You dont have to hate on it because you dont understand it. That's lazy and unintelligent. Broaden your horizons.

I have to hate on it because it sucks.

There are lots of interesting sports out there. I can avoid the ones that are boring.

And they go up and down a field in Football between commercials.

I find it funny that all the people that come to the defense of Lance Armstrong on this, but will rip Sammy Sosa. Lance has fooled you all with Livestrong. It has done exactly what he wanted it to do for his image.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

People do not have any concept of what winning seven consecutive titles means. The sheer amount of things that need to go right over 2+ weeks and 2,000+ miles in mountains, rain, on cobblestones, etc, etc, etc. I don't give a shit what trip anyone is on - it's a mindboggling achievement to do it once, let alone seven times in a row, doping or not.

I love to ride my bike, but I feel no obligation to watch other people ride theirs. People only pretended to care about this because it seemed cool that an American was somehow sticking it to the French, because lol France.

This is a tremendous victory for Bernstein.

Its really just NASCAR without a motor


A more boring version of NASCAR

Who'd have thunk it?

Feel free to think that football sucks. I don't really care.

"You're up against a prosecutor who drafts the rules, and goes back and changes the rules when they go against him," says Michael Straubel, director of the sports law clinic at Valparaiso University Law School and a defense attorney who handed USADA one of its rare defeats in an arbitration case.

The Lance Armstrong case has inspired several such stealth rule changes.

It's not that the case will be seen as a major victory for sports anti-doping authorities. It's that the anti-doping system claiming its highest-profile quarry ever is the most thoroughly one-sided and dishonest legal regime anywhere in the world this side of Beijing.

It's a system deliberately designed to place almost insurmountable hurdles in the way of athletes defending themselves or appealing adverse findings. Evidence has emerged over the years that laboratories certified by the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, have been incompetent at analyzing athletes' samples or fabricated results when they didn't get the numbers they were hoping to see.

Athletes' defense attorneys harbored some hope that by picking a fight with Lance Armstrong, the anti-doping system might have sowed the seeds for its own reform. Finally, it was thought, here was an athlete with the money and motivation to expose the legal sophistry, the pseudoscience, the sheer sloppiness that underlies sports anti-doping prosecutions all over the world. Instead, the outcome shows that the system is so relentlessly rigged that even Lance Armstrong doesn't see a point in fighting it.

"We're talking about three, four, five years of litigation," says Mark Levinstein, a veteran sports lawyer and a member of Armstrong's legal team. "Who in his right mind would or could go through that?"
Before we go further, let's address the question most people think is the nub of the matter. Is Lance Armstrong a doper?

Here's the answer: I don't know. You don't know either. More to the point, Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, doesn't know. That hasn't kept USADA from declaring Armstrong to be guilty of charges it has not proved in public, or to attempt to strip him of his seven Tour de France titles. (It's not yet clear that USADA has the latter authority.)

And there lies what is, in fact, the nub of the matter. It shouldn't matter if you believe Armstrong doped in winning his titles. You should still be appalled, even frightened, by the character of the prosecution.

In part that's because under the rules written by the anti-doping system, athletes' cases are heard not in a court of law but in arbitration.

Arbitration is a system that more Americans are becoming familiar with, to their misfortune and distaste. It's where banks, brokerages, cellphone companies and other powerful business institutions force their customers to litigate grievances, for the simple reason that arbitration systems favor those who use them the most — banks, brokerages, cellphone companies, etc.

The real secret of why anti-doping agencies have been able to hound athletes out of their sports with impunity is that in this system they're not only the prosecutors but also the judges and juries. They write the arbitration rules, including those governing what evidence is relevant and under what circumstances it can be questioned.

Defending oneself in this system is horrifically expensive. The hiring of lawyers and scientific experts, the cost of visiting labs in foreign lands and attending hearings all over the country can drive a routine defense to six figures.

Watch this below and tell me it isn't the epitome of why we watch humans we do not know personally, compete in sport. And keep in mind they are racing up a mountain that would strain a 4 cylinder engine.

That's not the epitome of why we watch sports. Not even close.

It was a guy falling off a bike, getting back up, and riding faster than other people.

I love to ride my bike, but I feel no obligation to watch other people ride theirs. People only pretended to care about this because it seemed cool that an American was somehow sticking it to the French, because lol France.

That's not the epitome of why we watch sports. Not even close.

It was a guy falling off a bike, getting back up, and riding faster than other people.

And you catch a ball and run faster than everyone else. Again, eye of the beholder. I just try to give other things a chance. Try not to be such a simpleton. I mean I feel like Im having a debate with a kid about eating something he simply doesn't want to try while insisting he dislikes it.

This is why I hate people like you. They choose boring, mundane, repetitive sports with very little strategy and then insult others for not understanding it. There are some sports that just suck. Cycling is one of them. I gave cycling a try. It's the same thing over and over and over again for a few weeks. Nothing changes. In a baseball game, there are likely 20 different types of plays that happen. There are multiple position switches and strategic decisions. There are bunts, sacrifice flies, intentional walks, singles, doubles, triples, and home runs. In cycling, it's literally a guy pedaling as fast as he can without getting too tired before the end. The strategy is to limit wind by being behind another guy. That's just a sport that sucks.

Oh my fucking god. You're going to criticize a sport, and then cite the stupidest sport in the history of the world? Jesus. You really are a fucking idiot.

ETA: this is even beneath your moronic "college futball iz gud becuz therez a buncha strategiez" argument.

Quality counterpoint.

Singles, doubles, triples AND home runs? Oh mah gawd! A guy can hit a ball and run to one of four potential places! That's fucking scintillating! Fuck, I have a boner just considering it! And just imagine! A fucking pitcher has the option of throwing the ball out of the zone considered to be a "strike" four straight times! Whoo! Just exciting, exciting stuff. It's practically chess.

I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.

Brick & MITC has potential. Keep it up guys.

MITC will back down. He clearly doesn't want to debate and instead wants to do what he does which is a drive by filled with troll level commentary. It's not even worth it.

If he can't get the ultimate point I was making then I'm not exactly going to be upset that he thinks I'm a fucking idiot.