A teacher friend who started a
cycling club for the kids at his previous school tells me that as a result of the Lance
Armstrong/US Postal doping scandal, two parents have pulled their children from
the club and my friend is not sure it will continue at all next year.
Have people no sense of proportion? By letting their children join a high-school
level club did these parents think they were launched into a pro racing
career? A cycling club, where children
would learn to ride safely and efficiently in a group, train properly and enjoy
athletic accomplishment with their peers has nothing to do with the cheating
and corruption at million-dollar commercial teams. When Linford Christie was suspended for
doping were kids pulled out of track and field clubs by their parents? Did Mark McGwire’s steroid revelations end
Little League baseball? No. Are professional sports rampant with cheating
and corruption? Yes. The danger is that people rationalize them as
more than the mere entertainment and spectacle they are and when the truth is
finally out fans feel used as their loyalty has brought fortunes to people who
maybe never were deserving of their support.
Lance Armstrong’s return from cancer to extraordinary athletic
success on the road was an heroic story, resistible only by cynics. He was admirable for his professional
approach to the sport, his dedication to training, his control of a powerful,
unified team. For jingoistic Americans
he was the Texas outlaw beating the effete Euros at their own game over and
over. Less attractive aspects of his
personality were not so visible to those wanting victory. Sports fans who had ignored cycling forever
were inspired now by it and not just in North America: while riding the recent
Gran Fondo associated with the World
Championships in Limburg one was struck by how many of the 7,000 mainly-Dutch
participants were riding Armstrong-era Treks.
Add in the highly-visible Lance Armstrong Foundation, the rock star
connections and the millionaire lifestyle and here was a totally different kind
of cyclist. But eventually the truth
will out, as Marion Jones (track) and Dwain Chambers (track) and Nina Kraft
(triathlon) and Duncan Spencer (cricket!) and Detlef Hoffmann (canoeing!!) and
so many others discovered when they were caught. And now Lance Armstrong, to deafening howls
of indignation.
I began watching pro cycling in the Indurain era and it has
afforded me great pleasure over the years.
It was wonderful to stand in a square in Bonn watching a big screen television and seeing
Lance ride away from Jan on the Alpe d’Huez or to see Lance chase down the pure
climbers on the Hautacam in the rain and pass them without looking back. To stand on the Alpe myself as Frank Schleck
tore off alone to the summit and stage win.
So many challenges addressed, so many memories made. Even now I admire the attacking spirit of
Alberto Contador at the Vuelta this year or think of Johan Museeuw at the
velodrome in Roubaix, pointing to his knee.
People who knew of my interest in racing would say: “But
they’re all doped” not because they cared about cycling but simply to deflate
the bubble, to diminish the pleasure of watching the riders. There was real effort-- sweaty, painful,
eye-popping, screaming-muscle effort--here on the roads of Spain or France or
Italy, even if chemically-enhanced.
Nobody ever won a three week long race by sitting on the couch and
eating potato chips and taking a shot of EPO at the start line. But is seems that an awful lot of cyclists
were taking that shot.
The argument that they all did it is no argument. They cheated wilfully and while entertainment
was provided to the fans it was at the cost of authenticity as well as theft
from those who did not cheat. The
cheaters should be punished or pardoned and the UCI needs to sort itself out
and the sponsors need to rethink what the pro sport is to them. Sports results are ephemera; they are really
yesterday’s newspapers and will be recycled as the next race begins. In truth, fans don’t actually live or die
from the results of a sports match, whether soccer or cycling, although from
all the indignation over the Armstrong case you would imagine they did.
Instead, I prefer to think of what cycling really means to
me. It has very little to do with being
a wanna-be-Armstrong but takes me back to cool mornings riding with my friends,
great friends I would never have met except through cycling. Or cycling alone across Spain on the path of
the pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago.
It is about training hard and enjoying the rewards of that effort
spent. It is about competing against
myself on the 15 km time-trial course, aching for that 40 km/h average but not
quite reaching it. It is about fixing a
flat tire effortlessly. It is about
planning and riding great roads through fantastic scenery, whether on the
California coast, the Adirondacks, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Dolomites, the
Vosges, the Black Forest. It is that
epic ride over the Blue Ridge and through the Fort Valley when you forgot to
eat that you laugh about for years afterwards.
It is about pride of possession or admiration of beautiful purposeful
machines, whether conceived by artisans working in steel or the product of the
highest of high-tech. It is the joy of
speed downhill on smooth asphalt, the tires whirring. These are the things that those kids in
Nick’s cycling club will lose because their parents cannot differentiate
between the important and the less important.
