Norman Einstein's
ISSUE 09 (02/10)
"Purity Of Heart Is To Will One Thing: the Aesthetic Poverty Of Lance Armstrong"
by Rough Justice
[Rough Justice is half of the team blogging the transcendence and hypocrisy of sport and those involved in it at There Are No Fours. He clings fervently to his dream of perfecting a knuckleball so good the Red Sox can't deny him, although he'll deny it if you ask him.]
If there is some point to everything we do, something we want for its own sake and which explains why we do everything else, then obviously this has to be the good, the best of all. And there has to be some such point, otherwise everything would be chosen for the sake of something else and we would have an infinite regress, with the result that it would be futile and pointless to want anything at all.
-Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics
The New Year is a month old, and so a new cycling season starts to form in the minds of followers. The Tour Down Under, part of the Union Cycliste Internationale's ongoing attempts to expand the sport's viability beyond Europe (see also: the Giro d'Italia's plans to have its opening stage in Washington DC in 2012) has come and gone, but in this hemisphere things kick off with the Paris-Nice Race to the Sun in March. At this point, Tour Down Under excepted, the season is pure potential. Every rider in the peloton has dreams of heroism and every fan tries to divine the contours of what is to come.
Reading through a thread of such hopes recently, I was reminded of just what low regard the American cycling scene holds for Lance Armstrong. While Sports Illustrated's and ESPN's cycling coverage centers on him to the exclusion of anything else, those who follow the sport in any capacity beyond maybe reading about the Tour as it's happening are collectively deeply ambivalent about the man. Why? His crime is at its heart one of betrayal.
Lance Armstrong didn't win the Tour Down Under. In and of itself, this isn't surprising. It's a race built for sprinters, with only one serious climb in it, and Armstrong is a man built for time trials and climbs, not field sprints. More importantly, it's early in the season; he's still tweaking his form, putting in the first race of a trajectory that will, he hopes, culminate at the top of the podium on the Champs Elysees in July. He had little incentive to win, and I would bet the idea of trying never seriously crossed his mind. There's no crime in treating the race as a tune-up or gauge of fitness rather than a serious competition, but it's indicative of a larger trend in Armstrong's (post-cancer) career.
Here's the laundry list of significant wins Lance has achieved: US Cycling Champion in 1993, World Cycling Champion in 1993, Clasica de San Sebastian in 1995, La Fleche Wallonne - possibly the best event name in sports - in 1996, the Tour de Suisse in 2001, and the Tour de France in 1999-2005. That's a respectable career without a single Tour de France victory, but look at the timeframe there. The only one of those that came during his string of yellow jerseys was the Tour de Suisse, and I'd bet you quite a bit of money that he won that as a tuneup for the Tour, the real Tour, where he was in good enough form that he won without pushing himself beyond his predetermined training.
He didn't invent the strategy - Miguel Indurain, for instance, had a similar tack - but Armstrong and his directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel made an art of using the entirety of the cycling season as training for the one race that mattered to them. Theirs is an empire built of single-minded doggedness, of spending all of their time and endless money focused on one single race each year. All of the training hours, all of the wind tunnel testing, every stone of their pyramid was there simply to win le Tour. Lance Armstrong aimed himself like a missile at a single contest for the better part of a decade.
This is not to diminish the man's talent. If you aren't familiar with his exploits, take some time to view his greatest hits on YouTube. He could outclimb anyone and out time trial anyone, and the explosive acceleration that was his biggest weapon is still staggering. The Tour de France is universally held to be the crown jewel of cycle races, and rightly so. To win a spring classic, or any other single-day race, you must have good legs on the right day and be fast enough to beat the pack, possibly in terrible weather. To win a stage race, you must not only be able to hold your own in the mountains, in time trials and in sprints, you must do all of these things for weeks straight, and be good enough at one or more to end up the fastest overall. The Tour de France is the hardest of the stage races and the most prestigious; it's a career-maker. Though a different race crowns the world champion, the man who wins the Tour is king for a year. You cannot win the Tour without being one hell of a cyclist, and you certainly can't win seven without forcing yourself into the conversation for best cyclist ever.
Credit: Matthew Alberty (Flickr)
Armstrong's failing, then, is not one of body, skill, or planning; it is rather one of imagination. If he was good enough to win two more tours than anyone before him, what else could he have won? There's no reason to doubt he could have won the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a Espana several times if he liked, and it's not at all crazy to think he could have knocked off a few more classics if he had cared. But to do any of that would have meant stepping outside the plan, expending energy beyond what made sense to train for the Tour. If he had broadened his dominance, it's possible he could have been a modern-day Eddie Merckx, head and shoulders better than the rest of his day: the greatest ever. But he has held too tight to the one race he made his for that to be a possibility.
