Why Lance Armstrong Had to be Brought Down

Lance Armstrong has been stripped of his medals for alleged use of performance enhancing drugs. A decade ago. From 1999 to 2012 he was a hero, the best cyclist in the sport, an inspiration to millions across the globe. He created a foundation that has done wonderful things to aid cancer research, and help cancer victims and survivors. He was an American icon. But America cannot have heroes. We cannot have great men. We have not been able to allow ourselves to have people who were smarter than us, stronger than us, better than us at anything, for generations. If such a man does come along, we may cheer and applaud him for a time, but eventually we grow jealous and must find a way to tear him down. He must become as small and petty and flawed as we are.

Of course every man and woman has flaws, especially those who gain fame. We are humans; we are flawed. There was a time when such flaws were understood to be there, but were not sought out, were not thrown into the spotlight in order to shame an otherwise great person. Instead those aspects of a person that were admirable and commendable were highlighted. This was not to coddle the ego of the individual, but to allow that individual to be inspirational to a nation. No man is a saint, and even historians are getting into the dirt digging idea and proving that the saints were no saints in their everyday lives.

But why can we not allow an individual who inspired us, who we all said at one point or another was the greatest among us in his or her specialty, why can we not allow that person to remain an inspiration? Why do we as a society insist on dragging our greatest back down into the mud we wallow in?

It took nearly a decade for “investigators” to “discover” evidence that Lance Armstrong had doped, although they were digging for it the whole time. He had passed every single drug test he was given for the seven years he was leader of the Tour de France. But now we say that those test results are still pristine (because of course no one has been trying, by hook or by crook, to prove that Lance doped). And of course with “new testing methods” these investigators can show that the test samples from a decade ago are still viable, untainted, untampered, and pristine, to prove that Lance was doping years ago.

The testimony from former teammates is also going unchallenged. But then, they were all threatened with lengthy suspensions unless they provided damning testimony against one particular man. That is not in the least bit a suspicious, threatening, coercive move by the “investigators.” And here I thought that those who were seeking truth and fairness did not threaten and coerce people. I thought that was the mob, or certain governments in history that were less concerned with truth than with spectacle and vengeance.

And vengeance against who? A man who inspired us, lifted up a nation, inspired couch potatoes and cancer survivors alike to get up and take control of their lives by exercising and caring about their bodies. How dare he. We are a nation who would rather have a “C” student as our leader than a Rhodes Scholar, because we enjoy having someone as ignorant and bigoted as we are lead us. We cannot allow athletes to remain great, we have to find a weak spot and knock them down. We cannot allow ourselves to believe in a person who is flawed, and all people are flawed. So we have to find those flaws, expose them, let those flaws obliterate everything great that our former hero did that we loved, and then rejoice that we have proved to ourselves that they are just as base and petty and vile as we are.

The defaming of Lance Armstrong was not about truth, or justice, or fairness. It was about our own selfish need to not have anyone be that much better than we are. How dare he have inspired us. How dare he be a hero.

Someone is playing the radio. . .

The writing prompt for 2/21 was "someone is playing the radio. . ." so here is what came tumbling out of my head following that prompt. I am trying to get back into writing for at least one prompt a day, hopefully posting my results will spur me on a bit, I could certainly do with the motivation. Now, being a true writing prompt exercise, this is a single draft, no editing, no fact checking, just my own imagination and the prompt it used to jump off into the great unknown of my brain's randomness.

     Someone is playing the radio. The words come through softly, indistinct through the wall. It is not music, but not talk radio either. At first he thought it might be public radio with Prairie Home Companion or something like that, but it doesn’t sound quite right. It sounds older, somehow a truer sound than the junk that fills the airwaves anymore.

     The muffled radio mumblings sound like home Not the home he knows now, which is no home at all, but a home from his childhood, back when families had homes of their own. There was no tv yet, and after dinner they would all gather in the main room to listen to the radio. There were some music shows that would come on, new singers or big band numbers. Late at night you could get classical concert style stuff. But most of the things on the radio were variety shows, or stories, or what you would call a sitcom if it was on tv today. And they weren’t these new shows with all the cursing and the sex, were someone dies almost every show. They were more wholesome stuff. There might be arguments, but no one would just cuss out the other person, there were real words in their arguments. And there was a resolution, they would work things out, talk things out and it would all be better by the end. There were spooky shows too, late at night. You could turn out all the lights and sit and listen to them in the dark, just to get yourself good and scared. There was no way you would go to sleep that night, not on purpose anyhow. And those shows weren’t bloody and gory and violent, that stuff doesn’t work over the radio. There was suspense, and the sounds in the dark that send chills up your spine: a creaking floorboard, a door swinging shut, the sound of footsteps. Everyday normal things that you heard on the radio then could swear you heard in your own house and you just huddled on the sofa praying that whatever was out there wouldn’t get you. But you didn’t turn on the light. That would make it all go away, it would make everything normal and ordinary again, and there was something delicious in the chilling suspense of the story being spun into the dark of your house. Those were the days he remembered now when he went to sleep, the days of the radio shows, and when he had a family all in one house together, and you could walk in and you were loved.

     The programs on the radio these days were soulless, they didn’t care if you were out there listening or not. They didn’t care what you wanted or who you were or how your life was going. They just played their music and hardly ever talked to you except to tell about the traffic or the weather. The talk shows only talked about the bad, and there was plenty of that. Besides that, the talk shows were more shouting than talking, and they didn’t care about you either, they just wanted to yell at you or sell you something.

The radio was not what it had once been. The world was not what it had been either. The world had somehow gotten darker, colder, and less inviting with every year that passed. No one cared if you lived or died anymore, just as long as you did whatever you were going to do out of everyone else’s way.

But tonight someone was playing the radio he used to know, the radio that drew you in, drew families together to sit around and listen together, to talk and laugh together. Not like tvs where you get shushed if you say something and no one looks at anyone, they all just stare with empty eyes at the picture box. Drones. Zombies. Mindless and thoughtless as long as the box is on.

     The radio show didn’t play on the real radio anymore, he knew that. The sounds coming through the wall would be from a computer or a cd, some little piece of the past captured and brought forward to remind him of better days. He knew it was not now, it was not truly real, only an echo of what had been. But tonight he was grateful to whoever was on the other side of that wall. He was grateful they remembered those old days, and that they would play those recordings. Maybe they were remembering better days too. Maybe they were just like him, lost and alone and searching for a way to get back to what had been theirs once. In his prayers he thanked whoever was on the other side of the wall for the gift they had given him this night, for giving him that wonderful memory, a simple thread to follow to find his way back home for a time. He fell asleep to the sounds of the world that was drifting through the wall into his dreams.