Lance vs Kimmage

This week Lance Armstrong criticised the Sunday Times journalist Paul Kimmage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fV-48DT3E

Kimmage has criticised many of cycling's authorities for double standards. When speaking to Lance he says puts doping offences in an order saying 'David Millar has been very pronounced in his anti doping stance, whereas these guys have admitted to nothing." Yet in his interview with Cycling Weekly we're told that "he [Millar] should never be allowed to race again." If this is the lesser punishment for a doping cycling I'm not entirely sure that I want to know what Kimmage expects for Ivan Basso and Floyd Landis. With a career already being taken away, one can only presume some sort of disfigurement.

Kimmage's failure to ever win in his professional career, despite taking drugs himself is perhaps too obvious a reason for his hatred of the clean Armstrong, but then perhaps that's because his jealousy is all too apparent. This is a man that says "the stuff that I learnt on that Tour about him and what he was really like was absolutely shocking" and claims to have references for this. Professional cyclists for references. Yet there is no expansion of what 'stuff' is, or indeed who these cyclists are.
Essentially you have a journalist's career built largely upon rumours, hints and suggestion. One must ask the question is this any different to a career built upon, not fact, but false fact, doping?

A journalist has a right and indeed, is expected, to ask hard questions. However, to call a man, never mind a man who has suffered at the hands of disease and raised so much to combat it, a 'cancer' is an insult not only to Armstrong, but anybody who has ever suffered or been affected by the suffering caused by cancer.

Cycling is a sport. Shown by Armstrong, it is a sport that can be a huge force for good, but it is just a sport. Armstrong's return, whatever one's personal opinion of him, will never take a life too early, insist upon hours of recuperation, or devastate an entire family. I sincerely hope Paul Kimmage comes to realise this on his own terms and never has to find out the hard way, like too many of us have had to.