Mal y pense

My bride was intrigued by the spectacle of Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey, so that is what we watched tonight.

And it was, indeed, intriguing, but not for the reasons it was advertised.

Most of it was a simple repetition of things we know, or should have known already.

The doping, well, I've said this before; I had no doubt that Armstrong, like most of his great competitors, used the methods they did - EPO, CERA, HGH, testosterone, stimulants, corticosteriods - because they had to, to win. The officials that should have been ahead of the cheaters were helpless, and so it was cheat, or lose.

It was obvious to me that Armstrong fully absorbed the ethic of the peleton of his day; that to win meant to cheat, and that anyone who couldn't or wouldn't cheat was not a hero but a fool.

From tonight's interview it's fairly obvious to me that Armstrong still feels that way. And he is still the carefully unsentimental predator he has always been.

He is remorseful, yes, but only because he was caught and in so doing has harmed people he actually cares about; his children, his mother, perhaps his wife and his ex-wife.

The rest of us, well, we're not really people who matter. We're there to be extras in The Lance Armstrong Story.

Most of us think this way, of course, but it takes a pretty enormous ego to be willing to parade that attitude in full view on national television.

And for the record, Oprah really was an awful inquisitor. She wasted an immense amount of time on things that were self-evident and let slide the real hard questions that might have forced the man she was supposed to be interviewing to reveal himself. He slid around any real acceptance of the wrong he did to those who had spoken the truth about him, notably Betsy Andreu and David Walsh.

Armstrong seems clearly using this as a ploy to win sympathy and as an attempt to gain some sort of toehold back into professional sport. He openly stated that he thought his punishment was excessive and that he was driven by a need to compete.

And that was a point that Oprah, as was her habit during the entire interview, failed to seize upon.

Because if Armstrong really needed to compete he needn't return to the Chicago Marathon or any other sanctioned event. He could train and run or ride in secret and alone, where only he would know how strong and fast he had become.

But for this man what he knows about himself is not important. His life is lived by what others know about him. It is not important to be the fastest, or the strongest. It is important to him that others see him as the fastest and strongest.

That has always been the only real question to me worth asking here: "Why now?"

"We've heard you say you're sorry. We've heard you claim that you feel that you have to tell the truth now for your children's sakes. But if that were the case, why didn't you tell the truth when you, of all men, could have told the truth and changed the very sport you claim you loved? Why should we believe any of your apologies now, when you had the chance to be a truly great man and you didn't; worse, instead of merely lying and cheating you savaged those who DID speak the truth about you?"

Sadly, this interview just made clear what we've known; that this man will never do anything for itself. He is simply not made to value such things.

Lois Bujold - I always seem to come back to her when I'm talking about Armstrong, for some reason - writes that the difference between honor and reputation is that reputation is what others know about you, while honor is what you know about yourself. That "(t)here is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying."

Which it may well be for a man or woman who prizes honor above reputation, the inner truth over the outward show.

But, if otherwise irritating, obscure, and incomplete, this interview did show me one thing clearly; Lance Armstrong was not that man.

And he still is not.

Gods and Heroes

The tale of Lance Armstrong has become almost tragic.

The only thing that saves it from true tragedy is that the tragic hero doesn't seem to be aware to his fatal flaw. He seems unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge that he has paid too grievous a price for his glory.

Lois Bujold said it best: "Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart." When Lance traded his honor - the very thing he trades on most, his reputation as a clean rider - for victories he gave away the gift. And he can never regain that gift; it is gone as though it had never been.

The fact that it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Armstrong, like nearly all the other top-flight cyclists in his era, relied on a combination of transfused blood and drugs like EPO and CERA to boost their endurance to impossible levels does not make the other facts of his lifestory - the cancer and the recovery - less true, or less moving.

Yes, there's a lie there. But there is truth, too. And to accept the truth you have to accept the lie; you cannot have the man without his failings, and it is for you and I to decide if those failings are too great for the man's achievements to have any meaning.

We want our heroes to be perfect. We want them to be pure, without stain, without sin. We want them to be bigger than we are, better, in short, we want them to be more than human.

But to be more than human is to be closer to a god than a hero. There are those among us who wanted Lance Armstrong to be more than a hero, more than a human, who wanted him to be perfect as a god.

And that will always end in heartbreak.

Clay

I've talked about this many times before, but now the evidence seems too overwhelming to refute:

Lance Armstrong was doping during some or all of his post-cancer Tour wins.

The thing is, I've never really questioned that great likelihood that the one-man icon machine was using something like the same methods the rest of the peleton was using. As I've also said before; professional cycling and The Tour in particular were drenched, saturated in doping in the Nineties and Oughts. All the patrons, the big powers of the peleton, were shown to have doped. The notion that Armstrong had some sort of godlike physique that enabled him to fly along with the blood-dopers and EPOids?

