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Overlooking the Tour: A Vicious Cycle
Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum touches on a Hot Button issue each Monday on CNNSI.com. After you read Jack's take, give us yours. I'm a terrible person. I'm a terrible, horrible person. What I should've been doing over the past week is spreading the word about Lance Armstrong as he pursued his second straight Tour de France victory. I should've been calling everybody I know. "How about that Lance, eh?" I should've been saying. "There's nobody like that guy. He's better than Indurain. Hey, I loved Greg LeMond as much as the next guy, but Lance? He da man. First he whips cancer, then he whips everybody's butt. Never seen anything like it." Sadly, that's not what I was doing. Along with many of you, I was too busy discussing Tiger Woods's absurd domination of the British Open, and when I wasn't doing that I was eagerly awaiting and analyzing the 200-meter Olympic trials duel between Michael Johnson and Maurice Greene. Now that the weekend results are in, we see that Armstrong's six-minute victory in the Tour was every bit as dominating as Woods' win at St. Andrews, but will no doubt be the secondary story on most sports pages Monday morning, as well as on the tongues of most Americans, mine included.
Armstrong, meanwhile, pedals up sides of mountains, reaching a level of energy depletion that most of us can't even imagine, then plunges back down as if on a two-wheeled roller coaster. The worst thing that can happen to him during competition? Death. And yet he rides on relentlessly, in all kinds of weather, often without a spectator in sight, pain and pressure his only perennial companions. I'm not doubting the veracity of the injuries that turned the Johnson-Greene 20-second war into a 10-second anticlimax, but Armstrong -- a tank-tough Texan, hunched over handlebars, pumping like a madman -- no doubt laughs at a hamstring pull. Unlike Greene, Armstrong does not reveal himself in chest-pounding exhortations; unlike Johnson, he does not state his case in ghostwritten newspaper columns. Why isn't this man being celebrated by people like me? Because like everyone else, I talk about and write about what I know. I can't tell you what it takes to make a man ride so hard his thighs feel like they'll explode. I can't identify with a man racing through the Pyrenees at perilous speeds. But I know how perfect your golf swing has to be to strike a 6-iron 225 yards (as Woods does), and I am drawn axiomatically to a you-show-me-yours-I'll-show-you-mine showdown (such as the Johnson-Greene 200). What I will say is that Armstrong's relative anonymity -- he's lionized in Europe but not in his own country -- adds to his heroic allure. He is the solitary man on a bike, little-known, little-celebrated, little-analyzed. He deserves better from people like me, and the fact that I realize it doesn't excuse it. Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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