LIEstrong

Society loves its heroes. We’ll take a random person, place them on a pedestal because of some arbitrary achievement, and hold them up as an example of what we should all strive to be in our daily lives. Our heroes come from all walks of life, and some are well deserving of our adulation. The big problem in our culture is that we’ve made a habit of deifying those from the sports and entertainment world.

You star in a popular TV show, and suddenly you’re a shining example for humanity. You have a song that makes it to the top of the pop charts and you’re on the request list to visit and inspire sick kids at the hospital. You’re a star athlete and you have the masses crowing for your face to be chiseled on the side of a mountain.  Heck, you could have no identifiable talent at all and still be worshipped by us, the great unwashed masses. Does the name Kim Kardashian ring a bell?

Yes sir, people sure do love a hero.

Oddly enough, the only thing we seem to love more than building up our idols is tearing them down to rubble. The ones we hold in such high esteem are quickly dragged back down to earth as we kick dirt on them and cry foul about how they have so terribly disappointed us.

If you want an example of how fickle we can be, look no further than Mr. Tour de France, Lance Armstrong. Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last 2 weeks and had no exposure to media of any kind, you know that Mr. Armstrong has been publicly crucified for ‘cheating’ during all seven of his Tour de France wins. There have been Oprah interviews, shocking exposes, and analyses on every genre of TV program known to man. Everyone you talk to seems to have an expert opinion on what he did or didn’t do, even if they previously thought Lance Armstrong was a stretchy children’s toy from the 70’s.

I have to wonder how many of the folks ripping Mr. Armstrong apart can seriously say that their lives were profoundly affected by the allegations launched toward him. I freely admit I don’t know and don’t care about the specifics of the doping accusations, and I suspect that most of those standing high on their soapbox don’t understand it either.  I personally like to imagine his blood was laced with gamma rays like the Incredible Hulk. It makes the story more interesting for me.


The funny part of the situation is that what Mr. Armstrong has admitted to is so widespread in the cycling world that in the 2010 Tour de France, every single competitor who placed in the top 10 was found guilty of taking performance enhancing drugs.  That’s not as interesting a story as ‘Super cyclist falls from grace,’ though, so it gets tossed aside.

Performance enhancing drugs or no, there’s no magic potion that can suddenly make a man able to bicycle two thousand miles across, arguably, the most demanding athletic course in the world. You have to be some sort of freakish athlete in the first place to accomplish that feat. If superhuman athleticism wasn’t a prerequisite, every middle aged guy you know would be buying a racing bike and some spandex shorts to take their shot at glory. If you want something to be outraged about, ponder that visual for a bit.

Mr. Armstrong has been vilified by a large segment of the population, but there is one key fact that seems to be missing from many folks’ tarring and feathering sermons. Since 1997, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation has been responsible for raising over $500,000,000 for cancer research. For those of you going cross-eyed looking at all those zeros, that’s five hundred million – half a billion dollars- to combat one of the world’s biggest killers.

A survivor of testicular cancer, Mr. Armstrong served as an inspiration to other folks battling cancer of all types and showed that victims of the dreaded disease don’t have to lie down and wait to die. There’s an inarguable value there, regardless of his sports morality.

Baseball players Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, along with mixed martial artist Vitor Belfort took performance enhancing drugs. Boxers Roy Jones Jr. and ‘Sugar’ Shane Mosley hopped aboard the PED train too. Players from every major sport have been implicated in PED use and if I were to list the names of just the cyclists who have been busted in the past decade, I could fill a dozen columns of this size. The funny part is that most of the athletes implicated have been welcomed back to their respective sports with open arms, and not one of them has started a world recognized charity organization.

Mr. Armstrong admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs and lying about it. From the public outcry you would think he personally went to people’s homes and killed their dogs. We know that’s not the case, though. An NFL franchise would have offered him a lucrative quarterback contract by now if it were.

I couldn’t care less about Lance Armstrong’s cycling accomplishments and how he achieved them. What I do care about is a man who has spearheaded a movement that has done far greater things than any sport ever could.  If one hand is filled with the half billion dollars the Livestrong Foundation has raised and the other is filled with seven tainted Tour de France victories, Livestrong will win every single time.

The end truly does justify the means.