Lance Armstong is Liverpool’s Luis Suarez but not Gareth Bale nor any other noble Briton
BILL Leckie says Liverpool’s Luis Suarez “is Armstrong MKII”. That’s Lance Armstrong, the fabulously talented cyclist who used illegal drugs to become a living legend.
Leckie writes:
THERE’S a huge gap in downright criminality between divers in football and dopers in cycling.
Yep. One is testing the referee. You get booked for diving. The other was part of a sophisticated plot to dupe the spectators and those cyclists not doping. Armstrong attempted to destroy the reputations of anyone who called him a cheat, successfully suing them and winning considerable damages.
But the intent in their actions is the same — to win by any means possible no matter how it screws over their fellow pros.
That gap is getting smaller. Livelihoods are at stake. Cheating affects the team’s win bonus, for one thing. Without rules, sport is nothing. The game doesn’t exist.
And there’s one other striking similarity between them — a cold-eyed ability to lie about their black arts till it suits them to tell the truth.
That gap Leckie spoke about… it’s getting smaller.
Which is why even if only a halfwit would put Luis Suarez in the same bracket of baddie-ness as Lance Armstrong, they’ve sure as hell come across as kindred spirits in the media confession box these past few days.
Only a halfwit would compare Armstrong to Suarez, says Leckie, who writes beneath the headline “Armstrong Mark II”.
We’ve surely all seen at least some of Oprah’s grilling of Armstrong by now. She got plenty out of him too, though maybe she’d have got even more if she’d just sat on him.
At least Lance never called her fat. Leckie then adds:
You’ve got to hand it to the guy. He might be a b*****d, but he’s a right clever b*****d. Which brings us to Suarez, another one right out of the same pod.
Leckie said “only a halfwit would put Luis Suarez in the same bracket”. Is a bracket different to a pod?
Leckie ends:
But you know the worst thing about it all? It’s that the top dogs like him and Armstrong not only have the power to get away with it, but they inspire a generation of copycats who don’t.
Anyone else think he’s bracketing Suarez with Armstrong?
The history of football doping: soccer’s biggest drugs cheats
And Armstong wasn’t the first.
U.S. cyclist Floyd Landis was stripped of a Tour de France title after testing positive for elevated testosterone levels at the 2006 Tour. He came clean in 2010. And Suarez is not the fist player to have dived. When Gary Lineker went to ground to win two penalties at the World Cup quarter-finals in 1990, the opposition didn’t look kindly on him. In Cameroon, Lineker’s name is mud.
PS: Suarez “the Uruguayan” admitted to diving.
Suarez pleads permanent innocence until he’s on telly in South America, where he can get away with saying: “These gringos, they don’t get how it is. They don’t understand our culture.”
Our culture? Those filthy foreigners, eh. Gareth Bale (UK) has three yellow cars this season for diving and two from last season. You know what he is, don’t you? He’s Armstong MKIII.
The history of football doping: soccer’s biggest drugs cheats
Posted: 22nd, January 2013 | In: Sports Comments (9) | TrackBack | Permalink
