al-onestare":39s92t48 said:
In a competitive sport though, in my view at least, as soon as you start improving personal performance by non-natural (is that the right term?) means, to gain an unfair advantage over a competitor, even if the whole competition is doing it, doesn't make it right and is cheating.
that's where you miss my point. it's not always about gaining an advantage. sometimes it's about surviving. Read the Kimmage book if you get a chance. He so much wanted not to cross that line, but the demands of the sport were such that without he'd have failed ... then been unemployed etc etc. It didn't help that the majority of everyone else was charged-up, so he if anything, he levelled with them. He was never interested in gaining an advantage over competitors.
I'll try and give an analogy (but the context is much different).
Imagine you and other colleagues do the same job. You are committed to ecological issues and therefore do not own a car. This means you have a long, strenuous walk at the beginning and end of day. The others all drive. As the days, weeks, months go on, you sense you are underperforming compared to the others and conclude that all the walking is taking its toll. Do you buy a car to ease the burden, keep up and safeguard your job, but at the same time become unethical or do you tough it out until stress/ill health/unemployment manifest themselves? Do you see the purchase of a car in this example as something to gain an unfair advantage? [rhetorical questions!]
anyway, this is getting off topic, as Team Sky are a essentially a winning machine, not a team surviving