Ridiculous.

Obviously Armstrong will go to his grave without ever admitting that he was cheating. The person he wishes to be perceived by others (and, by inference, he perceives himself to be) is dominated by the conceit that he cannot be a cheat.

But now equally obvious is the conclusion that the man DID cheat.

And I should note that it says something very interesting about the man that he has invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in forcibly denying this, and attempting to force others to support him. Given what we now know, it is intriguing that he would have insisted on this course, rather than simple grim silence. Either he is the infuriated victim of the most grotesque conspiracy every concocted, or his arrogance truly has no limits.

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. I wonder; what does Lance Armstrong know about himself. In the dark hours of the night, does he ever reflect on what he was and what he has become?

But, frankly, to me it no longer matters what the man did or does or if he ever admits what happened on the roads, in the cities and towns of France over seven years.

What we know is that athletes who need to win to make a living will cheat to win if there are no sure penalties for cheating. As surely as the sun rises or the rain falls. If you knew that your competitor was cheating and would not get caught, what virtue is there in being beaten hollow as an honest man?

So it would be nice if Armstrong would lie down and take his beating like a man. But he won't. So we will have to accept this as an indictment of the principle that any sport - any profession, any nation, anyone anywhere - can afford to be complacent and lazy about policing itself.

Professional cycling can no more expect its races to receive respect if it does not force its liars and cheats into the harsh light of punishment than a nation can expect to receive good government if its political "discourse" is dominated by ridiculous lies and half-truths and the public press forgoes exposure and ridicule of those lies in favor of facile presentations of fluff and nonsense.

There will always be those who choose to cling to the comforting lie rather than stare dry-eyed at the eviscerating truth. There will always be fools who will prefer to lie inert and be fooled than to force themselves to do the hard graft of determining the truth from the lie and finding out the consequences of each.

And there will always be the Armstrongs who rely on those fools. A fanbase, and a nation, of sheep will inevitably find that their heroes, and governments, are wolves.

Dynasty

Thinking back at this month's posts, the thing I note is that I didn't talk one - not once - about this year's Tour de France.

And it wasn't because I didn't watch, or didn't enjoy, this year's Tour. Both Mojo and I are "Tour fans"; that is, while we sorta-kinda follow the sport the rest of the year, we only really get the fever around late May. Watching the Tour is a morning/evening ritual at the Fire Direction Center, and what's kinda of nice is that our kiddos are getting the fever a bit, as well.

This year we all started out sort of hoping that Cadel Evans would do well, perhaps even repeat his win of 2011. When it became clear sometime in the middle of the second week of racing that 1) Cadel just didn't have it, and 2) Bradley Wiggins and the monster that is Team SKY were going to roll over everyone we fell apart, each developing our own favorites. The kids fastened on to Vincenzo Nibali because we had nicknamed him "Nibbles" in the first week and they loved the image of this lean Italian as a little mouse on a bike.

Mojo just enjoyed the racing and the incredible power of the British cyclists. Think back - how many times has a team come to the Tour with two riders who could easily have won the general classification? I'll be intrigued to see what happens with Chris Froome this winter.

I turned to following van Garteren, the young man from BMC who ended up winning the young rider white. He looks like a hell of a promising guy, and perhaps he will turn out to be the Luke Skywalker that brings a new hope to Team BMC next year.

This year's Tour was the story of a team, and a rider, that were head-and-shoulders better than everyone around them.

Sports - hell, history itself - is often a tale about powerful groups or individuals. Us hairless monkeys like power, strength, and so we tend to go all that about those "great dynasties" from the safe distance of our armchairs.

But I think that we forget that drama tends to come from great rivalries, from tense encounters between opponents of nearly equal ability and strength. The great dynasties of history tend to make quick and boringly brutal work of their enemies. It must not have been a whole lot of fun to be, say, a 1st Century AD German warrior. Sure, every so often you get a Teutoburg Forest or two. But usually it's the same old-same old; meet Roman troops, get ass waxed, wash, rinse, repeat for about three centuries.

Every time you hefted the ol' spear and shield there must have been the thought, well, shit, this is gonna suck.

Great teams and great individuals tend to do that to their opponents.

This year it was SKY and Wiggins who put Britain on the podium in the sort of casually brutal way that those great powers do.

Next year? Perhaps not; unlike Rome, cycling teams tend to be quicksilver, and the tension between Wiggins and Froome is almost certain to explode this SKY team very soon.

As always, this year's Tour was a great spectacle, a great athletic event, and a great human story. We enjoyed the hell out of it, warts (doping) and all. Vive le Tour!

