For years, throughout the month of July, I spend at least an hour (or
more) every night getting caught up on what happened in that day’s stage of the
Tour de France (TDF). I have attended (as a spectator)
many bike races and I once drug the CFO up to north Georgia so we could watch
the Tour de Georgia cover a mountain stage.
We drove for a couple hours, stood around in the cold for another hour
or two, all to see the pack of riders pass by in a few seconds. That was the only time that I ever saw
Lance ride in person. I was an early
adopter of the yellow Livestrong bracelet, I own numerous Livestrong shirts and
hats, and we even have a painting by an artist who followed Lance during the
2005 TDF and painted images from her trip. I’m
not a big “reader of books,” yet Lance’s book “Its not about the bike” is one
of the 4 or 5 books that I have read since graduating from college in
1999. (I prefer magazines… short stories
and lots of pictures!) So yes, I am a fan.
Since his admission to breaking the rules with Oprah last
week, several people have asked what I think about Lance Armstrong. It has been hard for me to come up with a
decision on this, and I’m not sure that I can give a clear answer yet.
I am a person who tries to judges things based on
principal. If you sell a crappy product
and don’t stand behind it, then I’m going to fight you tooth and nail to get my
money back based on principal. I don’t
steal because I don’t want others to steal from me. I believe that if you intentionally take someone
else's life, then you should
die. Yet, for some reason, this story
has my mind all twisted up.
Yes, he broke the rules and cheated. But what do you say when a majority of the
other riders who raced with him also cheated?
Unfortunately, most of the top contenders from that time period have all
been implicated in their own doping scandals.
In some of those years, you would have to go pretty far down the
finishers list before you find someone who hasn’t been busted for it. Does that make it right? No, but it almost seems to me that doping was
the “norm” back then so he might have still been racing against a somewhat
"level" field. However, I can almost hear my mother saying (and waving a finger at me), "just because your friends are jumping off of a bridge, does that mean that
you are going to do it?"
Off the bike, he is a cancer survivor and he started an
organization that provides support to people suffering from cancer and their
families. Does the
good Karma from that offset the bad? The
fact of the matter is that the Livestrong organization exists and it has raised
millions of dollars for a good cause. After all of this has came to light, he stepped down and is no longer officially associated
with Livestrong. Is that enough to save it or will it fall victim and go down with his ship
too??? Only time will tell, but, because of all the good it does, I hope not.
As a fan, I was definitely disappointed that this came to
light. I had hope in the fact that he
had passed some 300+ tests during his reign and I really thought that he was racing
clean. Do I feel lied to and
mislead? Sure, a little bit. Unfortunately, this seems to come with the
territory when it comes to being a fan of sports. The human body can only do so much and most
athletes are looking for every possible advantage. No matter what is done, drugs, blood transfusions and
other scientific “pump me ups” are always going to be around. He isn’t the first, and probably won’t be the
last big name athlete to get busted.
Baseball, football, and even the Olympics have all had their share of drug issues in the past and
probably will again. Testing can only
detect so much, however it sounds like the new “biological passport” system that
they are using now might make it harder to get away with it in the future.
So, back to where I stand…
I still think it is amazing that he was able to bounce back from a 50/50
odds of dying from cancer to become competitive on the world wide cycling stage. A lot of people would have just given up on racing and
spent the rest of their second chance trying to live a “normal” life after beating back the disease. He didn’t.
Would he have been able to do that without the assistance of doping? Who knows.
He then took the fame that winning the TDF gave him and put it into a
building up a charity that does a lot of good for others. If more
celebrities, athletes, etc. used their fame/wealth to support various causes,
this world that we live in could be a totally different place.
Am I giving him a free pass?
No, but what does my opinion really mean? He didn't put anyone else's life in danger, he didn't kill anyone... he made a bad decision to start doping and that snowballed into the chaos that we see now. I have certainly made bad decisions before but, fortunately for me, no one knows who I am and my mistakes quietly disappear into the past.
I am certainly not going to stop cycling because of this. Would I ask him
for an autograph if I ever passed him on the street? Yes, I absolutely would. Will I continue to wear the Livestrong stuff
that I have? Yes, I will (once things
cool down a little). Right now, I don’t
feel like getting into long, potentially heated discussions about him with random people on the
street and at the gym. In a few months, after our media and social websites
have forgotten about Lance and are focused on the next big celebrity dramatic occurance, I will wear them
again. Will we keep the painting up in
our extra bed room? Yes we will. Will I go down to the basement and dig out one of the five or six new, unopened Livestrong bracelets that I have packed away in a box? Yes, I think I will.
Did I answer the question? I’m not sure if I really did... but, as Forrest Gump said, "That's all I have to say about that." (For now, anyway)
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