Icons
Icon of the month: Lance Armstrong
Benjamin Hannavy-Cousens
Beneath the surface over-saturation of sporting images
characterising the summer of 2012, the narrative thread of Lance
Armstrong’s miraculous story was unravelling. In failing to
challenge the findings of the United States Anti-Doping Agency
(USADA) against him, Armstrong has submitted to being stripped of
all his victories since 1998 if not of his endorsement deals (Nike,
Michelob) and the support of the wilfully deluded.
Though there has never been a truly non-suspicious moment in the
career of the diminutive bully-king of cycling since 1998 (the year
when the ‘Festina’ scandal nearly destroyed the Tour de France and
meant that few feats in professional cycling could be viewed with a
qualm free mind for at least a decade), one wonders if the story
would have been better for him and us if he had limited himself to
winning the 1999 race, his ‘miraculous’
comeback-from-cancer-tour.
By 2005 his dominance had grown to the extent of either removing
the story’s lustre or propelling it to a kind of ecstatic
perfection, depending on your point of view. Armstrong strong-armed
the opposition in his winning years, bullying anyone who disagreed
with him in a graceless and apparently shameless fashion (witness
his treatment of Filippo Simeoni). But it was sort of okay, because
he had also destroyed cancer (best not to entertain the darker
murmurings that wondered if the ingestion of banned substances may
have caused the cancer in the first place).
With Armstrong, a greater unanswerable cause (cancer awareness)
is wheeled in to belittle smaller concerns (integrity of being) and
confound them with its logic. (‘It’s the economy, stupid’ is a
phrase operating in the same totalising way.) Winning alone counts
in this avowedly soulless complicitly capitalist worldview. The
nuances of spirit or the possibility that one’s endeavours, however
great, may be accountable beyond the image they create and the
spin-offs they generate, are occluded.
Hollywood never did make the mooted Armstrong film. Maybe they
knew something. If they do get round to it, one feels there will be
a revised plot angle making more of the back story that explains
the road to deception. In the words of the notoriously ‘clean’
cyclist Christophe Bassons: ‘He lives only to put himself above
mortals. I am more sorry for him than anything else. This need to
feel superior, to crush the competition, certainly has its source
in his past.’
It is difficult sometimes to think of the Lance Armstrong story
without Mark 8:36 coming to mind: ‘for what shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ This is
not to act as a judge over this particular soul (leave that, in the
first instance, to the USADA, WADA and hopefully the UCI); he was
simply a cheating cyclist who beat other cheating cyclists. To some
extent it was a level playing field. Except that it is impossible
to know whether he was a better cheat or a better cyclist, or both
and in this instance it should actually have just been about the
bike.
Armstrong was a fitting icon because he was always a surface
image, a representation, an advert; the ‘marketing character’ par
excellence. Being superman looked so good. And this is a real
problem when an image becomes a substitute for substance (trumping
substance abuse). The appeal to the iconic image should sound alarm
bells in those who want to enjoy and find some meaning and hope in
sporting achievement. ‘In my mind I have won seven grand tours’, so
speaks Alberto Contador, recent winner of the Tour of Spain who has
been stripped of two of his grand tour victories: ‘What matters is
my own feeling and the impressions that remain in the retina of the
spectators’. What actually matters is that these impressions are
not blurring our vision so that we are blind to sustained
deceit.
