I'm sure many of us have been somewhat amazed by revelations that Lance Armstrong was and is (allegedly) a drug cheat. But is it as simple as the media suggest?
It does seem incredible that any sportsman can achieve such extraordinary status and yet years after his last great success be on the receiving end of a witch hunt addressing concerns that he systemically cheated the sport that he had dedicated his life to. But is the situation that Lance Armstrong has found himself in an isolated incident or is it symptomatic of a society that now tests, overtests, examines, regulates, spins just about everything in the name of upholding integrity? The financial services industry that I was part of from March 1976 to June 2012 has and still is undergoing a witch hunt and it's incredible to think that '000s like myself are being forced out. Of course the reasons are very different on the surface. There is no accusation of drug abuse within the anti-RDR lobby. Lance Armstrong is NOT being told to go back to school to learn to ride a bike. Yet the results are exactly the same. Just like Lance (we're not on first name terms yet) my reaction is the same.
"I can't really be bothered dealing with the regulators and do gooders who have achieved very little and yet lord over us like vultures!"
Lord Turner is a hypocrite just like the people who are turning en masse on Armstrong. Nothing good can be achieved by all of this excessive intrusion and yet it's happening to '000s of people globally. One doesn't have to feel sympathy for L A. I doubt he wants anyone's sympathy anyway. Like him I worked and cycled my way through Capital Markets for many years. He did the mileage whereas I did the trades. He took the drug tests (presumably the Tour regulators took blood samples too) whereas I remained compliant. In both cases nothing was found to lead anyone to assume or presume any form of abuse was taking place. L A had already suffered at the hands of testicular cancer and presumably taken shed loads of drugs to combat this and yet he still managed to respond to sports regulators probing him. He was clean then and yet we're now being told he wasn't. The similarities here with the way that '000s of IFA's and Stockbrokers are being treated are somewhat obtuse but there is something rather sinister in all of this. Why are millions of people globally being so gullible regarding the benefits of any form of regulation? I'm convinced REGULATION & REGULATORS everywhere are the real enemy. I wish that the media would redress the imbalance on this kind of reporting but like many I'm suspicious as to who is controlling them.
Walking away from this intrusion and orwellian discrimination and holding one's head up high just shows that there are men out there who have woken up to this hypocrisy.
I'm just off to the shed to fix my bike!
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