Lance Armstrong: He’s Earned More Than Bad Press

Part 1, Part 2

UPDATE*

Lance Armstrong is hated by many people. A lot of them hate him for the likelihood that he is and has always been a doper, that he’s betrayed their trust and the trust of millions, that he’s shat upon the most beautiful of sports and thinks it is his right to do so.

Or at least they tell themselves that.

Fact is that while there is a mountain of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, there’s not one shred of real, hard physical evidence. Yet.

No, what most of those people, and many others, hate Lance for, is that he’s a lying, controlling, manipulative weasel, that he has enormous power and he gladly and readily uses it to crush not only anyone who is a threat to him, but anyone who so much as annoys him for the briefest moment.

Here’s the story (also linked below) of how Lance unleashed his deceit and malice upon Alberto Contador during the entirety of the ’09 Tour de France.

It happened on Thursday, a few hours before the Annecy ITT.

Contador came downstairs to the entrance of the Palace of Menthon, the luxurious Astana hotel. The Tour was on.

He looked right, then left. Nobody, nothing. No Astana cars or helpers. Cold sweat.

Quick time check. Where are they?

The hotel is several kilometers from the start. There he was, the leader of the Tour, in flip-flops, bag in hand and alone.

He went to the hall looking for an answer: Armstrong had ordered the helpers to go pick up his wife, kids and friends to the airport.

Contador left his room last because he was the last one starting the ITT. Armstrong had managed to take away his means of transportation.

The straw that broke the camel’s back. Hot flashes, he was rabid.

He called his brother Fran. He came to pick him up by car and took him to Annecy in a private vehicle.

He left last and finished first. His best victory. In the ITT. In solitude. The same way he has won his second tour.

Contador’s toughest climb was not recorded in images. It was narrated by others.

It was fought in the hotel and the bus: during one stage, Armstrong sat his guests at the very back of the bus, right in Contador’s usual seat.

One more provocation. Armstrong to the luxury suite. Contador to sleep with Paulinho, the only ally. Same deal during the entire tour.

Mouth shut, listening to Armstrong’s jabs: “It doesn’t take a Nobel prize to figure out what happens with side winds”.

Contador didn’t reply in the hotel. He did on the road. He attacked in the first mountain finish in Arcalis. Without permission from Bruyneel, Armstrong’s DS.

That night the Astana hotel was a funeral. Red eyes from the Texan (anger? crying? not sure).

The first cyclist that stood up to him. And he did it in silence.”

Not in the article – apparently LA did not attend the team dinner in Paris to celebrate Contadors victory.

Anyway, last April Bikezilla.blogspot.com was barely something I did to amuse myself.

Back then I had a daily readership of about ten (on a good day). Of those, three were regular, one of those three was a “freebie”, since she’s also a blood relative.

The other seven? They could only have been accidental. You know, people looking for a good website with interesting, well written and well edited articles, who just happened to get a twitchy finger just as their cursor moved over my link.

Sorry, guys. Better luck next time.

When Lance came out of retirement, oh gosh, oh golly, I was nearly wetting myself with excitement. The King was back!

There were days when I’d be on my bike and pumping out a massive 13 MPH avg speed over a 20 mile ride on the local rail trail and my legs would be aching like they were inhabited by evil hammer-wielding midgets trying to beat their way out. And dammit if I didn’t keep on pushing because in my sick little head I was Lance Armstrong fighting my way past rivals and up hills that were all out for my blood. Lance wouldn’t stop, and dammit, I wasn’t gonna stop, either.

For my own amusement and the entertainment of my three loyal readers I began a series of articles titled, simply enough, Lance Armstrong vs Albreto Contador.

Holy jeebus, what a surprise I got. By the time I posted Part 3 I was up to 300 hits a day, almost entirely for those articles.

Included within those 300 hits were multiple hits per day from the same Blackberry IP, which had me truly excited, because I’d read “Lance Armstrong’s War” and knew that 1. Lance was a Blackberry addict and 2. He had EVERY article with his name in it sent directly to said Blackberry.

OMG, OMG, OMG! Lance mofo Armstrong himself was reading MY junk. It was the coolest thing ever (ok, after my daughter).

I come in from work one day just before I’m about to write Part 4 and I check my stats. First thing I notice is that one of my hits if from Capital Sports Entertainment.

