It turns out that Floyd Landis really did cheat in the 2006 Tour de France . When he fell behind on Stage 16, I thought, "hey, this guy is all done. Too bad. I like him." And then when he roared back in Stage 17 I was a little bit ashamed for having doubted him. I was also excited that someone could do something so monumental all on his own.
Turns out, at least in this case, that he couldn’t.
I’ve always liked the idea of the hero in sports. I’ve always wanted to believe in the purity of a game. Barry Bonds, NCAA sports in general, and the pervasion of drugs in sports has taken most of that away from me. Still, when I was pedaling my bicycle up a long hill, I imagined that I was in the Tour and that I was going for the yellow jersey.
I won’t do that any more. From now on, I’ll be pedaling away from the professionals, the fakes, the cheaters, the people who will inevitably let us all down. When my daughters come of age I will explain to them that sports isn’t even a game, it’s a business and a charade of competition in which people cheat, lie, and undermine any ideas of what we are all supposed to learn from them.
When I was a little kid, I played baseball and my parents came to every game. They cheered when I won, they cheered when I lost, and they made sure that every single kid on the team got an ice cream after it was all over. I learned that sports were something I could do to test myself, to challenge what I knew about myself, and to bring myself into contact with others. Yes, I tried my best to win. But I followed the rules and, more importanly, I followed the spirit of sportsmanship.
These are games after all. There are winners and there are losers. There are spectators and there are players. There are cheaters and, once upon a time, there were people who played fair and gave all of us something to cheer for. There aren’t any fairy tales left in sports. Turn off the television, go outside, and play the game for yourself. The pros are all crooks.
