Lance Armstrong
L’Etape du Tour is an opportunity for amateur cyclists from all over the world to ride a stage of Le Tour de France. This year, the route will be Stage 20 of ‘Le Tour’, some 125 kilometres up and down mountainsides. Of the thousands who take part in ‘L’Etape’ on 7 July, many will give up, others will proudly tell friends and family that they rode a ‘Tour’ stage and never mind it took them eight hours or more, it will be something they’ll cherish in future years, and so they should.
However, the professionals who will follow them on 20 July will do so at an average speed of around 35kph and, by the time they get there, will already have completed a prologue and some 19 stages of this monumental test of human endurance, or put it another way they will have cycled well over 3,000 kilometres during July, arguably the hottest month of the year in France.
Put that into context.
When I go out on my bike I’ll cycle around 50 kilometres on a typical afternoon, by the end of which my legs will be on fire, and don’t even ask me about other parts of my anatomy. I’ll have been on my bike for around three hours. I’ll need at least a couple of days to recover. Yet professional cyclists do three times that distance in nearly the same time every day for three weeks on end.
Paula Radcliffe’s fastest time for the marathon is two hours 15.25 minutes. The marathon is a distance of 26.2 miles so a very simple calculation shows that she runs at an average speed of over 12 mph for two and a quarter hours. I once set a running machine to that pace and lasted 10 minutes before collapsing in a heap.
Through my involvement with professional rugby I have met many top-level rugby players and, while I am a passionate rugby fan and played it for many years before turning to coaching and refereeing, I can only look on in wonder at the capability of professional players.
I am friendly with Kevin Ferrie, the Herald’s chief rugby correspondent. Over the years he and I have had arguments about just about everything within rugby, always amicable, but equally always forthright. One area where we have had a particular debate is around the transition of rugby at the top level, from an amateur sport to a professional business.
It will probably come as a surprise to him that I have finally decided that he is right and I was wrong. Professional sportsmen and women inhabit a universe that will forever remain a closed book to the rest of us.
A professional lives in a cocoon, surrounded by coaches and advisors; his or her every move from the moment they waken up in the morning (at a time specified) until they go to bed (ditto) is programmed. They have one purpose and that is to compete and win. Not merely to take part, but to contribute to victory. If you are a ‘domestique’ in cycling your job is to help your team leader win; in rugby and football, it’s to help your team win. As a runner your purpose is to win and if competing at the Olympics to add your contribution to ‘Team GB’s’ success so that politicians can bask in your reflected glory.
It is this reflected glory that adds pressure, for it’s not enough to win for yourself; you must win for the vicarious satisfaction of your supporters. We are all familiar with the corrosive nature of some supporters in relation to sports such as football where a team’s victory is seen by their fans as an affirmation of themselves and what their lives stand for, and losing is taken as a personal disaster.
That ordinary people invest so much of their emotional capital in the life of another human must be a burden that for many sportspeople becomes unbearable.
The argument that nobody asks the professional sportsman to take part is on the surface powerful, as is the claim that they are well rewarded for what they do. Both arguments are for the most part true, but only from the perspective of the man in the street who sees the trappings of fame and wealth without seeing the burden of pressure that the demands for continued success requires. For the sportsman or woman the recognition of their talent provides them with a vehicle to excel that may not be open to them in any other walk of life.
I read David Millar’s autobiography recently. It is a searing indictment of a culture in which a supremely talented, though young and naive, cyclist from Scotland charts the pressure placed upon him to become part of a cycling environment in which ‘Le recoup’ – ‘the recovery’ – the cocktail of vitamins and pain-killers taken routinely at the end of a day’s cycling morphed into ‘Le prepare’ – ‘The preparation’ – where performance-enhancing drugs were available and where refusing to take them was viewed as letting the team down.
Now Millar makes no excuses, least of all for himself, but he does eloquently reveal a culture in which winning regardless of the cost to the individual, both physical and emotional, is paramount. Nor am I trying to justify such behaviour. But is it surprising that in this cocoon away from ‘real life’, certain individuals’ character traits become more pronounced?
Lance Armstrong has been subject to a tirade of vilification since his stage-managed appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. I have never met him so I have no first-hand knowledge of the man, but I have read his book. I have also seen and been the recipient of some of the incredible work that his Livestrong charity has done.
On the available evidence he does not appear to be a very pleasant person; he is self-centred and by some accounts a bully, who makes unreasonable demands of others in order to get his own way. He is also an incredibly driven human being who conquered testicular cancer and went on to win one of the world’s toughest sporting events seven times. Considering that drugs only improve performance and do not create the inherent ability, you have a uniquely talented person with human flaws.
That he let himself down is unquestioned. He says so himself (despite the lack of physical evidence, but that’s an argument for another day). He let down his sport, though questions have to be asked about the role of the UCI (the governing body of cycling) in the whole drugging issue. He let down his sponsors, but let’s not pretend they’ve suffered – the dollars poured into Nike’s coffers and they haven’t exactly been shy in their continued support of Tiger Woods, another seemingly less-than-pleasant human being with flaws. And he let down the people for whom he had become a role model.
But is that not the core of the problem?
Did Lance Armstrong set out to be a role model? Did Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter? Mike Tyson? The list is long and not particularly glittering, but surely we who look up to such people have to ask ourselves whether we are investing too much in people with a particular talent, than rather getting out there and working on our own behalf. We expect others to give us the emotional fulfilment we are unable to generate for ourselves and, in doing so, we open a door into a way of life that for many becomes the means to their own self-destruction.
We talk of supermen and women and expect such people to be so in every aspect of their lives, in effect to live our ambitions and dreams for us but without allowing them our get out clause – the freedom to fail.
On 13 July 1967, Tommy Simpson, the British cyclist, died during the Tour de France. He was 30 years old. The autopsy revealed amphetamines and alcohol in his blood.
To this day competitors on the Tour acknowledge his memory as they pass the memorial to him on Mont Ventoux. In doing so are they acknowledging the memory of a great man; or someone for whom failure could not be countenanced; or someone in whom too many people invested too much of their own desires and who was ill-equipped to deal with it?
Bill Mitchell is a founding director of Optimum Organisation Design Ltd, a member of the SRU senior panel of officials, and a born-again Highlander
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