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
An athlete's goals are shaped by who they watch when they are learning their trade. You copy the moves of your favorite players, pretend to be them in your backyard games. Cycling is like other sports in this regard; the champions are single men, inspiring the next generation that has them on posters above their beds. Armstrong was a boy when Eddie Merckx was devouring the competition, and then a young teen when Bernard Hinault was in his prime. Both were well-rounded; Merckx ridiculously so, winning almost everything possible, even the hour record (possibly the purest athletic victory possible) while Hinault was no slouch, taking all three grand tours and quite a few of the classics and other races. Had young Lance loved either or both of these men, or even their rivals, he might have later tried a little harder to emulate them.
Credit: misterworthington (Flickr)
Easily lost in the narrative packaging of Armstrong's career is the fact that he didn't start out as a cyclist at all. He grew up a swimmer and then triathlete, moving to concentrate on his bike at the age of 20. The arena of his glory was not part of his childhood dreams. His sporting consciousness was shaped by American sports, the Texas football teams he still roots for, not Europeans on bikes. But all major American sports have one championship that defines their season. Cycling, like soccer, has a more diffuse season, with multiple chances for victory and dominance, but Lance wasn't paying attention. Is it a surprise that he approached the peloton with the strategy of finding the biggest race and winning it the most times?
Justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice.
-Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
But there is another factor in play for why the American cycling community is so hostile to Lance. Yes, his dominance is in its way boring, but at the same time, he's ours and he's uniquely dominant, and has always done a relatively good job of playing the media game, inasmuch as he cares. The other half of the hostility stems from the nature of cycling fandom in an indifferent country.
It's difficult to be a fan of a sport that is both so diffuse and foreign. To really understand who the favorites are for even the major races, you have to have at least a passing knowledge of a few dozen racers and their teams, and the tactics of the peloton are take some time to figure out. There is basically no media coverage of races, so to learn these things requires dedication in the face of societal indifference. There is an elitism to this knowledge, like there is in any field where the learning curve is steep. The closest parallel I can think of is indie rock fandom before the internet blew up the music industry. Insiders care deeply and passionately, but don't tend to share that knowledge because the general public doesn't understand or care.
In becoming a star, Lance Armstrong leapt over all of this. He only sort of came up through the ranks, going straight from a promising but imprudent rider to Tour champion, separated only by the caesura of cancer. He didn't so much put in his time as leap from the field. There's nothing wrong with this, but it means that dedicated fans didn't have time to get on his bandwagon years ahead of the public. Because of Greg LeMond, the one race Lance dominated was the same one every American could name. He immediately was the American who went abroad and conquered, a story line that always plays well. He single-handedly became larger, at least in the US, than all the rest of cycling. He committed the crime of being too obvious.
The only ways to overcome this in the eyes of dedicated cycling fans would be to either become the best ever, which he maybe could have but didn't, and therefore undeniable, or to be so charming that you couldn't help but like him. His public persona is likeable enough, but in a corporatized, anodyne way that is calculated to put off no one. He learned his PR lessons from Michael Jordan, which is both apt, given his pedigree, and disappointing. There is no hook there to grab the devout. His triumph is unassailable, but ultimately somewhat empty. He is not bettering the sport, he has instead, by design or accident, transcended it. To the American public, this makes him a star. To Trek and Nike, this makes him golden. To the fans who love that sport, however, it makes him nearly a traitor. For all his strength, for all his glory, he didn't bring cycling with him. Is Sports Illustrated going to care about the Tour de France as much when he's gone?
Lance Armstrong stands astride the cycling world, relevant even as he nears forty. It is within the realm of possibility that he will win an eighth Tour de France this year, something that even a decade ago would have been ridiculous to suggest anyone could do. But to become this, he chose to sell out what he might have become. To win his first Tour the way he did is understandable. He had just overcome cancer, and even he didn't know what he could do. It made sense to save his bullets. But to stick to that blueprint when he could have done more is to deny the possibility the transcendent figure he might have been capable of becoming. Lance Armstrong didn't lose the American cycling community by winning the Tour de France seven times, he lost it when he chose to become Michael Jordan instead of Eddie Merckx.
He became a brand, not a champion, and that is unforgivable.
Copyright, all rights reserved.