I know this because it had not only a static IP, but a dedicated IP. It actually SAID, “Capital Sports Entertainment”!

NOTE: CSE is jointly owned by Lance Armstrong and his agent Bill Stapleton END NOTE

So, again, OMG, Lance loved my junk so much that he told Bill Stapleton about it and Bill, who I admired no end after reading about the way he stuck by Lance when he had absolutely no logical reason beyond friendship to do so, actually came in to MY blog to read MY articles!

So cool.

Up until then, and I don’t know why, those “Lance vs Alberto” articles were coming up in the top 3, top 5 at worst, in Google searches no matter how I worded the search.

So the next thing I notice, wow, so odd, is that I had just 40 hits for the day and it had been hours since ANYONE had come in.

In fact, within 2 hours of Bill Stapleton visiting, the hits dried up completely. I checked the searches and suddenly I wasn’t even in the first ten pages.

Could any of that be a coincidence?

I don’t believe in coincidence.

Damn, talk about devastating and humiliating.

The guy who was my idol was so controlling, so malicious, so petty, that he actually felt the need to crush a tiny blog that a week before hadn’t been noticed by more than three people worldwide.

Could he possibly be so threatened by a small handful of very fair articles that saw equal parts of blame for both he and Alberto?

No, that couldn’t be it. It was simply that what they said against him was found to be an irritation and that was enough. It was simply his personality to attempt to stomp it out without a second thought.

It pleased him to crush me and my little blog. It made him feel strong and powerful and verified to him my utter lack of worth not only as a writer but as a human being. In his mind I totally deserved to have the life smashed out of me and I should be thankful for the abuse.

How many other insignificant bloggers have annoyed Lance and been crushed by him through whatever control or contacts he has within Google?

I completely understand how anyone might be sickened by Lance, not for doping, which has never been proven and may never be proven, but for who and what it is that can and has been proven.

Lance recently said that he’s done too much good for too many people. Ok, he has been inspirational to many thousands of people, and not just cancer patients. His LiveStrong organization has added many more thousands to that.

But if you aren’t a part of Lance’s Cause and you aren’t a member of his Merry Band of Slaves on Team RadioSkank, then Lance has no hesitation in destroying you for no more reason than a whim.

If you help one guy it gives you carte blanche to cause harm to another? I’m thinking that that is not the way the great karmic wheel works, that good deeds and bad deeds are not intended to be a balancing act, that a wealth of one does not mean a licence for the other.

Lance is hated by many, many people, but I don’t think the possibility of his doping has much to do with it. I think a lot of people simply know Lance for what he is: a despicable, self-centered, ego-maniacal, ruthless, malicious, petty, spiteful, immature, controlling, manipulative child with a martyr’s complex.

*UPDATE

Google has finally declared publicly that it doesn’t give a damn about your individual right to privacy and little things like your right to free speech.

But this is only a public announcement of what they’ve been doing behind closed doors for at least a year, as shown in the above article.

But it doesn’t stop with that story.

Since then my Google hits had crept up from zero to between 30-40 per day.

Once the Tour de France started they were hitting 60-80 and climbing. Still nothing like they were before the attack from Lance and Google, but improving.

Until one day I posted an article I called, “The Lance Experiment”.

In it I openly criticized Lance Armstrong and told him that there wasn’t one damned thing he could do about it.

What do you think happened?

Within hours of that article going up my hits from Google literally dropped to zero again. NOTHING. And this at a time when cycling related searches are coming in at a frenzied pace.

Since then I get 3 or 4 per day from Google.

Odd that prior to the biggest race in cycling I got ten times as many Google hits as I get now, and that during the biggest cycling race in the world and just after I challenge Lance, they again utterly vanish.

Odder still that they now come in at barely a trickle, rather than returning to their former rate.

If they can attack one little blogger like this, how many others have they “punished” on the word of Lance or some other celeb or part owner?

Google was never the happy-faced good guy of the internet, they were never the champion of the open exchange of thoughts an ideas, nor of free speech. That was just what they wanted YOU to believe. Now that they have a near monopoly on myriad internet services they’ve dropped the mask.

Now we see the real face of the villain and Lance Armstrong is just one of the demon’s many aspects.