Should We Hate Lance Armstrong ?

(This article was written after Lance Armstrong, a celebrity cyclist, told Oprah Winfrey that he was doping during his seven consecutive Tour De France wins. He has since been stripped of his titles and lost multiple endorsements)

Should We Hate Lance Armstrong ? 

Why not ?  He knowingly took banned substances. He knowingly manipulated loopholes in the drug-testing processes. He knowingly influenced his teammates to take banned substances along with him. In his interview with Oprah Winfrey, he played with semantics when he said that he did not directly ask his teammates “to take drugs or leave the team” but he “may have” asked them to “step up their performances to match with others if they wanted to retain their places in the team” ..and who are the “others” ? Armstrong himself to start with. A very daunting benchmark himself.  Put simply – he broke the rules and lied about them repeatedly. .not once not twice but many many times. There is no reason not to hate him.

Why come clean now? Was he caught red-handed in a way that he couldn't deny it at all ? Did anyone give any similar evidence? Or did he, if his view in Every-minute-Counts is to be believed, just get tired of putting up to USADA’s (United State Anti Doping Agency) ad-hoc and seemingly unending drug-tests ? Or, did he just wake up one day and got taken over by Mother Morality and Father Ethics? Did he choose coming clean over Life-Time-Ban looking starkly in his face? There is a precedent of Marian Jones who won Olympic Gold Medals and later failed the drug-tests only to lose all her Medals in later years – who later confessed to everything to avoid Life Time Ban. There is no reason not to hate Armstrong.

Does this act not undermine the standing and reputation and sanctity of the Tour, The Country of France, Armstrong’s US Postal Team and more importantly the Sport itself? No single man is above the glorious tradition called Tour De France and no one should be. There is no Tour-De-France winner for those seven years after Armstrong’s titles were withdrawn. Tour is not just a cycling race, it is the toughest gruelling test of highest degree that challenges human spirit in the face of competition and more than that, Mother Nature and her vagaries. This is a signature event for France and one of the grand sporting spectacles on Earth. Armstrong made a mockery of The Tour. He insulted all the other cyclists who probably trained as hard and probably deserved to win too but could not, probably because they did not take banned substances. Ask them this question and they will tell you “ Of-course there is no reason not to hate Armstrong”.

So yeah let’s all jointly start hating the man who broke our hearts.

But wait a minute. This hate comes into play because we all have loved this man before. We have loved his courage and his fire-in-the-belly to rise from ashes like a Phoenix. We have loved his dedication to the Sport and discipline for his training regime. Put simply, we have loved his Spirit of which aggression is a big part. That aggression stems from his desperate drive to prove himself over others who rejected him before. We have loved to read those sections in his book where after his first comeback-victory of the Tour he walked to the Cofidis Group (the group who part-ended their sponsorship to Armstrong when he was diagnosed with cancer) and said “this is for you”. The World needs heroes and he was ours… an unbelievable story over the impossible. Yes we loved him.

Can “love” be replaced with “hate” like a switch of a button? He has done wrong but has his wrongdoing physically hurt anyone? Is he as bad as Salman Khan who has been accused of killing 4 people while driving under the influence of alcohol? What “We The People” are doing to Salman is exactly opposite of “hate” actually. We have a convenient escape route to like Salman by saying that “we like him as an actor ..let him be guilty of running over a few people but we enjoy his movies”. Can we compartmentalise and separate anyone’s behaviour and like one part and not like that other? Going by examples in Indian Hindi Film industry, it seems so. There are celebrity actors, who, in-spite of being accused of serious crimes, are getting all the public support and applaud for their movies. There are so many politicians and MLAs and big-shots who have so many accusations of all sorts but most of them are roaming around scot-free be it acting in films, being in the parliament or inaugurating a hotel chain or being a Chief Guest at a Fashion Pageant. When compared with the members of the same club, Armstrong comes out to be the least criminal guy.  He has not killed anyone, he has not robbed anyone, he has not molested anyone neither has he hurt anyone so why hate him ?

But can one wrong justify another? in the eyes of the law – perhaps yes. The judiciary system accepts a precedent as a baseline to make any judgement on the current case, which is a separate discussion, but don’t we know what is right from wrong? 

Ultimate test is one’s own conscience. Can one live with the wrongdoing? Can one sleep soundly at night knowing that he or she has done the wrong thing? Sport and Sporting authorities have been laying great emphasis on this aspect – called Trust – when it comes to accepting self-declaration by the players or athletes. Once this trust started breaking up, they stepped up the policing – which was met by even smarter ways of breaching that trust – through well thought of planned schedules of taking banned drugs. In Armstrong’s case, this happened for 7 years. Step back and read that line again – 7 years.

Is there any reason not to hate Armstrong? This hate which arises from love, also brings sadness and disappointment. In this world of wrongdoers shamelessly stealing the limelight, we looked up to Sport for unspoiled  natural gateway for pure unblemished fun and competition. What do we do when Sport itself gets that stigma from one of it’s Demi-Gods?

We do the same what Lance Armstrong did. Depend on the Sport itself to shrug off its dirt and keep the faith in sporting abilities of the true champions to give us the courage to move on.