George W. Bush never had to answer for his “youthful indiscretions.” Michael Phelps, not so lucky.
Having been caught red-handed with a smoking bong firmly pasted to his maw, the long knives are out for the Olympic hero.
Let’s see if I've got this right. Phelps isn’t a future Hall of Famer juicing himself with the “cream” and the “clear,” or getting his gluteus maximus pin-cushioned with designer ’roids. He isn’t a doped racehorse, or a testosterone-shooting bike nerd trying to turn his Lycra-Spandexed bum into a blur pedaling across France.
He isn’t even the current president of the United States, who freely admits to having toked his share of tropical trumpets back in his Hawaiian hoodlum days, not to mention tooting some of the Big Island’s finest imported disco dust.
He’s a 23-year-old rock star who got caught smoking pot.
How is Phelps going to do the breast stroke covered in tar and feathers?
Get it straight, sports fans: Phelps’ biggest crime here wasn’t snarfling the bong (or “dope pipe,” as it was called by the News of the World, the crack team of global do-gooders who broke this earth-shattering story). It was reinforcing every negative stereotype about college-age stoner dorks ever perpetrated on the square world. The flipped-back baseball cap alone is worth more hard time than any hit of South Carolina chronic.
Does anyone remember Ross Rebagliati, the Jeff Spiccoli of snowboarders? He was the Canadian dude who won the first gold medal in his sport back in ’98, only to later have it taken away when they found THC in his bloodstream in the post-event drug test. And then they gave it back to him (the medal that is, not the THC) when even the teetotalers at the Olympic Anti-Doping Committee had to agree that marijuana is not a performance-enhancing drug. If he actually was stoned when he won the event, they’d probably have to give him another medal, maybe even a trophy shaped like a hookah.
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