But this year the drama was all about the dominance rather than the rivalry. All about the greatness rather than the tension. This year it was Britons first, the rest nowhere.

Patrocles with a Chainring

I meant to talk about this year's Tour de France earlier, but it's been an insane week around here, what with the grandparents coming (and then going) and my work pulled me out of the house at 4am and not returning me until after sundown.

But I'm here at work late, watching a direct shear sample consolidate, and wanted to share some thoughts about the 2011 edition of the grandest of the grand tours.

But - this is probably the fortyzillionth time someone has made this observation but it's my first, so bear with me - this year epitomized what makes bicycle stage racing such a terrific sport.Because, and we've talked about this before, if sport means anything other than mere diversion and physical exercise it is a sort of bodily morality play, a struggle between ideas; ideas of training, ideas of what the human body and mind are capable of, ideas of right, and good, and wrong, and evil, all carried out in the gross physical acts of a small group of very fit people.

Every contest, whether it's a soccer match, a chess game, a debate, a bicycle race, is in effect an argument between different ideas of what is the right sort of match, game, debate, or race. How best to prepare for it, perform it, succeed at it.This is what makes international soccer so entertaining, or matches between clubs with very differing styles of play; because the two gaffers, the two teams, are wordlessly insisting that theirs is the better notion, and the contest is a way of determining who is right, or closer to right.

Which is what makes the effect of cheating - like the doping in cycling - so pernicious. Because if you don't know whether, and you suspect the likelihood of, the cyclist who ride so heroically today was powered not by will, or stamina, or great training, or brilliant technique, or aided by a ferociously organized team, but instead was fueled by some faceless chemist or physician concocting a blood transfusion or chemical cocktail...well, it makes the entire business less than pointless. Even if you consider sport a worthless entertainment if the contest is honest at least there is the simple truth of the winning and losing, the striving and the gain.

But if the business is a sham, and the achievements and disasters painted over with a taint of cheating, well...

At any rate, this year is supposed to have been a very clean Tour, and I am pleased with that.So the other thing that makes stage racing so satisfying is that the other business of sport is to tell a story, and the great stage races can tell stories with a delicious zest that is matched by no other sport I can think of.

Imagine a soccer match - no, a string of matches - played out every day over three weeks. Only instead of just two teams there are dozens on the pitch, all playing each other, and all for different aims; some to score goals, some to win matches, some to keep a clean sheet, some for individual brilliance, some for team perfection. And those matches would be played on a different pitch every day - some perfect lawns, some muddy fields, some with huge ravines and immense hillocks within them.

That's why a grand tour is so incredible.

Because both the cast, the setting, and the process of a grand tour are perfect for a wonderful tale. Here you have a large group of actors, these cyclists, some 200 of them. But they are organized into smaller groups; the teams, the specialities - climbers, sprinters, the great heroes of the peleton - the GC contenders - and the workaday domestiques...together they present a literally colorful patchwork congeries for our enjoyment.

Different, and yet the same everyday, lining up for the start whether for 200 kilometers of flat roads in Brittany or a short, brutal afternoon's climb into the Alps; the same names, the same faces, that we come to know over three weeks.And yet, changing every day, every hour, as the roads beneath them change. Today might be a day for the speedsters, the sprinters, rocketing across the finish in a rainbow of bone and muscle. Tomorrow may be a day for the climbers, dancing on the pedals as the poor sprinters sag back, hoping merely to finish in time.

Every day is a new match, under differing skies, over changing terrain, and all moving through time towards the final day in Paris. And there they are, the Hectors and Achilles and Ajaxes of our Illiad - the GC riders. Every day they rise or fall, every moment cycling on against the clock, ticking the kilometers off as they eye each other and the pack, needing to husband their strength yet knowing that that strength may need to be sacrificed to reel in a challenger or hold onto a championship.

