Live Strong -right?

So it's been in the news for awhile now, but everyone has their knickers in a knot about Lance Armstrong finally confessing to using performance enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France.
He has since been stripped of his title, banned from the sport, lost any and all endorsement and lastly is potentially going to have to pay a lot of money for all the trouble this has caused.

Personally, I think it is completely ridiculous how people are reacting to this situation and I feel bad for the guy.

So he lied. Lying innately is wrong, but if you think about it, is what he did really any worse than what any other person in the spotlight does?

Recently Beyonce was accused of lip syncing at the Presidential Inauguration, and people are defending her saying that it would have been a very difficult performance because it was outdoors, cold and windy.
Fair enough.

Look at any magazine, billboard, or advertisement. With very few exceptions, none of what you see is what the models actually look like, they have been photo-shopped, and made over to appear the way you see them.
We know that, this is old news, we've moved on.

Turn on the radio. Almost all music now a days has been auto-tuned, or electronic.
People obviously like this type of music or else it wouldn't be popular.

And finally, Al Gore.
Now it's no secret that I'm not overly fond of Al Gore, but that is besides the point.
A few years ago Al Gore came out with this little movie, you may have heard of it, it's called an Inconvenient Truth. In this movie he discusses the issue of global warming and how we need to fix it. He showed a lot of evidence to back up his claims and used a lot of statistics.
This included a lot of falsified or misleading graphs.
Did we scream and yell at him for lying to us? No. We gave him a Nobel Peace Prize.

Now you're probably thinking, but Ashley, Global Warming is a big issue. So what if he used misleading statistics to get his point across? He was doing it for a good cause!

Well yeah. He was.
But have you forgotten that Lance Armstrong has (had) his charity. Remember those LIVESTRONG bracelets everyone wore where the money went to cancer research.
He likely wouldn't have been able to start a charity like that if he wasn't famous, and he wouldn't have become famous if it wasn't for winning the Tour de France as many times as he did.

You could also point out that Al Gore is a politician, it's his job to not be 100% honest.
Armstrong was a cyclist. If you were to give all this medals to the next runner up who hasn't been caught using performance enhancing drugs too, you'd have to give it to the guy who came in TWENTY-FORTH place.

So, to paraphrase Chris Crocker "Leave Lance Armstrong alone!"
The issue is with cycling and society, and you can't put all the blame on Lance.