his accomplishments, like Armstrong was.

Apparently A-Rod’s lawyers will argue that he didn’t use drugs “and even if he did, he should only sustain a 50-game suspension as a ‘first time’ violation.” That sounds reasonable, unlike the total stripping of titles and reputation that six-time Tour de France winner Armstrong sustained.

It would have been much more fair had Armstrong been suspended from professional cycling for a certain period of time or for USADA and the other agencies involved to have declared a zero tolerance for use of performance enhancing drugs in professional cycling, going forward, than what they did. In essence, they rewarded Armstrong’s teammates, who were using many of the same performance enhancing drugs as he was, for ratting him out, sparing their reputations and accomplishments while destroying his – all in the name of sport.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on August 7, 2013 at 11:30 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>