Comment of the day, April 21, 2009:

Karma
By: Baldwin
Tue, 04/21/2009 – 10:44
I remember that Lemond pleaded with Landis to come clean and admit doping, because, Greg said, the psychological pressure was one day, sooner or later, going to catch up.

Lemond used as examples of that pressure very personal and painful childhood trauma from his own life that he had only come to terms with in adulthood. He said the fact that he had kept silent for so long had ground his marriage into dust and come to dominate his life and personality. He said that only with treatment, therapy and a lot of soul searching was he finally able to get right with his family and get his life moving again.

The circumstances of Lemond’s trauma and silence are obviously different than Hamilton’s, but I think everybody here fully sees that there is a clear link, if legally hypothetical and alleged, between Hamilton’s first doping ban and the events of last week.

That said, Hamilton has lost a career, a wife, a reputation and a dog in the past four years. Any one of those things can be incredibly stressful, including, as silly as it sounds, the loss of a family pet.

Immediately prior to that he won the Olympics, Liege Bastogne Liege, the Tour of Romandie, took 2nd in the Giro and won a long breakaway stage in the Tour de France. All very exciting events in a career, and each one also tremendously stressful, however positive that kind of stress can be.

In the imagined psychological background we all must picture for Hamilton, those victories and triumphs must ring increasingly hollow with each year as more and more information comes to light showing not only Hamilton, but an entire generation of the American peloton, as willing and serial dopers.

And those anecdotes of tooth-grinding agony and broken-shoulder suffering only muddle the final picture we end up with. A picture of men with enormous strength and endurance, champions in an alternate reality, who are in the end tainted as much by their doping as by their terrible, terrible lies.