The Armstrong Years, as great as that champion was, were a different sort of story. It was always about the Great Hero, always about which of the Trojans would fall to Achilles' fierce attack, and when. We always knew that the horse was full of destruction, just not where and when, and on whom, it would fall. Those years were incredible in many ways, but this year was just and incredible because its story was so much unlike the earlier one.This year instead of the one colossus, we had four pit fighters;
Alberto Contador - defending champion, but worn from the Giro and bloodied from the ugly doping cotroversy still hanging over him.
The Schlecks - fierce youngsters full of promise...but how much was still promise and how much ready to hand? And
Cadel Evans - the perennial also-ran, the lonely battler over many a lost campaign, only this year with a new team that looked ready to fight for him.Well, if you followed this Tour you know what happened, and if you didn't you've already stopped reading this post. Cadel finally donned his maillot jaune, a worthy champion at the head of a tough, well-led team. I will never forget Andy Schleck, though, riding away from the peleton on the day of the Galabier, riding like a hero, riding like a man possessed, throwing down the challenge to the other GC contenders. Or Thomas Voekler, who proved yet again that that famed yellow shirt can, indeed, make a man ride like he had the strength of two. Or the old god of thunder Thor Hushovd, at 33 and ten years veteran of the Tour, roaring to stage wins and a week in yellow.And, perhaps, the most dramatic three days in recent Tour history; starting with Scheck's incredible 60 kilometer attack that culminated in victory on the slopes of the Galabier, to Evans' ferocious ride up the Alpe d'Huez - even as Schleck rode Voekler out of yellow - that preserved his chance for overall victory, and finally his destruction of the Schlecks in the penultimate time trial stage that brought him home in the golden fleece to Paris.The glory......and the pain, the drama......and the grinding days in the saddle. We watched it all and it was a great story, a great Tour, another year we were carried away in the hollow ships.Vive' le Tour!

91 hours in France.

The 97th Tour de France is over.Alberto Contador has won his third Tour, bringing him into the corona of the Greats; the equal of Philippe Thys in the Teens, Louison Bobetin the Fifties, and Greg Lemond in the Eighties and early Ninties. The next step is a fourth and fifth victory; if the Spaniard can manage that he will be assured a place in cycling history alongside Hinault, Merckx, and Big Mig Indurain. His performance in the individual time trial on Saturday was strong enough to allay most of the questions observers like myself had about the athletically acceptable but sportingly questionable attack on the Port de Balès on the 19th of July that put him in yellow.

This edition of the Tour will, sadly, probably be remembered more for the Last Tour of Lance rather than Third of Alberto.The spectacle of Armstrong struggling to keep up, his jersey ripped from crashing, is a worthwhile reminder of the incredible luck needed to even finish, much less win, this most grueling of athletic events. In the seven times the man won this event he never had a really bad day; never took a serious injury, never really fell catastrophically at speed as he did in Stage 8 this year. The pain he endured was the pain of victory, not the agony of defeat.You could make the argument that for a man of 39 twenty-third place is not a defeat. I doubt that Armstrong feels that way; he is what he must be to have won this race seven times - a predator, a man with a tremendous ego and need to win. No, regardless of his age, today must be a bitter end to his cycling career.

And, for me at least, this year asks some real tough questions about the man who was either Lance's strategic partner or his sock puppet, Johan Bruyneel. Because Team RadioShack was, in my opinion, a disaster this year. Yes, it won the "team GC" classification, traditionally a sort of booby-prize for the team with the most organization and least talent at the Tour. The very notion of building a team around a man of 39 was questionable; the notion of not having a Plan B in case that man crashed out or cracked was even more questionable. Sadly, Levi Leipheimer was exposed as merely a nice guy from Butte, Montana. He never put in a serious attack, never even looked remotely threatening. His thirteenth place was the result of grinding out decent, unspectacular, ultimately mediocre rides every day. That's not enough to become a great champion. He will have to step up his riding if he wants to step onto the podium. And at 37 he doesn't have much time.

The man who turned out to be the real GC hopeful for RadioShack, Chris Horner, was misused for three weeks carrying water for Armstrong or Leipheimer.

The question now is whether Brunyeel can find his next Armstrong or Contador. He has shown that he can't win through pure tactics. If he can't find the next Great his day may well be done.

Mark Cavendish won his fifteen sprint stage in two years.

Holy fuck, the man is fast.

Today is Contador's day in the sun on the Champs. His rival, though, will be back next year, with his brother Frank healthy, and there must be some concern in the Astana party tonight about the possibility of challenges from other of the riders that showed well this year such as Jurgen van den Broek of Lotto and Ryder Hesjedal of Garmin.

Perhaps the single biggest story is the one that has not been told about this year's Tour; the question of doping.

The UCI and the Tour organizers will tell you that the extremely low number of riders ejected for using CERA, ERO, tesosterone, HGH, or any of the many other chemical and blood products that the sport has been saturated with since the Nineties means that the testing is working, and that the dopers are being forced out, or forced to cut back or give up their craft.

And the fact is that the 2010 race was more like last year's relatively scandal-free Tour, and has not featured the horrendous doping scandals of the Tour of 2006, and the lesser but still ugly expulsions of 2007, and 2008 Tours.

But here's the thing that disturbs me.

There's no question that the Tour in the Nineties and Oughts was soaked in doping. The arrival of EPO and the EPO-derivative CERA, HGH, testosterone...these forms of cheating helped men fly up mountains and recover overnight in ways that no clean rider could match.

