Who d’ya feel more sorry for; Arsene Wenger or Bradley Wiggins? One is a victim of his own self-important arrogance and the other… is pretty much the same. One is being hounded out by his own club’s supporters whilst the other has the entire mechanism of government railed against him and accusing him of being a cheat at his sport without giving him the benefit of any form of defense. Wenger has a defense but its really shitty at the moment. So you can see, this is no meaningless and facile comparison but indeed a question that needs to be considered.

The entire sport of cycling has been in disarray since Lance Armstrong was caught crossing the Tour de France finish line with a syringe hanging out of his left arm. He was a ‘drug cheat’ and was correctly disgraced and disbarred… errrr… dismembered… whatever they do to drug-cheats. Which, at that time, it must be said, was a bit of a grey area.

Everyone was taking drugs for something. Even for a cold, for an allergy, hay-fever, whatever. And if you had a letter from your (team) doctor, stating you need meds for ‘a condition’ then that was pretty much a carte blanche to take what you like. You can take an anti-histamine for hay fever, but you could also choose a fuck-off mega-steroid which would (among so many other wonderful things) probably stop your sneezing. Whilst making you bigger, faster, leaner, stronger, more powerful and A FUCKING GOOOODDDDD!!!!! Or at least feel like it.

So they questioned Sir Bradley last night and he maintains that he “never crossed the ethical line”. Yeah. Like what’s he gonna say? He was doubtless under pressure, both personally and also from ‘the team’ and did what the doc told him. Ethical lines are big grey areas with lots of little lines inside them.

And if that’s not bad enough as it stands, they also announced today that Bradley Wiggins invested in a tax AVOIDANCE scheme. Not ‘evasion’ but avoidance, so it was legal. Even though they closed it down. And not just any ole tax avoidance scheme but one which used a charitable front to acquire tax benefits for its ‘investors’ whilst doing virtually nothing for any known charity in the process. Usual tax avoidance mechanism: you invest a million quid, sell it to a trust for a pound, establishing a massive loss, which you sell to an offshore loss company who sell it back to your for 22 million quid which is lodged in Panama for a month, during which time there’s no tax due on the million quid and the government here owes you £48k off your tax due to the excess losses. Or something like that. In this case, add in some ‘gift aid’ from the government and a charitable status umbrella and you’re talking major league, bottom-feeding scummy finance.

But I still feel more sorry for Wenger. Just because he’s Wenger.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx