Around six weeks ago, in a town tucked away somewhere in the misty green hills of England, a throng of rabid and intoxicated Brits gathered. Now a gathering of rabid and intoxicated Brits is no extraordinary matter unto itself, but this time the alcohol and anger were channeled not at delirious hooligans of the rival army from Manchester, but rather but at a gargantuan effigy of an aging, tired Texan in a maillot jaune.
There, enshrouded in autumn fog, stood the victim. Looking blackly into the void through ostentatious Oakleys, holding in one hand a cracked trophy of the Tour de France and in the other a sign with the words “For Sale: Racing Bike: No Longer Needed,” Lance Armstrong readied himself to take the full wrath of the rabble. He stood with the solidity and equanimity of St. Sebastian, hatred and venom and scorn all over the friggin’ place. A cue was given, and the effigy was soon ablaze. As the flames consumed Lance and his paper mache trophy, a sinister delight rushed across the flame-lit faces of the rabble.
The collective anger here is only indirectly related to alcohol. It is in fact a natural consequence of the loudness of truth. The truth no longer whispers unsure mutterings and allegations; it pronounces evidence with clarity and assurance and volume. The USADA report, compiled after sworn testimony from some 26 individuals closely associated with Armstrong and his US Postal team, reveals a doping program that is positively East German in its sinister opacity and Lexusian in its relentless pursuit of perfection.
The Armstrong scandal raises another critical question—namely, was the Tour de France primarily a race of athletic endurance or rather a doping competition? In a sport where minutiae matter, where a fraction of a percent in performance can make all the difference, the introduction of EPO and blood doping (which experts estimate can have a 10-20% increase in endurance) explode any notion of fair competition. Whether Armstrong was the most gifted bike rider in the race becomes impossible to ascertain. Was he in fact the Übermensch that we all celebrated him as, a slayer of cancer and of rivals in tights, or was he simply a lucky chap whose body responded better to the same dope every other ambitious rider was on?
Be that as it may, this is supposed to be a personal reflection, not a tired meditation on the problem that Lance represents. by saying that I have been positively obsessed with the Lance Armstrong story for the past two months. I find myself binging his name several times daily to see what the latest developments in the scandal are (Google, both as internet presence and as verb, is officially verboten at my place of work, a school somewhere in the Microsoft empire). I spent a sleepless night in early October poring over the 200-page USADA report. I felt like a red-eyed sociopath, but the truth had to be penetrated. I’ve watched and re-watched all that Youtube has to offer on the subject, from the 60 minutes report with former Armstrong teammate Tyler Hamilton to the Australian documentary on the Texan’s doping conspiracy to the now infamous “I’m on my bike” Nike ad. I’ve relived Lance’s climbs up Alpine peaks. I’ve seen footage of former Tour de Frances that I had never watched when I lived in France. I’ve spent hours trying to convince largely indifferent friends and colleagues that the story is worth their time (or at least should be the focal point of every conversation). One would think that I have been hired as an independent legal counsel or media expert on Armstrong, and yet alas, I expect no compensation from either Armstrong or his persecutors. I am just a Texan with a strange sense of complicity in all of this that I myself cannot quite pin down.
Perhaps I will end up one day as one of those bearded weirdos in a public library, loitering with a purpose only I understand, staring darkly at other library patrons from behind a stack of Armstrong conspiracy books and a legal pad. I’ll stop showering, grow unwanted facial hair, wear yellow jerseys that haven’t been washed in years and make JFK conspiracy buffs look square and unimaginative by comparison.
Why the obsession? Well,perhaps the most absurd part of it all is that I do not own a bike--and haven't owned one since I was thirteen or so.
I can also say that I have seen Lance Armstrong in person on two occasions in my life—once in Austin in 1998 and once in Paris in 2002, and I further state that neither encounter meant squat to me at the time.
When I first saw Lance in 1998, he was a virtual nobody, and had not yet won any of the seven tours. He was honored before 80,000 Texans lusting for combat on the football field only to fulfill some perfunctory obligation to a “greater good” (as is so often the case before sporting events, where moments of silence are mere interludes to orgies of brute athleticism and commercialization). I looked benignly down onto the cancer survivor from the upper balcony of Memorial Stadium in Austin. I can’t remember if I clapped or looked at my watch . A year later, in 1999, far removed from Austin in the blue hills of Virginia, I smiled when I saw that the ant I had espied from the bleachers had won his first Tour de France—a race I still had zero interest in actually watching.
In 2002, while visiting Paris for the first time, my good Texan buddy and I made a quick trip over to the Champs-Élysées. Lance rocketed past in his yellow jersey, not even bothering to acknowledge us or stop and have a cup of KoolAid. Obstreperous Texans high-fived (the fist bump had not even come into fashion yet) as Lance won another friggin’ Tour. Ho hum. My friend and I stayed above the fray, preferring instead to quiz each other to see who had the larger vocabulary or to search the crowd for some krasivaya devushka. Lance meant little still.
The fascination with Lance was not to begin for another year. I was living in a dorm room the size of a large van, a stone’s throw from the River Rhine. These years in Bonn were, in fact, the glory years of my life to date. I’d spend my mornings on long runs along the river or at a large outdoor swimming pool, where I’d swim and sit under a large tree with a French novel. My afternoons were most often spent in cafes with attractive young women from France, Italy, Spain, Japan, Russia and China (this was part of pre-CIA training). My rent was a whopping $120 a month, and though my freelance English tutoring money had none yet made me a billionaire, I could at least afford a television set.
I spent countless hours watching German and French television from my dorm room, indulging a habit that I had acquired in my days of childhood vagrancy but this time in the service of language acquisition. My television, owing to the trusted precepts of Maierkultur, was minimalistic, but something special happened when I first managed to see Lance climbing Alpine slopes on his bike and slaying Germany’s Ullrich. Sitting Indian-style on my bed with bowls of cereal on my lap, I would pump my fist in triumph as Lance ascended the Alpe d’Huez or the Plateau de Beille with brio.
When I declare the summer of 2004 the best of my life, I say that not with Bryan Adams mopey-man nostalgia, but with fond memory of my mid-20s, freedom from worldy and practical concerns, devotion to sunshine and soccer and swimming and travel and literature and the exuberance of young love. And for whatever reason, when I recall that summer, I always remember watching Lance at the apex of his dominance, drawing inspiration and vigor from his triumphs and channeling this into various domains of my life. Vicarious living is perhaps the best living sometimes.
Now few would choose to live vicariously through Lance these days. The man who calls himself Mellow Johnny (an Americanization of “maillot jaune”) will drift into a thick fog of shame. My daily monitoring of Lance’s twitter account reveals that his posts, once a steady flow of laconic loudness, have dwindled to the occasional muttering, the sullen and perfunctory pressing of icons on his I-phone to acknowledge the death or birthday of a friend.
Obscurity will be a heavy burden for an egomaniac like Mr. Armstrong, accustomed as he is to seeing his name embroidered on ugly yellow articles of clothing for the past decade, Elvis-style. And though I, like the rest of the world, now know the man to be a doper, an asshole, a villain, I will continue, at least for the short term, my strange and perhaps slightly unhealthy obsession with Lance--his triumphs and his downfall. I still watch his Youtube highlight reels as much as I read into his doping organization. And when I run the Kona Half-Marathon this June, I will still be channeling my inner Lance, without using the EPO of course (at least allegedly ;) 