The patrons of the Eighties, the big men like Lemond, and the domestiques like Frankie Andreiu - who themselves knew of tricks like corticosteroids and caffeine - couldn't believe how the peleton flew along the roads at 45-55 kilometers per hour. EPO changed everything.

In the infamous "Tour de Dopage" in 1998 the winner (Marco Pantani) finished riding 3,877 km (2,409 mi) in about 93 hours.

In 2006, the even more infamous Tour of Floyd Landis, the eventual "winner", Oscar Periero, rode 3,639 km (2,261 mi) in 89 hours 40 minutes.

When Rasmussen of Rabobank was thrown out for dodging a doping test in 2007, while still in yellow, Contador's eventual winning time was 3,569.9 km (2,218 mi) in 91 hours.

You would think that if the testing had been effective in reducing the use of the blood doping, the EPO, the hormones and the drugs, that the winner's time would have begun sliding backwards from the dope-saturated Nineties and EPO-drenched Oughts.

This year's winner's time?

3,642 km (2,263 mi) in 91 hours, 58 minutes, 48 seconds.

Away in the Hollow Ships

On the final rest day of this year's Tour de France, a moment's reflection on the 97th running of perhaps the world's best known bicycle race.

1. This year's Tour seems to be more of a grinding endurance test than ever. The cobblestones didn't help. The weather didn't help. The crashes didn't help. After 16 days of racing there are five riders within eight minutes of each other, but many of the pre-race favorites; Armstrong, Cadel Evans, Ivan Basso, are far down and many minutes out of contention.2. I think we can stop wondering whether if Contador is a one- or two-year wonder, or a great champion in the Hinault and Indurain mold. If he can win this year, and not be brought low by injury or drug use I think he has established himself as a potential successor to the greats of the sport.

That said, I can't help but think less of the man for his attack on the summit of the Port de Balès. If sport is about anything it must be about the measure of the sportsman or sportswoman. The play should be fair; that's why cheating, whether it's doping or foul tackling or buying umpires is so poorly thought of. If sport is to matter anything, it is about testing one person against another to see who can go faster, higher, stronger, further. Regardless of the course of events that day, Contador lost his chance to prove that he would have beaten Schleck fairly. That isn't his job; his job is to win the Tour. But my job as a fan of the sport is to choose who I believe best honors the sport.3. I have talked a lot about this before, and there really is no point in rehashing it. The Armstrong Era of the Tour is over, and in a spectacular fashion; "Your father was no merciful man in the horror of battle.
Therefore your people are grieving for you all through their city,
Hektor, and you left for your parents mourning and sorrow
beyond words, but for me passing all others is left the bitterness
and the pain..."

4. I find that perhaps the saddest part of the Fall of Hektor is that his Patroclus, Levi Leipheimer, inherited a team in disarray. Johann Bruyneel's name has been mentioned when the great organizers and coaches in the sport are mentioned. But this year has to make one wonder; was Bruyneel a great tactician or merely the trained bear for great riders, Armstrong and Contador? He seemed unable, once Armstrong fell, to find a way to get his backup GC contender, Leipheimer, into position to threaten the podium in Paris. Leipheimer seems destined to find a place in the Hall of Near-Fame, a position in the pantheon of the Demi-Gods of Cycling.5. And, again, this year is a tale of woe for Cadel Evans. The Australian rider had suffered from atrocious team support in last year's Tour, finishing 29th, after three years where Silence-Lotto provided barely enough enough help to get him on or near the podium. But the truth is that the man had to do most of the hard work himself. His new BMC Team has done no better for him than Lotto did. But, let's face it, the man cracked on the Col de la Madeleine in Stage 9. He has not ridden like a champion this year. But it's sad to see him fall so far, and land so hard...

As always, the Tour is a pretty good reflection of people in general, with all their hopes, and fears, their greatness and the smallness. It is pain, and fear, bravery, and weakness. It is a great spectacle, and the battle promised for the Tourmalet tomorrow should not be the least of its enticements.

Update 7/21: It is beginning to look very like another Tour victory for the man from Pinto; he paced his rival Andy Schleck all the way up the Col de Tourmalet. I think that Schleck's chance was to drop the Spaniard on the big climb today by a minute or more - he couldn't. And barring disaster I suspect this means a third climb to the top of the podium for Alberto Contador.So as always...Vive' Le Tour!

Trial before Pilate

The generation of this post came from two very different parents, as should all fertile offspring. The first was a comment on the earlier post at Graphic Firing Table about celebrity culture in general and as it applies to Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, in particular. The other was a part of a long conversation I've been having with a friend, a terrifically bright and vital woman, about perception and truth and the relationship between them.

