Thursday, August 30, 2012

Lance Armstrong Redux


Is Lance Armstrong a seven time champion of the Tour de France? Absolutely. And why do I believe this? For the same reasons that Barry Bonds is the home run king. In a dirty field of competitors, it makes no sense to retroactively strip titles and award them to people who were probably just as dirty. It is time for me to pull the lid off of this canned shit. Get ready for a strong whiff of revulsion.

I don't watch sports or keep up with them anymore. The only reason I comment on Lance Armstrong is because I have followed his story since 1999 when I actually was naive enough to believe that he was a clean athlete. I lost my faith in Lance around the same time Greg LeMond called Lance a cheater after Lance spilled the beans in a private telephone convo. It was one man's word against another, but I believed LeMond. I believe Lance is guilty along with all of the other competitors. I am sure there are honest clean athletes in cycling, but they are not at the front of the peloton. If you are going to compete in cycling, you have to dope.

Lance Armstrong's story is going to challenge the anathema concerning doping. I can feel it coming. For me, the disgrace isn't that Lance is a doper so much as that he is a liar. At some point, this shit is going to come out into the open and be accepted much as the underground payoffs to "amateurs" in Olympic sports finally gave way to letting professionals compete in the games. The antidopers cannot win their fight anymore than the Prohibitionists won their fight against demon rum. Doping is here to stay, and it will become an accepted part of sport. USADA and WADA should just close up shop.

Personally, I find doping in sports pretty nauseating. But I have written about this before in Greece and Rome. Sports is either a celebration of virtue (Greek) or spectacle (Roman.) These days, we are Roman in sports, and this is not going to change. Virtue in the athletic arena is a farce. As such, I don't care to watch these things on TV anymore because professional athletes are not heroes. They are fodder for our entertainment.

For me, the thing about Lance is not about whether he was a doper or not. It doesn't matter if he is a champion or not. The real question is this. Is Lance Armstrong a hero? The answer is no. This is why I wanted the truth to come out. I don't want his titles stripped or him to be banned from competition or serve jail time. I just want people to stop revering him as a hero when he clearly isn't a hero. No doped athlete can ever be a hero.

Antidoping organizations are the defenders of a lost ideal. Sports became corrupted by money long before they were corrupted by PEDs. Boxing is the most clear example, but boxing has always been in the Roman tradition of things. Thanks to gambling, you never know if a fight is fair or rigged. If you want to see the future of professional cycling, just look at boxing. Nowadays, the more straightforward spectacle of UFC is what sports will be going forward.

Lance Armstrong is a fierce competitor, a bully, and a pathological liar. These are the "virtues" of today's world of sports. This is the tragedy of the Roman sensibility because brutality and savagery become the name of the game instead of honor and discipline and fair play. The result is not unlike replacing Shakespeare with action movies and porn. The irony is that the spectacle meant to cure boredom merely inflames the boredom and leaves it unsatisfied. But that is a topic for another essay.

I don't watch sports. They make me sick. There are better things to do with your time. When it comes to the good, the true, and the beautiful, today's world of sports is none of these things. Welcome to the bad, the false, and the ugly.

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