Where have I been? I just got bored with all the media's distorted Floyd Landis doping crap and Operacion Open Mouth, and actually, bored with me. But the latest “Poundisms” in the January 7th Sunday New York Times have pissed me off again. Follow the Link to read the interview by Michael Sokolove, which happened in July during the time that the doping crap first came out about Floyd Landis.

I am telling you that Dick Pound is a classic study in Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and if I were still a Teaching Assistant, I would use him as a test case. His sense of entitlement, his arrogance, his ruthless power-grabbing, and his retaliation, vengeance and anger are classic. And how impressed he is with his own brilliance and rigid rightness. Dick Pound is never wrong... he wouldn’t even consider that possibility.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the Sokolove interview:

Thinking about Landis seemed to enliven him (Dick Pound). He spoke of the cyclist as if he were some sleazy perp just collared by the vice squad. “He was 11 minutes behind or something, and all of the sudden there’s this Herculean effort, where he’s going up mountains like he’s on a goddamn Harley,” he said. In the 2006 tour, Landis raced in pain while awaiting a hip replacement, went out to an early lead, lost it, then seemed to miraculously regain it. “It’s a great story,” Pound said. “Wonderful. But if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

and:

Pound took something like a schoolboy’s delight in talking about Landis’s lab result, which supposedly showed his testosterone level to be grotesquely above what is typical for most men. Landis has denied taking a prohibited substance and is fighting what could be a two-year ban from cycling. “I mean, it was 11 to 1!” Pound said, referring to Landis’s reported testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, a measure used to identify doping. “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?”

Sokolove says this about Dick Pound: Battling the known and the unknown, and probably outspent and outgunned, Pound has seized the prerogative of the underdog: fight with whatever you’ve got. Fight fair. Or unfair. His best weapon is his brilliance as a formulator of quotes, his ability to make headlines and call attention to his cause. (He takes great pride in this; one of his books is titled “High Impact Quotations.”) Pound is not a stereotypical Canadian, if you think of Canadians as reticent, nor is he very lawyerly: he assembles whatever facts he can gather, but when they’re not attainable, sometimes just makes them up.

Boy, do we all know the truth of that statement... Pound is one of those narcissistic people who have gained immense power in the organization, and is so ruthless (and disingenuous) that the IOC will never be able to remove him from power. Like most dictators, he is entrenched in the organization. Read Sokolove’s article and you’ll see what I mean...