Monday, July 29, 2002
There are stupid writers in the world, but this week's Coulter Award for witless hackery goes to Ron Borges, a crappy sportswriter for the Boston Globe, for his comments about 4-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong. Witness:
Athletes, for my money, must do more with their bodies than pump their legs up and down. If that’s all it took, the Radio City Rockettes would have to be considered the greatest athletes of all time.
Well, let's just use his criteria. We don't have to go far to find another sport where the participant is not much of an athlete by Borges' standards. That would be track and field, especially the running events. Gee, they only have to pump their legs up and down and move their arms. Not much athletic ability needed there by those standards.
Do I even need to go on? Does it have to be mentioned that the older name for "track and field" is "athletics"? And is he saying that those in athletics aren't athletes.
We could also go to Borges' main beat of boxing. Well, there were two heavyweight fights this past weekend which don't match his criteria for athletic events. On the undercard was Butterbean Esch against Larry Holmes. That one's barely suitable for Fox's Celebrity Boxing. At the top was a John Ruiz title defense against someone who got DQ'd because he kept taking shots at Ruiz's, um, package. Hey, if it were a real athletic event, Ruiz would've just fought through it, eh? Some toughness. I guess since Borges' own beat stunk so bad this weekend, he had to go pout about something else.
Cooped Up has a complete analysis of his comments. Permalinks broken, yadayadayada.
