2012 Year In Sports: Fall Of Lance Armstrong, Rise Of Michael Phelps

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The 2012 Year in Sports will be remembered as the year of the fall of Lance Armstrong and the year of the rise of Michael Phelps.

There’s no bigger story than the sudden and swift decision to strip all of the awards the former seven-time Tour de France winner accumulated since 1998. The International Cycling Union (UCI) took that dramatic action at the close of an investigation that seemed to want to find him guilty of doping.

Now, Lance Armstrong’s gone from a totally beloved, do-no-wrong athlete to the butt of the occasional Twitter joke.

And losing his Nike sponsorship, and fighting lawsuits.

But this blogger has always admired Lance Armstrong for one thing: fighting and beating cancer. In my book, if doping is what Mr. Armstrong had to do to build his body to the point of fighting cancer successfully, then we all should be doping at some point in our lives. He will always stand tall in my book.

While 2012 saw the fall of Lance, it also saw the rise of Michael Phelps. Mr. Phelps is a now retired American and Olympics swimmer, but along the way, he became the most decorated Olympian of all time, with a total of 22 medals.

This blogger can say he had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Phelps in 2008:

And said then that he’s a cool muthafucka; apparently he still is today. But at the London Olympics, we watched him

The stage for his 2012 assent was the London Olympics Games, where he lost his first meet, had to listen to the crowing by Ryan Lochte that it was “his time” and then calmly came back to get the “toppings” of his career: 22 medals, 18 gold, two silver, two bronze. Nice work.

Equally great was the Gold Medal win of the United States Women’s National Championship Team, which blazed an undefeated trail through the London Olympics. Alex Morgan, Heather O’Reilly, Abby Wambach, and Hope Solo led a great team of athletes that were the pride of America. I can say I had the pleasure of meeting at least two of them:

Other notable sports stories in 2012:

– The San Francisco Giants World Series win!
– NY Giants beat The New England Patriots in The Super Bowl (again)
– New Orleans Saints get hit with fines and suspensions due to allegations of the existence of a bounty program.
– Lindsey Vonn gets win after amazing win the year after her divorce from Thomas Vonn, then claims to suffer from depression.
– The Oakland A’s make the MLB Playoffs for the first time since 2006.
– The fall of NHL Hockey and the nasty labor dispute that ended a season.
– The rise of NFL Rookie QBs over the last year, starting with 2011, and then really picking up in 2012.

Ok, this has a San Francisco / Oakland Bay Area bias, but what do you expect? I live in Oakland!

Stay tuned.

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