That remains a ridiculous argument. The thing about a race is you can always think of excuses for not winning. Plans for Mars were being met by all accounts, however Nixon still cancelled them because the Apollo victory was so decisive.

IMO he stopped it because Russia wasn't meaningfully threatening to field a mission. The end was always artificial and if the USSR had beat the US to the Moon maybe we would have gotten a race to the first "permanent" base on the Moon or spacestation or even a rush to Mars. That's the point of the "did the US really win the Space Race?" question, it's about how the finish line was essentially always the next thing the USSR hadn't done yet.

Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass "

It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.