For the public at large it was a shock. For Lance Armstrong apologists it was a fallen hero’s redemption. For dedicated cycling fans, it was far less than they already knew. For North American news editors, it was a prompt to scan their Rolodexes for people who knew something, anything, about this alien sport called “cycling.”
In the days since the world sat in on Armstrong’s chat with Oprah Winfrey (let’s face it, it was more of a chat than an interview), the media has been saturated with analysis and re-analysis of the fallen cyclist’s every word. Much has been made of Armstrong’s evasiveness, his continuing denials, and the likelihood that public relations featured more in his decision to come clean than genuine contrition. The apologists are all but silent now, with Armstrong being pummeled from all sides as a pathological liar and a crook.
Though this pummeling is justified and long overdue, it’s not enough to restrict discussion to just Armstrong. Few could disagree that Armstrong is a liar on the grandest scale and that he perpetrated one of sport’s greatest hoaxes. It’s plain enough to see that we’ve all been duped, but few are asking why we were duped in the first place.
After all, it’s not as though we weren’t warned. Ever since the beginning, Armstrong’s has been a leaky ship, with journalists, competitors and former employees crying foul. Armstrong’s chat with Oprah is not a recent development, but the result of evidence that mounted throughout Armstrong’s reign. Much of this evidence was public. Most of it was dismissed. So the question lingers. Why did we believe?
Armstrong as a person is unique, but as a public persona, he’s a dime a dozen. One could even call him a stock character, the archetypal hero of the American dream who digs deep into the limitless stores of determination and hard work waiting in the human spirit. This hero narrative is so repetitive that it has become an unchallenged, and largely unacknowledged, part of the cultural fabric. We assume it by default and demand a great deal of evidence from claims to the contrary. During his reign as Tour de France champion, Armstrong’s every triumph was seen as self-evidently a product of his own virtue, with cancer providing suitably cozy alibi for his superiority.
Stories like Armstrong’s have pushed our faith in the power of human will into the realm of sheer fantasy. In blasting his critics atop the podium of his last Tour victory, Armstrong said, “I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles, [but] this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it.” That Armstrong evokes miracles to defend his legacy speaks to the supernatural pedestal on which we’ve placed his achievements and the stock persona he occupies.
The discussion of Armstrong has convincingly shown that he didn’t live up to the standard we set for him, but we’re still holding onto the same narrative that duped us in the first place. In explaining Armstrong’s rise, we rarely looked beyond Armstrong. Now, in explaining his fall, we again fail to look beyond the man. It’s not enough to change our image of Armstrong. We need to examine how unrealistic, misguided, and fantastical that image was in the first place. We should not only be revising Armstrong, but our own readiness to believe in his story and others like it.
Few of us will witness the feats of an Armstrong or someone like him up close. But every once in a while we get a glimpse behind the curtain, and what we see is rarely comforting. How many times have we built up a hero like this only to tear him or her down? The reaction is always the same. We condemn the individual for their transgressions — and rightfully so — but we rarely look past the individual to our own complicity in enhancing their image to such unrealistic proportions. With Armstrong, we have seen the man behind the curtain, but have left the curtain up for someone else to sneak behind.
— Mason Hanrahan
Third Year Sociology
