On Lance Armstrong

Once the 2012 London Olympics came to a close, I thought about how refreshing it was to see U.S. distance athletes be in the mix, and in some cases, medal, at the world level.  And then I thought about how inspiring those races must have been for a high school or college runner hoping to one day compete on an elite level.  And then I thought about how when I was in high school, elite running at the U.S. level and elite running at the world level were two separate entities, and how 2012 has proved that those entities are no longer separate, but the same, which is a good thing, because now high school and college runners can look within their sport for inspiration, and not have to look outwards, like I once did.  When I was a teenager, Lance Armstrong served a much greater inspiration for me than any professional U.S. distance runner ever could.  Lance not only competed in endurance races on the world level, but he won them.  He was my hero, and I had initially planned to write a blog post about how Lance’s P.E.D. allegations tainted  what little innocence I had left from my youth, but then Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated beat me to the punch by writing this amazing article on how drugs destroy our fascination with physically superior athletes.  Deford was able to sum up a thought I have been struggling to articulate in three succinct sentences: “At base, we attend games and we become sports fans because we are enthralled that these young men and women are capable, with their bodies, of what we could never manage with ours. We envy and cheer their graceful superiority.  When athletes take performance-enhancing drugs they destroy that basic truth.”   Think about that for a moment.

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