First, the comment. The poster, a friend of ours who is a cyclist himself and is married to a fitness fanatic and passionate cycling addict, said:

"...your discussion of the Lance's bad behavior was the final straw, and I just took off the yellow bracelet I have been wearing for months...as I read the coverage, and read about Kristin Armstrong I felt less and less happy about wearing the symbol of somebody I increasingly thought of as callous and egotistical. The details of his breakup with Sheryl Crow just crystallized my distaste for Lance's character."

So the revelation of Lance's ruthlessness put an end to both the bracelet and the respect.

The discussion revolved around my friend's concept of Truth as something universal and immutable, a sort of Truth as Godhead, that exists as an object beyond, immune to and unaffected by, human perception.Its a good discussion, and well worth the recounting but beyond what I want to talk about here. But I want to use it as a frame to hang my subject on.

Because in this case the is a central Truth to the matter: the entirety of the personality of Lance Armstrong himself.

This is utterly unknown and, more to the point, unknowable, to any of us; my friends, me, you the reader. We cannot know Lance Armstrong as he knows himself, as his family and friends know him, even as those who are acquainted with the man know him. What he likes, what he doesn't, his strengths, his failings...beyond the crayon drawing of the man presented in the public media we have, like my friend's concept of abstract Truth, no way of understanding LA through inquiry or perception.

We can observe, assess and judge what we see as aspects of the man's personality. And I have, and did; saying that, while I respect the man's athletic skills and his tough struggle back from cancer, his treatment of the women in his life leaves me cold, and less that enamored of him as a husband, fiancee' and lover.

But the things is, those things don't lessen his skill. They don't detract a bit from his courage.

And they don't affect his stated belief, through his Lance Armstrong Foundation, "in life...in living every minute of it with every ounce of your being...in energy: channeled and fierce...in focus: getting smart and living strong. Unity is strength. Knowledge is power. Attitude is everything."

As someone who has been shot at, well, Lance, no, attitude isn't everything = windage and elevation make a difference. But let that pass.

The thing is, the yellow bracelet can mean different things, and I would say that it may mean more, or less, or just different things than the man himself.

If you're wearing a Livestrong bracelet to symbolize your fight against cancer, or someone's hope for recovery and survival...or as a way of expressing support for the man as a cyclist and a champion, then it seems to me that revelations of the man as a man, husband, father, partner really don't dim the brightness of that little rubber band. You can support the man as an athlete, or as a cancer survivor, without admiring or respecting his romantic or sexual ethics.

But if you're wearing it as some sort of general show of affiliation or association with Lance Armstrong the man, well...

...then you're probably wearing it for the wrong reasons.

Lance Armstrong is no different from any of the other strong, glib and pretty people we "meet" through the electronic media. His strength cannot strengthen us, his prettiness gild us, or his fame enhance us. His intelligence doesn't make us wiser, his wealth make us richer. We are who we are regardless of our wish to cover ourselves with a tiny corner of the mantle of his celebrity.

Sadly, we live surrounded by the notion that none of the realities in the above paragraph are true, but we are smaller and lesser for believing them. When Pilate asked "What is truth?", he meant to pose a conundrum, not state a contemporary confusion. But more and more, I believe that we in 21st Century America are truly confounded separating our perceptions from reality, belief from fact, and the cold truth from warm and inviting lie.

(crossposted from MilPub)

Alcibiades on a bike?

I didn't blog about this year's Tour de France at all.

Writing that surprises me. I've blogged the Tour every year I've been doing this, from the tainted 2006 Tour of Floyd Landis to the 2007 Tour with all the drama of the expulsion of Rasmussen, the heroism and then the shame of Vinokourov, and the arrival of Alberto Contador and the departure of Team Discovery to 2008 and the Year of Little Carlos.

I enjoy pro cycling the way other men enjoy porn; seeing the flaws and the fakery and the seamy byplay of it all but enjoying the resultant pleasures - and mortification - of the flesh, nevertheless. In this case, the flesh, bone and muscle it takes to get on a bicycle and ride over a thousand kilometers in three weeks. Through little towns and great cities, fields of flowers and industrial wastelands. Up to the summits of the great mountains of history, through the passes where Charles Martel and Napoleon's soldiers marched. It's just a great sport.

But not this year. I'm not sure why. Caution, perhaps. So many of the riders have been caught doping, it's always a chancy thing now to predict or celebrate a great ride.But the other reason was, I think, that I sensed the possibility of a really ugly Tour with the return of Lance Armstrong. I've discussed before why I think LA's return to the sport isn't an unalloyed benefice. And, sure enough, the Armstrong Show had an immense impact on, and I think a very mixed impact on, this year's Tour.

