First Loser

Found a new hero yet, or don’t much care? Regardless, you have to admit Tyler Hamilton’s recent interviews are shocking. I mean, that hair!

For the most part, I’ve spent the whole sad Armstrong episode standing in the corner just shaking my head. It was on my mind on the ride in to work today, though, and I have what might be a slightly different take on it all.

I don’t think it’s about Lance.

For me it isn’t. For me, it’s about us, fans of pro cycling, being asked to question what we’d all witnessed. If you follow professional cycling, think of a moment that literally got you up out of your chair in the last ten years. That Landis solo breakaway on Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour. Any one of Vino’s mad attacks. Hamilton needing dental work after gritting his teeth so hard racing with a broken collarbone. What Contador has done to the Vuelta that’s going on right now.

Can you trust it? Whatever your personal favorite most amazing day in the history of professional cycling, you’ve now been forced to doubt it. You’d be an idiot not to.

For people who ride bicycles at least enough to suffer, this puts us in an odd place. Those who don’t suffer on a bicycle get to avoid all this. To them, Lance is a figurehead, so they love him. Or he cheated and they hate him. Whatever. But to realize how impossibly difficult it is to ride a bicycle like that–like any of these guys have ridden a bicycle–and be asked to discount that, dismiss it all, causes the brain to do strange things.

Dopers suck. Cheaters suck. But are we supposed to think those rides were easy for these guys?

What sits so wrong with so many of us is that we’re being told those experiences meant nothing–not “less than we thought”: nothing. The reality is that they meant a great deal, corrupted or not. To try to dismiss the entire endeavor might be an honorable approach, but it just doesn’t square with the reality many of us witnessed, wherein one doper among a sea of dopers turned himself inside out to be better than the rest. If the rest of the pack had been clean, I think we’d all feel much better about vilifying the dishonest “winner.” But as it is, we’re being asked to choose alternative winners from a pool of cheaters. Even young children realize that’s stupid.

To be sure, if even half the shady shit that’s being implied about Lance Strongarm’s intimidation tactics and nefarious behavior are true, then the fucker should be in jail, though no one seems willing to pursue that part of it. We’re all supposed to just believe the show’s over after a quiet bowing out by a guy who still gets to keep countless millions upon millions of potentially ill-gotten gain. You can collect all those yellow jerseys if you want, but if he still has the gains, not to mention plenty of fond memories, then what’s been taken from him? Even the sponsors have stuck with him, and why not? The moments were the moments. People apparently pay Kim Kardashian absurd amounts of money just for looking pretty on the outside and being ugly on the inside. That’s a hell of a lot less than Lance has done.

The whole thing is ridiculous.

Fully discrediting someone implies he accomplished nothing, and that’s so patently, obviously wrong that most of us, Lance Armstrong included, just seem to ignore it. Drugged up cheats or not, these riders clearly accomplished something.

You want to really punish Lance? Don’t pretend he never won anything. Give him second place.