By Tom KandoIt is now inescapable that Lance Armstrong cheated MASSIVELY and consistently during much of his career. As the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad puts it, “the stench is rising...there is overwhelming proof of systematic doping by the seven-time Tour winner.” (October 10, 2012). The number of witnesses testifying to this has risen to 26. The accusations include alleged intimidation and threats by Armstrong against his peers, huge suspicious payments to Italian Dr. Michele Ferrari, and all sorts of other sleaze.
I have often defended
Armstrong - most recently in a
post on September 16 of this year. Even then, I wasn’t so foolish as to claim
that he didn’t cheat. I was arguing for extenuating circumstances.
But now, I am embarrassed
by some of the things I wrote and by my comments afterward, in which I tried to justify my
position to anonymous critics. I shouldn’t have tried to question the evidence.
Sorry.
So I am eating crow.
It doesn’t even taste so bad, because I have this nice sauce
of miscellaneous musings to go with it.
Having behaved naively, I am reminded of the joke about the cuckold: He suspects his
wife of cheating, so he hires a private
eye to tail her. After a while, the detective reports back to him: “Well, I saw
your wife meet this guy in a cafe and they kissed. Then they went to a motel. I
saw them undress and jump into bed. And
then they drew the curtain closed and turned off the light,
so I don’t know what happened after that.” The husband’s reaction: “Damn! I
wish I knew for sure whether or not she is cheating on me!”
Although I am betrayed, I am not angry. I hate witch hunts,
crucifixions, public hangings. I was
late coming on board against Richard Nixon during Watergate, I was late joining
the pack against George W. Bush. I believed Floyd Landis when he claimed to be
innocent. I am a softie.
Reactions to the Armstrong saga range from soft and
forgiving to harshly punitive. America
has a lot of the latter. To them I quote Jesus: “Let he who is without Sin cast
the first Stone.”
The social media show that millions of people remain as
ambivalent as I. Donations to Armstrong’s
Charity Livestrong
have actually gone UP since August. Public opinion is much more divided than in
cases like Marion Jones, Barry Bonds and
Pete Rose. As Eddie Pells wrote recently, “sometimes good people do bad things.” (Sacramento Bee, October 14, 2012).
And there is no doubt that Lance Armstrong has done not just
good things, but great things. His bicycling achievements are stupendous,
with or without doping. And most
importantly, he has raised hundreds of
millions of dollars to fight cancer.
So how bad is Lance Armstrong? Has he murdered people? On
the contrary, he has probably saved many lives.
But what does my reaction matter? Think of the huge
ramifications: Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated had declared him the
greatest athlete in the history of the world. Nike, Anheuser-Busch and and
his other multi-million dollar
sponsors have already dumped him. He has stepped down as chairman of
Livestrong. Magazines, corporations,
governmental agencies around the world
now have egg on their face - as I do.
The man is going to suffer plenty enough. His career, his
reputation, his financial empire, his cancer foundation, his place in history
are being destroyed or severely damaged.
That’s enough of a comeuppance.
11 comments:
I look forward to the coming sequel of this blog spot : "Eating Crow about Barack Obama"
I agree that Armstrong has suffered enough. As Americans we can be so unforgiving and we have a hard time reflecting on our own human imperfections. As you stated, he did not murder anyone but he has saved lives. Sometimes we dont see the human side of life and realize that part of our journey here on earth is to learn compassion and forgiveness. I do argue that wrong is wrong and the point is to help humans become their best possible selves. No one wants to cheat themself out of being their best but our worse enemy is fear. As a black woman, I was angry when I found out that Marion Jones was doping. I thought why a black female role model, the few that we have, make a scene like this. Blackness, and femaleness is already stigmatized to a greater or lessor extent and now this is rubbed in the face of Americans, especially black Americans. It hurt me. I had to redeem my spirit and fight like hell to still support Marion because I know that she made a mistake and she was embarrassed. She came out resilient and showed us in the end that there is something to be said about the human will and personal outlook regarding how we perceive and define situations. Okay, we screw up but if a person could be redeemed we should not be so harsh. Who doesn't want a second chance? And as you said, "He/she who is without sin cast the first stone"
Gail
Nice to see that anonymous follows my posts.
Gail brings up the issue of forgiveness.
This reminds me (unrelated to Lance Armstrong) how unforgiving many conservatives are. Their focus on individual responsibility has merit, but their punitive attitude is mean-spirited and hypocritical. Their mantra consists of cliches like “you must pay for your mistakes,” “mistakes have consequences,” “it’s all about personal responsibility,” etc. (47% of us do not take personal responsibility for our actions, right?).
This Hobbesian and Social-Darwinistic attitude permeates everything - from support for the death penalty and for three-strikes laws to opposition to the entire social safety net.
But aren’t mistakes part of the human condition? Society is geared toward this. That’s why we have safety belts in our cars, and dividers on our highways. Because we all make mistakes. Without forgiveness and second chances, practically none of us would make it.
How contradictory that it precisely those who claim to be Christians who are often the least forgiving, the most eager to punish, to throw away the key. I bet you that many of these folks would be the first to grovel for a second chance, when caught “making a mistake.”
I love this post Dad and was very eager to get a moment to finally read it. I'm surprised at how sad I am about Armstrong's doping. Like you, I'm a softie and I'm also someone who wants to believe we can still have real, old fashioned heroes in this world. But, that said, I still agree that Armstrong is to be commended for good deeds and involvements.
