To fully understand the extent of America’s
long-held indifference to the allegations Lance Armstrong’s career was
drug-fuelled, we need to travel back to the summer of 2001 when he was in his
pomp. The year he won his third Tour de France also coincided with a scandal
besetting the Little League World Series. A kid named Danny Almonte had pitched
extraordinarily for a team from the Bronx but, as he did so, allegations grew
that he might be an overage player. Imagine.
In an effort to successfully prove the boy
wonder was 14 and not 12, Sports Illustrated dispatched a couple of reporters
to the public records office in Moca, the city in the Dominican Republic where
Almonte was born. At a time then when the European media was rife with serious
and informed speculation about Armstrong and performance-enhancing substances,
America’s most-respected sports magazine was too concerned with exposing an
adolescent cheat to ask serious questions of somebody on the way to becoming a
national icon.
This was to be the way of it for the duration of
Armstrong’s stint at the top. When Irish journalist David Walsh co-wrote “LA
Confidentiel, Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong” with Pierre Ballester in 2006, no
American publisher would touch the book. Despite the fact anything with
Armstrong’s photograph or name on it was flying off the shelves all across this
country, not a single company was interested in going near a work that
forensically called into question the authenticity of his feats.
No matter what Armstrong says or does in the
coming weeks, the role of Walsh and Paul Kimmage in trying to expose the Texan
for more than a decade should also be acknowledged. This dogged pair kept
chipping away at the story when it was neither popular nor profitable. Anybody
questioning the ability or courage of modern sports journalists should YouTube
Kimmage facing down the cyclist during a press conference at the Tour of
California in 2009.
On that occasion, Armstrong invoked the cancer
defence, a move guaranteed to get the public and far too many journalists on
his side. Part of the problem in America has always been that to say anything
about validity of his Tour victories was to invite a backlash because of the
amount of money he has raised to fight the disease. This was a guy who would go
mountain-biking with then-President Bush in Texas. This was Hollywood’s
favourite athlete. How could he be anything but pristine?
It’s worth remembering too that xenophobia
contributed to America’s refusal to even ask legitimate questions in the first
place. The fact almost all the speculation about Armstrong and steroids came
from Europe was significant. Remember, he owned the Tour in the same era when
France was so hated in America (for failing to support the wars) that some
people here started calling chips Freedom Fries rather than French Fries.
Plenty were willing to believe any allegations against Armstrong were either
sour grapes at losing to an American or politically-motivated attempts to
denigrate somebody who was then the country’s most famous sporting export.
The interesting thing here is Americans should
now be more appalled than everybody else in the world and they aren’t. Not by a
long shot. For the last year, there has been constant talk that the US Postal
Service may have to declare bankruptcy and mail will no longer be delivered to
homes six days per week. This is the same US Postal Service which sponsored
Armstrong’s team to the tune of more than $30m between 2001 and 2004. In 2001
alone, the USPS paid him nearly $1.5m in personal bonus payments for his
performance at the Tour de France.
With that title no longer in his name, surely
there should be a public clamour for all those bonus payments to be returned to
the ailing mail service. It won’t help save the institution but it will at
least remove some of his ill-gotten gains. We won’t our hold our breath for
that to happen though. Why? Because there are enough Americans out there who
won’t care whether or not he finally even comes clean about cheating.
Many of those “fans” treat sport as part of the
entertainment business. They care not a jot how athletes perform great feats as
long as they perform them. This much has been demonstrated most recently in the
willingness to accept arch-cheat Mark McGwire back into baseball as a coach
despite the stench of steroids coming off his career. Others will equivocate about
Armstrong’s achievements and argue that all the rest of his cycling peers were
cheating too so that makes what he did okay.
However, he handles his mea culpa, he will most
likely live strong and prosper. At least in America.
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