Much to my chagrin, I always seem to be on the wrong side of a rivalry. The Dodgers always start the season with the best record in baseball before inevitably losing the National League West pennant to the San Francisco Giants. When the future finally started looking up for my beloved Los Angeles Clippers, their hallway rivals decided to assemble the NBA's closest incarnation to a Barca-esque super team. I'm even on the wrong side of Dartmouth's lopsided rivalry between affiliated and unaffiliated students. But through it all, there was one athlete that the battered American sports fan could always fall back on, whose victories were both inspiring and frequent. Sadly, the true character of this man was only recalibrated with reality after a spectacular fall from grace. As it turns out, the Lance Armstrong we thought we knew never even existed.
When it comes to sports, we are licensed to let our eyes get tricked by our brains. Let me take a quick detour and take you to the seminal study in selective group perception the result of a particularly barbaric football game between Dartmouth and Princeton in 1951. Trading blows on a late November day, the Dartmouth defense first broke the nose of Princeton's star quarterback. Then, in the following quarter, a Dartmouth player had his leg broken. The Daily Princetonian and The Dartmouth each took to accusing the rival coaches of ordering their players to deliberately injure their adversaries.
Professors in Princeton and Hanover recognized the divergent views of the game amongst the student bodies and decided to investigate. They showed similar groups of Dartmouth and Princeton students the exact same footage of the game and asked them to survey the number of penalties and their flagrancy. Princeton students believed that Dartmouth committed twice as many penalties as Princeton, while Dartmouth students believed each side deserved the same number of flags. Both groups of students saw the opposing team's penalties as more severe than their own teams.
Say what you will about which team instigated the hostility. In sports, the result is all that matters. Regardless of what social scientists concluded, Dartmouth lost the game to Princeton. The outcome will always color our memories and interpretations of an event, which is why the toppling of Lance Armstrong from his perch as an American icon is so devastating.
From 1999 to 2005, Lance Armstrong won every single Tour de France. For three weeks every summer, any American with access to a television would inevitably encounter the story of Armstrong's inspirational story. He had survived an aggressive form of cancer that had spread throughout his body, overcoming the disease to become the world's greatest cyclist.
If Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Team's unprecedented success smelled illicit at the time, everybody plugged their noses. Who would have the guile to call Lance Armstrong's incredible story a fluke with nothing but a hunch? He dedicated his life to his sport and his charity, and both were triumphant. But when the truth started to leak out, there was nothing we could do but watch Armstrong crumble. When the United States Anti-Doping Agency called Armstrong's doping scheme "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen," it wasn't merely talking about distribution. The specialty of the U.S. Postal Team was its business-like cover-up methods. Armstrong's story and performances could only be elevated to mythical heights because of a systematic disregard for honesty and fairness.
It was only when we were forced to reckon with the man behind the icon that our colored perspective of his sport was exposed. Unlike Princeton and Dartmouth, which see their Ivy League foes across the bleachers, all of America was on Lance Armstrong's side. Yellow bracelets proliferated to show support for Armstrong and also (by virtue of his history) athletics, health and cancer awareness. Lance Armstrong was somebody we could all root for, until he wasn't. It seems that we were all on the wrong side of this sports story.
