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If you weren’t in Australia last month, you missed your last chance to see Lance Armstrong in a bike race in top form. Now, he says he is retiring for the second time and for good. It wouldn’t be too surprising, however, for Armstrong to drop in on local or regional races around the country over the next couple of years, if and when he feels like it. He seems to love competition and the sport so much that it is hard for him to stay away.
The headlines in the sports world today are saying that he “failed to win an 8th T de F” and thus suggest that his return to the sport of cycling was not really successful. You can look at it anyway you want to. My thought is that, one, when he came back he was on a team where he was not the leader and, two, he would likely have needed two years to come fully back up to speed. He didn’t have two years. His second year, with his own group, Team Radio Shack, turned out to be a mess of crashes and other bad fortune. He wasn’t in the game the second year.
Let me recount a bit. He crashed, hard, in the Tour of California last year. He crashed three times on one day in France. During his come back year, ‘09, he crashed and broke his collar bone for the first time ever (a common cyclist injury) while prepping for the Tour de. After seven consecutive wins in France, he found the means to be a mortal being, pulled down from Mt. Olympus.
There were a ton of crashes in the whole Tour de last year. The first few days were a wreck-a-thon of crashes. There are many times in cycling where a crash simply cannot be avoided. Someone is going down and they are taking you with them. That’s why they say 25% of the professional riders require hospital treatment every year. It takes good luck just to get through a big race without a crash.
It is often difficult for athletes to retire, because sport is the center of their whole being. (Lance has much more in his life, of course, with his cancer foundation, five children, an ex-wife and many millions in the bank.) Retiring, coming back and learning that the game has passed you by is also common. I don’t know if that happened with Armstrong, but sitting out almost three years was probably too long to be out and when he came back, he faced less than ideal conditions. Still, he got third in the Tour de. Not bad.
Only Lance can answer whether his age finally caught up with him. Any athlete who sits out a sport and expects to come back in full form usually finds big surprises. While he was resting, other people were getting better and younger riders were surging forward. While he was still a great athlete, something was missing, either in the will or the ability or just plain luck. In the main, however, he was still seemed capable of winning a Tour, given the right circumstances and good fortune.
During the years of Armstrong’s dominance of the Tour de, many sports reporters repeated the idea that it was Armstrong’s method of preparing made him king. He concentrated on the Tour and the Tour alone, we were told. He used other races in the spring merely as tune-ups and he rode the entire Tour course before hand, or at least the mountain stages. When he returned, all of that changed. He was riding in a lot of other races and, the first year, trying to do the Tour of Italy (The Giro) before France. The Armstrong camp had been feeding the narrative of single minded preparation and concentration as the key to his success and, now, all of that was changed. I never heard or read any explanation as to how the new way was going to work out.
If Armstrong is eventually pulled down by doping allegations, it will be because he failed to make, and keep, enough friends. The whole Floyd Landis campaign to bring down Armstrong seems to be based on the fact that Armstrong didn’t help Landis get back into the sport once Lnadis’ three year exclusion was over.
Cycling just cannot seem to get it right with the doping issue. The more they try, the more trouble they get. The mess with drugs reminds me of the U.S. Congress: the more rules they make to try to stop cheating, the more people get caught and, in the public mind, the worse everything looks.
There can be little doubt that many in France were on a campaign to impugn Armstrong’s name, too. It was as if a Frenchman had come here and won the World Series with three home runs and then did it again and again. The French, at least a lot of them, didn’t like that at all and any slim evidence they could get was pursued relentlessly, even when there was no evidence at all.
Now, there is an American prosecutor after Armstrong. There is nothing more that a prosecutor loves than to hit and take down a big name and Armstrongs’ is one of the biggest in all of sports. Sadly, Lance Armstrong is gone from top level, professional cycling as a rider, but the controversy will be following him for a long time to come. We could still be hearing about that five years from now.
Doug Terry, 1.16.11
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