Tour De Lance

A few months ago, another one of our heroes took a rather spectacular fall from grace.
Lance Armstrong, seven time winner of the Tour De France, was stripped of his titles retroactively based primarily on the suspicion that he had used Performance Enhancing Drugs (hereafter PEDs).
It was peculiar that Armstrong, despite vehement past denials, chose not to contest the action of the World Anti-Doping Agency.  You had the feeling that something was brewing.
And so here we are Lance has taped an interview with the high priestess of American culture, Oprah Winfrey, in which he is reportedly going to come clean and admit that, "Yeah, I took PEDs."
On one hand, I want to say that PEDs are a really bad idea, they can mess up your health in the long term, they are in fact a form of cheating and sports really should not tolerate them.  In fact, the thing that Armstrong is perhaps even more famous for than his Tour De France wins is his enormously successful Cancer research fundraising machine, Livestrong.  Because Lance is a survivor of testicular cancer.  He survived cancer before he even won his first Tour.  One wonders about the link between PEDs and cancer... but I'm not qualified to establish causal medical relationships.
What I'm more interested in is Lance Armstrong as a hero, because I think he was, and to some extent, I think he still is.  He's obviously a flawed person, he may be a cheater, but I think in the final analysis being a hero to kids with cancer is probably more important to the world than being able to ride a bike really fast.  So I'm going to ask for a little grace for Lance, before I hear his interview with her royal Oprah-ness, before all the pundits and sports nuts start ripping him apart.  I am personally going to give him a pass on the whole PED thing.  Here's why:
1. The sport he was involved in is a cesspool of doping and cheating.  Cyclists make Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds look like high school wrestlers trying to bulk up with some spurious muscle builder from GNC.
2. Because the cycling world is so FULL of people trying to get an edge the testing procedures are ridiculous, and Lance never actually got caught, which primarily proves that he was just better at cheating than everyone else, but that leads me to the final piece of this argument.
3. The people he was racing against were mostly doing the same things he was and so, while it does not excuse his behavior, it does somewhat vindicate his 7 Tour championships.

If you're competing against cheaters, you have to cheat, or you will probably lose.

Drugs or no drugs, Lance Armstrong is still pretty much the best cyclist since Greg Lemond hung it up.  His primary challengers, Alberto Contador and his teammate Floyd Landis have also run into trouble with the Anti-Dope man.
If Lance had been cheating against a bunch of pure, idealistic, choirboys who just wanted to ride their bicycles for the love of sport, that would be one thing.  But the purity of cycling as a sporting event is laughable, they're pedaling peddlers, rolling billboards for whatever corporate sponsor throws the most cash at them so they can buy absurdly advanced and expensive bikes and travel the world riding around in fancy spandex.
What makes the final difference for me, is that Lance used his fame and fortune, ill gotten though it might be, to do some good for a lot of people who really need it a lot more than the sporting public.  Livestrong helps people who are fighting cancer.  It helps people who have to be on steroids just to stay alive.  It inspires people to give money to research, in short it does a lot more good for the world than the Tour de France or the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Just a guess but Livestrong and Lance's non-cycling related legacy may be the reason he has chosen to enter the public confessional with Mother Oprah.  Maybe, he really is a hero, and he has realized that it's just time to come clean about the cheating.  Maybe he wants to admit that he did wrong, take responsibility for what he did and move on with all the other stuff he might be able to do besides ride a bike really fast.
Even, and maybe especially, heroes need grace.