As my wife and I were chatting this morning, I told her about the developing story of cycling and doping. Former Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has now admitted to cheating, and how he's implicated Lance Armstrong. It seems as if it's only a matter of time until Armstrong is busted.
I reveled in being one of the few who didn't praise Armstrong, but cynically assumed he was cheating. It sure looks like I was right.
But my wife had a different opinion. Rather than high-fiving me and helping assert my self-righteousness, she looked sad. She said, "That's terrible. Just think about all those yellow bracelets."
I paused and thought back on the whole thing. Yes, Lance Armstrong should be reviled and chastised if Landis is telling the truth. He tricked us all into thinking he was a true hero; when instead he was nothing more than a phony. He took his seven phony championships, upgraded from his wife to Sheryl Crow and rode off into the sunset. What a scumbag.
But he allegedly did what pretty much every cyclist does. And he raised a mountain of money and awareness for cancer. It's not as if the money will be returned, but the truth of sports and fairy tales slowly is coming to an end. We live in a society where cheating is paramount, whether it's in the stock market, politics or even high-school athletics. To win is to cheat.
The true sadness of all of this is that we're becoming accustomed to taking any heroics with a grain of salt. The next time we hear of an amazing athletic feat, we're going to close our eyes, cover our ears and wait for the bomb to hit. Even if it never comes, we aren't the same people anymore. Not in this era.
Not to go Unabomber on anybody, but I miss the times when all this wasn't around. Before blood-doping doctors, HGH and roids. But part of me wonders, are more people cheating, or is it we're just better at catching cheaters? We can X-ray a corked bat or follow a paper trail of a crooked doctor now. What if we could have done these things back then? Would Ben Hur have been busted for feeding his horses something more than just oats?
So while Lance Armstrong's eventual downfall isn't anything out of the ordinary, it's just another domino in our ever-growing cynicism about sports. I'm just not sure if were always gullible, or if the money and fame has pushed more over the edge into competitive advantages. Either way, it's a sad day when someone's hero gets busted.
The real fairy tales are about the ones who resisted the urge and fell short because of it.My heroes are the late-round picks who get cut because they can't bench 400 pounds and still run a 4.6 40-yard dash. They won't see the millions of dollars and magazine covers that the cheaters did, but they will have the clear conscience of knowing they did their best, and did so legally. These athletes won't be champions, but they'll be winners in my book.
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