Editor’s Note: This article contains strong language.
“It was seven years ago,” I began writing this piece late Sunday, “to the day, in fact, that Lance Armstrong victory-lapped about the Champs-Élysées after the final stage of the 92nd Tour de France, all high-and-mighty, some bicycling Napoleon.”
“There was that day a certain je ne sais quoi about the American cyclist,” I soft-pedaled. “A certain air of eminence, maybe. Not swagger but stinky one-franc French cologne, with base notes of haughty and overtones of high-horse. And why not? He’d just won – déjà goddamned vu – his seventh consecutive Tour de France, after all, and there was just something in the 33-year-old’s blood that day, I suppose. Through his seven-year tour de force, too, for that matter. I saw it. The French saw it. And the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency – they saw it, too.”
“Stackers, pumpers, A-bombs, gym candy. Jose Canseco’s,” I freewheeled. “Dope, by any other name. And his la-di-da, laissez-faire air, then? ‘Eau de I Got Away with It.’ PEDs, mes amis – performance-enhancing drugs. And Armstrongs’ veins were allegedly full of them. That, and shit, too.”
I braked there, suddenly – skid-marking the Word document with type. I’d been in a journalistic kind of yellow jersey at the piece’s 100-word mark, hauling heavy ass downhill to do what Jan Ullrich and Iban Mayo and Ivan Basso and USADA and all Christendom couldn’t – smoke Big Tex, one way or another. Barbecue him. Like a drug-fed, ‘roided chicken.
It was a swig of joe, though, that pissed on and put out the fire in the pit of my gut.
And not café but caffeine, more specifically – the beverage of the bureaucracy; the stimulant of the masses; the performance-enhancing drug of the people. The ever-lawful psychotropic alkaloid is nature’s designer drug and mankind’s most done dope.
Indeed, the world runs on Dunkin, and 90 percent of North Americans groggily agree that the best part of waking up is coffee – if not Folgers – in their cups.
I couldn’t write without the shit, I was sure, filtering through the draft before me – Mr. Coffee, of the same brew, burbled smart-assedly from the kitchen in agreement.
Performance-enhancing drugs, all right. Hell, that night, I’d stacked the inky froth with two 5-hour Energy’s. Earlier that day, I’d popped a couple aspirin pills. And that morning, a multivitamin.
I’d then forgotten, though, to take my fish oil supplements, still on my desk in my bedroom – beside, that is, a dusty bottle of leftover Lexapro, which I was prescribed after my mother’s death in December. And in my desk drawer, definitively, were two 30-mg Adderall XR capsules.
Shit, I’m the goddamned pope of dope, as it were. And Armstrong – neither cardinal, bishop nor priest. Nor deacon. He’s a mere altar server, for God’s sake, and a saint, moreover, for kicking cancer’s ass. USADA, which in June doped-up doping allegations against Armstrong, is a kind of Devil’s advocate. If it could, it’d strip Armstrong of his triumph in the Tour de Testicular Cancer for, say, his “performance-enhancing” chemotherapy. USADA is an institutionalized anti-doping fetish hitched with red tape to the handlebars of American sports like a wicker basket of dildos and Voodoo dolls.
They’re given to a sort of puritanical superstition, these bureaucrats, especially in deference to their Godsped holy war against PEDs. The USADA’s unmentioned motto: “Abandon dope, all ye who enter here.”
But they’re armchair dopers, ironically, nine-to-fivers dosed with all manner of de facto PEDs – SSRIs, SNRIs, amphetamines, antihistamines, benzodiazepines, barbituates, Prilosec and Nexium, boner-meds. A white-collar cocktail of drugs, by all accounts. Armstrong, though, is the goddamned doper.
There’s a word for the USADA: regressive. The agency itself is a performance-inhibiting drug. I, for one, won’t hearten those hindering humanity’s progress – Armstrongs’ seven consecutive Tour de France victories, especially.
File this one under: I’m in it for the species.
Phil Sweeney is a 25-year-old English senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_PhilSweeney.
 
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