Reissue the Tour de France Awards

I don’t typically weigh in on sports, but the French agency that conducts the Tour de France has stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles, and has decided to leave no winner listed for those years.

That is wrong.

The prize obviously should go to the runners up.

As a cartoonist and columnist, II am aware of the fact that several previous Pulitzer Prize winners are plagiarists and/or hacks whose malfeasance is so over-the-top that they should be stripped of their Pulitzers.

It was bad enough for the legitimate cartoonists who deserved to win to be passed up at the time. But clearly, when a prize is stripped from someone for cheating, that prize should be properly and reawarded to the honest professional who was passed up at the time. Not to do so is to pretend that the agency that issued the award had not made a mistake at the time, when in fact they did.

6 Comments.

  • Once word got out that blood transfusions and EPO were undetectable (but still considered ‘doping’) some (most?) of the runners-up were doing it too.

    They couldn’t find anyone who could prove he was clean so they could give him the stripped prizes.

  • It’s really a pretty amazing situation. If they actually did as you suggest, they’d either go broke looking (7 times) for the first clean guy to finish, and/or, when they finally did find him, let’s say #187, and when everyone saw that they had to go all the way to #187, they would all give up on the sport in disgust, including the sponsors (like Rabobank already did). At that point there will suddenly be negligible money in the sport, and the races will be filled with riders who pay their own way and ride because they actually ENJOY it. And, human motivation being what it is, maybe they’ll actually be FASTER than these heartless robots. I have a dream.

    Or the whole sport can just go away, I’m fine with that too.

  • Would be very interested in your identification of “previous Pulitzer Prize winners” who you consider to be “plagiarists and/or hacks … “

    • @falco: I’m sure you would. But it’s a small fraternity, and I have enough enemies as it is. Not to mention, it’s not my job to find these things out—it’s the Pulitzer Board’s.

  • alex_the_tired
    October 23, 2012 7:58 AM

    It’s a nice example of the whole problem we all face in the world, isn’t it? Lance Armstrong/George W. Bush/Corporate Fraudster cheats and wins. When he’s caught, the punishment is trivial in relation to what he already obtained through cheating: even if Armstrong has to give back any prize money (unlikely), he certainly has invested that money along the way and can stand to lose it with barely a hiccup of inconvenience. Dubya got out of Vietnam (thanks, Dad!) and got job after job (thanks, Dad!), and even though the reality now is that most people understand he’s burned-out drunk who never accomplished anything on his own, he still has the family money, the family name, and the family connections. The Wall Street goons? Same deal.

    The election is the same sort of shit. If Obama wins, we’ll all be waiting a long, long time for any of those jobs to appear: the House and Senate will block him just like they did these first four years. Obama, eyes fixed on his third term, will play the waiting game. His supporters, huddled on their steam grates, will lecture the rest of us for failing to understand the “long game.” Meanwhile, all the blowhards in D.C. will continue to get their pensions, their life-time health care, and all the rest of the perks they vote for themselves.

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