Well Well WELL... The US Government exposed as steroid-athlete pushers???

I have friends who sometimes give me information, and I have to say that I got a pretty good dose of it from one recently which may expose a large part of The National Sports Machine I spoke of earlier with the $Cam Newton situation.

For many years, the entire basis of the US Olympic propaganda was the whole "U.S. vs. Them" motif, where the United States would be the only country in the world with the Olympic team which could, across-the-board, match up with the Evil Empire of the Soviet Bloc.

This propaganda also included that it was eventually exposed that many of the Eastern European sports machines were government operations, and many openly used illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Well, I firmly have believed we've taken a number of cues from that mechanism.

Now, we might have proof of a big one.

On "60 Minutes" last Sunday, professional cyclist Tyler Hamilton reported (there are seven web pages in this article, the link is to the first one) that:

• He himself was doping, even though he had denied it for years and refused to cooperate with an ongoing Federal probe of Lance Armstrong and his team, which won seven editions of the Tour de France. (The team didn't win, but you don't win the yellow jersey without team help.) Only a subpoena forced him to testify to the probe, in which he admitted everything, his career being a drug-induced fraud.
  
• As a result, he has repudiated and turned in his Olympic gold medal.
• Hamilton: "He took what we all took, really no difference between Lance Armstrong and I'd say the majority of the peloton, you know. There was EPO, there was testosterone, I did see a transfusion, a blood transfusion,". The transfusion would be evidence of another illegal practice in cycling, called "blood doping". It is a practice in which oxygen-rich blood is taken from the cyclist and re-transfused back into him when needed during competitions like the Tour de France.
• That Armstrong had used EPO at least as early as 1999, and openly was using it to prepare for the 2000 Tour de France and beyond.
• Doping on Armstrong's team pre-dated Armstrong joining the team.
  
• The most damning thing, though, might well be this exchange with interviewer Scott Pelley:
  

  "Is it just a bunch of guys making decisions on their own about what they want to do? Or is this a doping program that was directed for the rest of the team?" Pelley asked Tyler Hamilton.

  "You know, the team really encouraged it," he replied.

  "The team management?" Pelley asked.

  "The team management encouraged it, yes," Hamilton said.

• Additionally, Armstrong might've bought his "innocence" through top cycling officials. A Swiss lab had tested a sample of Armstrong's urine and found it "suspicious" toward the use of EPO. In a highly-unusual manner, Armstrong was able to arrange a meeting with the International Cycling Union (the UCI), himself, and his team manager. Around the time of the meeting, he gave the UCI's dopers $25,000.
  
• Three years later, he tacked on another $100,000.
  

Why would this be an issue?

The team was sponsored by the UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE.

If the team management was involved in steroid pushing, illegal EPO use and blood doping, etc., The United States Government would be involved in encouraging the use of performance-enhancing drugs in their athletes, and sports bribery.

We would, today, be no different than those damn Russkies back in the day.

Surprised? Hardly! They need to cancel all of professional cycling. You give me one cyclist, even a domestique!, in an elite race like the Tour de France, who's clean, and he'll be the first in years!

But would this mean that the US government, without some knowing of it, has openly been pushing drugs onto athletes for at least the professional cyclists?

No wonder they think this interview might change sports history, and for far more than just cycling!