The is no question that the presence of Armstrong raises the awareness of the Tour in this country. When LA is not riding the conversation I hear about the race is pretty much confined to the real hard-cores, the genuine cycling fanatics (of which we have more than a few here in Portland...)

Once you get away from the Bike Gallery or the Portland Wheelmen the level of interest drops to...well, pretty much zero. I doubt that 90% of the Portlanders you see sporting a Livestrong yellow bracelet could pick Frank Schleck or Mark Cavendish out of a crowd if you put a gun to their heads. But add our Texas boy back in, and...well, you know the answer.

In fact, the Versus people counted on the Armstrong Effect this year. In a small but telling gesture they added a tiny Astana jersey to the usual lineup of category leaders' jerseys at the bottom of the screen that tells you where the leaders are at any point in the day's stage.

So you knew not only where the GC, points, mountains and young rider leaders were...but where the uncrowned King of Cycling was. I know this seems trivial, but did they do this for Sastre, the defending champion? Had they done this for ANYone before Armstrong? I mean, great champion or not, this is a 38-year-old coming off four years of retirement and a broken collarbone. Why should we have any expectations of him other than that he would try and do his best to win, as he always does?

Oh, yeah, right. He's LANCE ARMSTRONG!

So. The Tour was it's usual wonderful mix of vicious politics, brute force, gasp-inducing skill and grinding endurance. Those of us who watched got to enjoy the usual sights of the color and power of the peleton, great breakaways, monster climbs and frightening descents (including Jen's Voigt's horrific crash descending the Col de Petit San Bernard shown here - warning, not for the faint of heart). The story, as always, was who would cross the finish line in Paris in yellow, and Alberto Contador was that man.But I have to think that winning his second Tour was extraordinarily difficult for Alberto, and not because of the heat, the wind, the climbs - and the Spaniard climbs like a goddamn elevator - or the crashes. It was because of all the attention paid to his teammate Armstrong.

Johan Bruyneel is a very bright man and a great maker of cycling teams. If this Tour is any indication of his personality, however, he is also a poor man-manager and something of a jerk. Signing Armstrong to a team that already had a GC monster as leader showed that he either 1) had lost confidence in his man Contador, 2) was so in love with Armstrong that he was willing to risk an all-out fight between him and the Spaniard rather than see LA sign with another team, or 3) thought so much of himself that he thought he could ride both these tigers to a podium sweep in Paris.

Well, the expected occurred. Contador and Armstrong are predators, egotistic men who live to win. The veneer of politeness wore thinner and thinner as the tour went on, until finally Contador attacked on the slopes of the Col de Verbier, taking the yellow jersey.

He did the same again three days later, to the public ire of his team director and his teammate Armstrong (who, by then, was by tradition and financial caution rendered unable to attack a yellow jersey held his own team) for dropping his teammate Andreas Kloden out of contention for a GC podium. With his immense climbing strength and the dramatic mountaintop finish on Mont Ventoux the penultimate stage the outcome was pretty much decided. Only the ill feelings persisted.Of course, there were other stories - there always are, that's the glory of the Tour - such as the Schleck brothers riding for the glory of Luxembourg (has Luxembourg EVER had any glory?), or the incredible speed of Mark Cavendish who yet managed to get schooled by the flying fox, Thor Hushovd, in how to win a points jersey without blinding speed.The race ran its three-week course of victory and defeat, of pain, hard work, desire, the thrones and dominations and all the splendor thereof. Not to mention the silliness, indignity and fatuousness, which is pretty much what you'd expect for any great human endeavour...So as much as I enjoyed this year's Tour, I came away feeling a little sadness for Contador, the young man whose second victory will always be tainted by the anger and frustration he must feel at his own team, its manager and his "teammate" Armstrong. And that brought me back to the man from Plano and what our obsession with him says about him, and about us.

I don't know anything about Armstrong the man. The notion that we can "know" people we have never met is a curious development of the electronic media and its saturation with the lives of the famous (although these are often known only for a sort of circular fame that rests on their simply being well known; modern celebrity seems to require neither exceptional wisdom nor particular skills but merely a complete lack of privacy). I can only guess by what is reported of his actions.

He is, obviously, a very driven man, personally and professionally. A man of great ego, and self-absorption; one has to be, to be a great athlete. Of his continuing battle after his cancer we are told of his indomitable will and his zeal for life. Of his personal tastes, he seems to be a bit...simple. We've learned so much else about him, but not that he writes poetry, plays the koto, knows how to swing dance or enjoys the films of Harold Ramis. He seems, well, a bit of an athlete: uncomplicated (a synonym for "kinda crude") and direct. Hard to say...

