My uncle used to race rally cars. He won an old car rally in '86 - the Great Race\) - back when it was cars 50 years old and older. Which meant pre-war. a 1914 Dodge Brothers Touring driven from DC to Los Angeles won him a $150k purse.

In 1989 he ran it again, again in the Dodge Bros touring. This time, every single stop he made, they made the mechanics take the car apart looking for cheats. Finally after five days on the road they insisted that the transmission come out and be dismantled. Lo and behold - synchromesh gears. Because transmissions from 1914 Dodges are rather rare, the vehicle's owner had put Pugeot gears inside the Dodge case. They were cheating. In order to avoid scandal, they were stripped of their age advantage, forced to compete as a 1939, and finished the race in 8th place.

The amazing thing to me was not that my uncle was cheating. It was that everyone was cheating, it just didn't matter until you were winning. We knew people on that race running modern engines. Vehicles running steel-belted radials (which really improves your timing over canvas bias-ply, lemme tell ya!). Problem is, when you're charging a $30k entry fee of everybody running, and you've got a bunch of gentlemen racers out having a good time, they do not like to see a professional rally driver at the helm of anything.

In every sport in every nation in every league above amateur, people cheat. The argument about Major League Baseball isn't who's doping, it's who isn't doping. The basic problem is that doping works, doping is impossible to detect, and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. And, since we pretend that somehow athletes are always role models and always the better angels of our nature, they aren't doing what it is clearly obvious everybody is doing. It's a competition. You do anything for an edge. Sunrise, sunset, forever and ever amen.

Science ain't like that. Nobody says "I wanna become a geneticist because I want Nobel money." Nobody gets into journalism because they want a Peabody on their mantlepiece. The accolades are a side-effect of the job. They are a validation, not an end product.

The world is coming down on Lance Armstrong like a ten ton shithammer because competitions have rules and he broke them. Mostly because he then lied about it for ten years. If he'd happened to cure polio along the way nobody would give two shits if he did it with a steady drip of goat estrogen on an IV pole strapped to his rear fender or whatever. But since the beginning and end of the entire process was competition governed by strict rules, everybody's doing the panty-twist dance.