Lance Armstrong and the power of myth-making

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I got into cycling after Armstrong, or rather as Armstrong was "coming back" into the sport, so while I remember the legends of Tour de France's gone by I was not emotionally connected to the Armstrong myth. Nonetheless, I wanted Lance to win. I wanted him to win in his comeback. And, until recently, I wanted to see how high he could ascend in the Ironman. Now, things are different for me--my opinions have changed--but it wasn't easy for that change to come about, and for others the legend is more powerful than the truth and the narrative keeps on chugging. There is much to be written on the Armstrong saga, but I want to avoid the simple commentary on where he was lying or telling the truth. I don't want to draw attention to details of the interview he did with Oprah or the loose ends that really don't add up. I don't even want to dwell on the areas where Lance is still obviously culpable--even if those areas where he needs to spend some serious meditation. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to think through what Armstrong's story says about how we create myths and the risks in making a human being (with all his faults) into a legend.

Lance once responded to a tweet I sent him. I don't tweet much, so that was something in itself, but having that mythical person responding to something I put out on the internet was a serious moment of geeking out in my life. Mine was just a little life; I am just a little person; but in that one moment I was interacting with (I could half-believe, influencing!) a man of myth--a person whose flesh and blood were entirely secondary to the narrative crafted around him. For a moment, our stories were as close together as they could ever be.

Last night, when Armstrong was giving his "tell-all" interview with Oprah he talked a good deal about losing control of the narrative. In his way, this was Lance attempting to apologize, even if it appeared half-hearted at best. But it's also true that there was a narrative throughout Lance's career that was bigger and more mythical than anything reality could offer. This would have been true even if he has been racing cleanly, even if he would have been the person we wanted him to be, because the story offered something cogent that each of us could hold on to: we wanted to believe in Lance because if we believed in Lance it offered us an avenue to believe in ourselves. We wanted somebody to "defeat" cancer. We wanted him to rise above perhaps the most demanding aerobic sport in the world and we even wanted him to crush those who suggested the myth was anything but gleaming gold. In some sadistic way, we wanted Lance to shut up Betsy Andreu, Emma O'Reilly, Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis, and anybody else who threatened to tarnish the legend.

The myth was just far more powerful than anything reality could offer. The Livestrong campaign was too perfect; the way Armstrong sent tweets out to cancer survivors and those who "lost the fight." Everything was crafted with the legend in mind. Lance could no more tell the truth than J.R.R. Tolkien could stop in the middle of the Lord of the Rings and say, "This fiction stuff is just entirely untrue. I had better stop." For Lance, the truth was in the legend; the moral of the story justified the means and the real people he stomped on to keep the myth pristine. Even last night, Armstrong couldn't bring himself to speak truth or true apology to those that he wronged. In his mind, the narrative was still being written.

He just doesn't realize that the book is falling apart at the seams.

The problem Lance has is that he is a human being and not a mythical character. Authors get to create myths; characters do not create themselves, and that may have been Lance's initial, fatal flaw. He worked diligently to tell his own story--the greatest story that could be told with him at its center. He and his team of lackeys crafted a narrative that was as implausible as it was attractive. It was a story that allowed many of us to see him as a mythological hero that he wasn't. Some who bought into that narrative are now so entirely stuck in that "truth" that they are still defending Lance, the person, in order to hold on to Lance, the legend. A great story is hard to erase from our minds because we begin to craft our own stories around it.

That is the struggle for cancer patients who looked to Lance for strength. I'm not naive enough to believe that anybody suffering from cancer is so one-dimensional that the truth will crush them, but there is a sense that their narrative is thrown out of whack. Those of us who ride bicycles aren't going to stop now because the myth that pushed us into the headwinds and up sharp hills is a fake, but the story of how we got there is now somehow less whole. For those casual fans of cycling who loved to see Armstrong win this may be just another fallen star of the same ilk as Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire, but it also rips out of us some of the strength we drew from his epic myth. Lance's story became our story; it integrated with our story and made our stories more powerful and our goals more attainable. So, for the truth to be so unseemly shakes the foundation of our hopes. Nobody would say the entirety of their hope in life rested in Lance, but in many ways his narrative gave us a vision of what the future could be if only we overcame what he did, if only we rose up to be the people we were capable of being.

That is where we find ourselves today: mourning the loss of that narrative. It's been a long time coming. Stories are always better when they are crafted with an eye on reality, and as it turns out Lance was unconcerned with things like the truth. Even fiction only works when it points to something that is true and good in the world. Almost by accident, Lance did that for a time, but as it turns out it was ultimately designed for his glory and not for ours. There is something human in that to be pitied, and today I can think of nobody more deserving our pity than Lance. He is a fallen human being who still does not seem to grasp the depths of his sin or the ways he has put himself before others.

In recent days I have wondered what redemption looks like for Armstrong, and it is a difficult question. We love redemption stories and sympathize with the person coming back from immense odds (it is much of why we loved Lance in the first place). But this time it is much trickier. The legend has been tarnished not just by drugs but by hubris. Armstrong seems incapable of repentance. That is the real issue, and unfortunately for him it is a prerequisite for redemption. Maybe he will change. I hold out hope for just about anybody, but at this time, as a friend of mine said, his behavior looks more sociopathic than simply idiotic. The story is ash now. The only question remaining is whether someday a phoenix will emerge and true confession will come, or whether this is now simply a tale of nihilism, a myth broken of its power and shown to be nothing more than the shiny casing of an ugly moral. I do still hold out some hope, but as with so many things I don't yet know what form that hope could take.