Whenever I read about an athlete who dopes, I always wonder if there's a sports agent or manager in the background, pushing the athlete to overlook their own good judgement. More realistically, the athletes themselves, who are super determined humans, are "in it to win in" and probably don't have to be pushed too hard. But there still must be SO MUCH pressure on these people to break records, get those endorsements, and even simply to be able to provide for their families. And, for that reason, I find myself more sympathetic to people like Armstrong.
What I am angry about though is the fact that tax payer monies are now being used toward an investigation of how/when/where/etc. he doped. That's very wrong, no?
D
Hi cutie,
you say wise things.
The Armstrong saga never seems to stop. Every morning, new announcements come out. Today, we hear that the International Cycling Union has, as expected, followed the USADA and stripped Armstrong of all his Tour de France victories.
Well, as I said before, the man is being hit very hard and it is difficult not to feel sympathy for him. There seems to be a very special animus against him on the part of the authorities (a double standard). Probably because he was so very very big and successful, and also because his denials were so cleverly orchestrated and hidden for many years. In other words, he is the biggest fish they could ever hope to catch, and they did.
That doesn’t make the government’s actions very inspiring. Many other great cyclists are known to have been cheating (using illegal performance enhancing substances) - Contador, Ulrich, Anquetil, Vinokourov, Greg Lemond (probably), the Schleck brothers, and the greatest of them all, Eddy Merckx. Many of them were never prosecuted, and those who were only received minor punishment.
I suppose one could continue to argue that if everyone cheats, then the field stays the same, and Armstrong is still the greatest. But that’s silly. I have no idea what percentage of them cheat. They do say that “without using performance-enhancing drugs, it is impossible to be competitive in this sport.”
This is a case of “the higher they are the harder they fall.”
Tom
I used to really like Armstrong and would only watch the Tour de France when he was contending, but I now have no sympathy whatsoever for him. Pat McQuaid, the ICU president, was quoted as saying he was “sickened “ by the USADA findings and “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling…He deserves to be forgotten”!!! Lance was not “doing it because everyone else was doing it”, he was organizing and directing it, he was coercing those who were not willing. He wasn’t corrupted; he was a corrupter.
To anonymous:
All the things you say are true. Great disappointment. I doubt that he will be forgotten. But he will not be remembered the way he would have liked.
I am somewhere close to Tom in this process. I am a long-time supporter of Lance, and I am sad to see all this evidence that he doped.
Lance is on the receiving end of a one-sided media blitz, for a culture that seems to revel in bringing down its heroes. The desire to become a celebrity is apparently what motivates Travis Tygart, and the desire to avoid a loss of income is apparently what caused many to testify against Lance. Shame on those who are caught up in this as though they are fighting for good, if it is really self-interest that motivates them.
But the evidence is convincing to me. Lance cheated.
It isn’t too difficult to process the idea that I had a sports hero who turned out to be doping, and that I love a sport in which doping was the rule, not the exception. What is difficult is to figure out what this says about my cancer experience, because Lance’s inspiration was a part of that experience, part of my resolve to endure whatever came and to fight forever and to live strong. Is my victory over cancer less valid because I was inspired by a doper? Sounds like an easy question to answer, but this will take me a while to work out, much like a grieving process.
I had a friend who couldn’t bear the chemotherapy and stopped, and cancer took her life. I wonder whether she would have fought through it if she had an inspiration like Lance. I wonder whether there are people now fighting cancer who will not find the strength in themselves to beat their disease, because Lance is now less available as an inspiration.
This whole discussion misses what is really important about all this nonsense and also those things that should most interesting.
1. Armstrong was involved in a high stakes game. His ability to win, by whatever method, resulted in his amassing a $125 million fortune. And even with a $3.9 million penalty for getting caught, his success is a testimony to the American dream. He and his are set for life. We live in a society in which honor is an illusion --- a sentimental storyline -- cultivated by commercial interests to come between millions of suckers and their wallets. Tip of hat to Lance -- Well Done!
2. Does anyone doubt that the players of America's no. 1 sport, namely football, are stewed to the gills with so-called "performance enhancing" drugs? Our obsession with fingering individual cheaters is transformed into nonsense when the whole of the "sport" depends on it. Our malevolent delight in fingering "cheaters" is part of the entertainment that feeds a machine that is all working people up into frothy excitement, thereby loosening their wallets.
Fake merit and fake honor are favorites. Those who place honor before $$$ in all walks of life are rare indeed and the wise observer, upon seeing dollars rained upon winners in the Olympics, in business, in entertainment in art and politics, should fix their gaze with jaundiced eyes.
3. And finally, in our pharmacologically obsessed society -- better living through chemistry -- where do we draw the line between what is cheating and what is not? Given the millions of $$$ at stake, the consumption of what version of power pill or pain killer or energy juice in the ever-growing apothecary of modern science is to be considered cheating?
Our hypocrisy is appalling. We have become a nation of celebrity worshippers who drool over the numbers. We kneel at the altar of the meritocratic myth of exceptional individual achievement and thereby teach our children the secret of success. Do whatever it takes to be exceptional. Stand out from the crowd. Run the fastest, be the biggest, richest, smartest, most cunning. Winners keep winning and losers are relegated to the dung-heap of ignominy. Moral, ethical and honorable actors finish last!
Tom, you are not alone on how you were hoodwinked. I was too.
Although I chose to believe how great Lance was, the inner side of me would say - this is too good to be true.
The moral of this tragedy - although he tried to fool the people, the only fool was Lance Armstrong. Inspite of his superior accomplishments, in the end he will be rembered for getting caught.
Just like Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Mark McGuire, Pete Rose, and so many others. Lance forgot the old expression - if two or more persons know about something - it's no longer a secret!
Thank you all for your comments. Good points and good discussion!
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