We’ve
all read by now that American hero and cyclist Lance Armstrong has admitted to
Oprah that he, in fact, used performance enhancing drugs during his run at the
top of his sport. Immediately upon
learning that he would be admitting his usage, so many in the news jumped on
their high horse and started condemning anything and everything that Lance
Armstrong is. Facebook and Twitter
exploded with attacks on him. Quite frankly,
it’s gotten ridiculous. Before I get
into this, I don’t want you to think I am defending him in any way. I honestly don’t have enough facts to make
any kind of informed judgment. I just
want to put out a few thoughts.
There
are a few things that blow my mind about this situation. There are a variety of people mentioning that
Armstrong tore down the people around him.
He has cost people jobs, money and a variety of other things as he
covered his tracks. The interesting
thing to me is that now we have people tearing him down…for tearing people
down! That is the sheer definition of
hypocrisy.
Most
likely you have lied about something in your life. No one reading this is perfect. People lie all the time and continue to build
on that lie, regardless of the consequences.
The problem with Armstrong is that his lie was on a much larger scale
than others. He has a unique story of
inspiration that adds a wrinkle so hard to accept. It’s difficult to balance his deception with
the positive things done through his Livestrong Foundation.
The
situation with Armstrong is no different than any other professional athlete who
chooses to utilize illegal substances to get ahead. I can’t help but always think that if you know
a person lives in a dirty world, you can’t be surprised when they are exposed
as dirty. The cycling world is one of
the dirtiest sports in the world that almost annually has someone (or multiple
competitors) busted for steroid use. How
naïve are we to think that Armstrong was the lone, upstanding athlete in this
corrupt sport?
The
fact is that the onus of steroid use in sports is on the shoulders of the fans (as
much as the athletes), who routinely turn our heads and pretend it isn’t
prevalent. We like to pretend that our
sports heroes are all natural, despite physical evidence showing otherwise, and
then condemn them the moment they are exposed.
It’s not just cheating after their career is over. It is also cheating when they are chasing
Roger Maris’ home run record.
Major
League Baseball was in awful shape coming off of a strike shortened season of
1994, which cost fans the World Series. Attendance
and television ratings had sagged. The
league needed something to bring people back around. Enter Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Despite the obvious physical change we had
seen in them, the nation got caught up in the chase for the home run
record. We rejoiced and were ecstatic when
McGwire blasted record breaking homerun number 62. We cared about the accomplishment. It wasn’t until his career had ended that we
started to care about how he did it.
We wanted
to attack and condemn Jose Canseco for exposing steroid use, but at least he
had the guts to admit it. He never
denied his steroid usage. He wrote the book
that blew the doors off of Major League Baseball. Somehow he became a pariah, when in fact he
was the one honest guy in this entire situation. If his book had not exposed the rampant use,
would MLB have done anything? I
sincerely doubt it, but once Canseco’s book came out, they were backed into a
corner and had to respond.
It’s
time we stop jumping on a high horse and acting like these guys are the worst
thing on Earth for trying to gain an advantage.
The fans are just as guilty. We
support the guys who hit the most homeruns, who hit the hardest in football,
who punch the hardest or the American dominating cycling (a sport we don’t even
care about as a nation). The layman will
never understand the world of the professional athlete; a world where there is
always someone coming up that is bigger, better, stronger, faster. It never surprises me when one of them has
been exposed as a cheater. They do
anything they can to gain an advantage.
Unfortunately some have to resort to illegal activity to accomplish it.
Don’t
act for one second that any cheater in the world, in sports or business, wouldn’t
do the exact same thing as Lance Armstrong, Mark McGwire or the guys of Enron
did. It means they are human and made
mistakes. It’s what makes us human. We make mistakes. We try and fix those mistakes, but sometimes
we handle that incorrectly. Just because
you haven’t done something on a grand scale like they have, it doesn’t give you
the right to judge them. You may not
agree with their decisions, which I don’t, but they have to live with the repercussions
and not me.
Before
you pledge your unrelenting fandom to someone, you might want to make sure it
is someone you know you can respect. At
the end of the day, though, fans never truly know their sports heroes. The best thing about sports idols is not only
marveling at their on-court or field achievements, but sometimes you can learn a
little something about life outside of those athletic moments.
One
thing we have to learn about these situations is that none of us were
there. We really don’t know what they
did or did not do. We don’t know how they
treated others. We hear sensationalized stories
that bring in readers and viewers. It
could be the truth. It could be someone
with an axe to grind. I’ve learned that
there are two sides to every story and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Regardless,
jump off the high horse and stop pretending we’re innocent in all of this.
Questions
or comments? Feel free to e-mail me at: wahlscorner@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment