A LANCE THROUGH MY HEART

I love the Tour de France; it would have to be the craziest, most gruelling event in the sporting calendar, and the most telegenic. It is riveting to watch and wonderful to listen to, with the calm and erudite commentary of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. To think of what these athletes must suffer as they travel day after day for 3 weeks, time trials and all, in boiling heat, rain, cold; through the Pyrenees and the Alps, the insane ascents and the even more mad and dangerous descents, riding 90km/hour down the mountains, protected by nothing but skin tight nylon and a dinky helmet; one wrong move and it’s kaput. The dangerous peloton with the jockeying for space, the attacks, the breakaways, the sheer courage and strength and stamina, it’s awesome.  I always want to slap the overexcited spectators for getting in the way, on more than one occasion causing riders to crash, not to mention the one time a dog ran across the road and the riders went down like dominoes.

So considering how difficult this event is and how competitive are the road cyclists, and how crazy the Europeans, in particular, are about road cycling, well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that there are those who use performance-enhancing drugs to get the winning edge. And considering the fact that Lance Armstrong won the Tour 7 times, which is also impossible, I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that he was one of the drug cheats. So I’m not surprised. But I am heartbroken.

Because Lance was always more than just a jock. Lance was a legend. And when you look at the story, well, yes, it did seem too good to be true. And it was.

When I read his first book, ‘It’s not about the bike’ I was moved by his story- alienated from is father, raised by his single mother, struck down by testicular cancer which spread to his bones and brain, undergoing surgery and searching for an oncologist who believed in him enough to try different chemotherapy, looking for a cure when popular medical opinion had given up- and the photos of Lance at his sickest, a bald,walking, scarred skeleton. It was an extreme sort of story of an extreme sort of person. A person who, frankly, came across as an asshole, but one you had to admire for his strength of purpose and resilience. Easy to admire, hard to like.

I believed that the chemo had remade him into something more than human, a physical freak. I didn’t dream that a person with this sort of medical history and this sort of ferocity and dedication to living, would take performance-enhancing drugs. HGH (growth hormone) could have easily triggered any residual tumour growth. Testosterone- in a person with one testicle? Couldn’t that cause it to atrophy? EPO- well, I don’t know that EPO would have damaged him, but still, I naively thought, along with millions, that he would not be so reckless as to take these drugs. So we are all dupes. And there is also now this whisper that, since he was doping before the cancer diagnosis, could the drugs have actually triggered the cancer? (I don’t know enough to comment, but I think probably not, or else there would be heaps more athletes with cancer, no?)

What’s also so awful is the cover-up, involving bullying and intimidation of other riders and apparently, his wife at the time. So he was even a bigger jerk than I had originally thought.

But he is still a great athlete, and so are all the other drug cheats. Landis and Leipheimer and Contadore and all the guys that got caught, and so many who weren’t. They are all great athletes, but they succumbed to the ethos of ‘Cheat or be cheated.’ They made a wrong choice. And now we scorn them.

And the ‘Livestrong’ foundation and those sexy yellow bracelets (which unfortunately spawned dozens of other bracelets so the meaning was kind of lost) and the millions of dollars raised for cancer research- should we scorn that too?

I won’t stop watching the Tour, and I hope Phil Liggett won’t stop commentating, although he must be devastated beyond all measure, as he was Armstrong’s most staunch defender. I want to think that this upheaval will shake out all the cheating athletes and doctors but I fear it won’t. They talk now about ‘the Armstrong years’ as if those were the worst years of doping, but were they? Is it better now? Who really knows?

So Lance couldn’t be a role model; then let him be a terrible cautionary tale. Disgraced, stripped of his victories and sponsorships, a fraud. A great athlete whose arrogance and hubris led to his downfall; the legend has become a cliché.

Cadell Evans better be as clean as they all say he is, or I don’t know what I will do. There’s only so much disappointment I can endure.