American "Hero"

    Lance Armstrong was an American Hero; he won seven straight Tour De France titles and was a Cancer Survivor. Some may have even said he was the best cyclist in history. Recently, though, it seems that Lance Armstrong is really no hero at all. As Juliet Macur states in the New York Times, "...accounts were revealed Wednesday in hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony from teammates, e-mail correspondents, financial records, and laboratory analyses released by the United States Anti-Doping Agency" that provide proof that Lance Armstrong was doping, using performance enhancing drugs.  Not only was Armstrong using the drugs, he also forced some of his fellow teammates to do the same and threatened them by saying that they would be off the team if they didn't do it. Just like Parris in The Crucible uses intimidation to make people stay with the church, Armstrong did the same to pressure his teammates into using drugs. To top it off, there were team managers and doctors present to help the cyclists inject the drugs that would raise their oxygen carrying capacity and improve their stamina, ultimately to make sure that the team would win. In order to make it less likely for the cyclyists to test positive during a drug test, they were careful to inject the drug into their veins, instead of their skin, so that it would shortly leave the blood stream.
    Armstrong has been been stripped of all of his Tour De France titles and banned from cycling, but is this punishment too harsh? I don't think so, but Michael Specter of The New Yorker said that "a cyclist once told me that if you don’t use drugs during a race like the Tour de France it’s as if you are observing a sixty-five mile-per-hour speed limit on a highway—while everyone else is driving eighty." In other words, many of the top cyclists use performance enhancing drugs, so then maybe Lance Armstrong really was the best. Doping has become so common in this sport, so should it just be legalized? If so, under what conditions?  If so many are already using it, then wouldn't the competition be more fair if everyone was on it, instead of just a few people? Personally, I do not think that the drug should be legalized. Many performance enhancing drugs can be very dangerous, and it sets a very poor example for kids to see that the only way their hero succeeds is by using drugs. People should not have to rely on a drug to help them win, but the sad truth is that many people are so set on winning, that they will do whatever it takes.

To read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/sports/cycling/agency-details-doping-case-against-lance-armstrong.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=opinion