His politics appear to be a bit of a mystery; he is a personal friend of perhaps the worst U.S. President since James Buchanan, George W. Bush, but is quoted as saying that he "disagrees" with the idiot son of George and Barbara.

I respect the man's strength and courage. But it's telling how small things affect how we feel about other people we don't really know; Armstrong lost the ability to touch me more deeply with his cutting treatment of his former fiancee'.

To publicly claim that he broke off the engagement because he "didn't want more children" only months ahead of his impregnation of his new squeeze?

Cruel, Lance. Very cruel.

Here's the thing, though.

Armstrong was publicly discussed as a political candidate back in 2005/2006. He himself talked about a possible run for governor of Texas (but scrapped these plans when - I suspect - it became obvious to LA that as GOP governor of Texas he would have to make decisions to please his party that would cut off a lot of his Livestrong donations). But he was considered by some, and still is in some places, as a viable political candidate.

On earth - why?

We don't really KNOW the man. What we do know - especially in light of his treatment of Sheryl Crow - suggests that he is, for all his virtues, also a ruthless egotist with a side of cruel.

(For those of you who don't recognize her, this is the FIRST Mrs. Armstrong, Kristin, whom he dumped for Sheryl Crow. Who may have been the first to get the real feeling for how ruthless the man can be when he wants something.)

But he's famous! How can he be ruthless, callous or mean? Don't we know him? Don't we LIKE him?

People have always been entertained, or even obsessed, by the rich and "well-born". The extravagance and public display of royalty and nobility constituted perhaps the only public benefit of monarchy prior to the electronic age. But it is since the arrival of the mass print media, newspapers, television and movies that real Celebrity Culture has launched. We are bombarded, saturated, with the doings of the rich, the highly places, or the merely "famous". In the Seventies Rula Lenska

was a sensation because she became well known for...being well known. She was a novelty, a curiousity, a freak. Today she would barely qualify as a footnote. Our public fascination for celebrities like Rula and Lance Armstrong has become almost inescapable.

So what?

Well, the "what" is that we have begun to - in the words of P.J. O'Rourke - "impute unlikely virtues to the cute." The damn cult of celebrity has left the entertainment page and the moviehouse to wander over into politics and the public square. Where once we elected generals (as if U.S. Grant hadn't warned us about the foolishness of THAT form of hero-worship...) we now elect actors. Ronald Reagan. Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Sonny Fucking Bono.

It seems like any idiot with an Equity card can get elected, at least as a Republican (tho with Al Franken we may have the Democratic equivalent). So why not Lance Armstrong? Despite the evidence of the man's professional sporting life as well as hints from his personal life that many of the attributes valuable in a public figure: thoughtfulness, self-criticism, empathy, humility (to go with the more common decisiveness, confidence and intelligence) are lacking or severely stunted in him, he certainly wouldn't be the worst well-known person we've ever elected to power here in the United States.

A democracy's deepest vulnerability is to demagoguery. Would be autocrats may attempt to conquer it, wealthy malefactors to purchase it, bureaucratic moguls to subvert it. But nothing can destroy a democracy so thoroughly and so permanently as the foolishness and greed of its people. "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury." (interestingly, I have always thought that this quote is from de Toqueville - I see that it is not. Regardless, it is well put, and the longer version of the famous Dick Cheney statement: "Deficits don't matter".)

Add to foolishness and greed the public's willingness to promote to public office someone whose primary quality is that people have seen them on television in a uniform, or in costume. For any polity to choose its leaders based on how they look or what they do is often a mistake. For a democracy, where trust between leaders and led is so crucial, electing incompetent boobs because of their scripted sound bites sound good coming out of a familiar and pretty talking head...well...

In the early 400s BC Athens, then the leader of one faction fighting the Peloponnesian War, debated the next campaign against Sparta. One of the Athenian politicians was a very handsome and gifted young orator named Alcibiades.Of this man, Thucydides says: "Alcibiades, son of Clinias, who wished to thwart Nicias both as his political opponent and also because of the attack he had made upon him in his speech, and who was, besides, exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage, and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by means of his successes."

Alcibiades helped talk the Athenians into one of the most disastrous campaigns in military history - the Sicilian Expedition. His oratory, and the citizen's greed for power and loot, combined to begin the end of the great Greek democracy.I don't know if Lance the politician has the potential to be our Alcibiades. None of us does - in fact, we don't really know the man at all. The problem is that our celebrity-infatuation makes us feel like we do. So we keep electing our Lances. And Reagans. And Schwartzeneggers. And Sonny Fucking Bonos.

After all, they're celebrities. We hear about them and see them and know all about their lives. They're so strong, and so pretty, and it's like they're our friends because we know them so well.How could they possibly ever betray us..?