Lance: Another illusion shattered
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
He was the ultimate American sports hero. Now he is a symbol of the corruption that has infected not only sport in this country but all kinds of institutions globally, from finance and the media to science.
Lance Armstrong, who bravely battled cancer and beat it, has been trying for a long time to race away from the storm clouds building over his head ever since he began performing super-human cycling feats on the steep peaks of the Pyrenees and the Alps.
Now it has all caught up to him, and the deluge that has engulfed Armstrong has swept it all away: the glory, the record seven Tour de France titles, and the adulation of Francophobe Americans who loved the Texan for upstaging the French on their own turf.
The evidence presented against Armstrong by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) is detailed and devastating. It includes 26 sworn statements, mainly from former teammates. The agency’s conclusion is that Armstrong not only took performance-enhancing drugs but that for years he spearheaded the most successful, sophisticated, and professionalized doping conspiracy in the history of sport.
The agency’s finding taints not only Armstrong but many others who rode on his various teams. Even some who didn’t know about the scheme and did nothing wrong will suffer. The U.S. Postal Service, an agency under attack by Republicans in Congress, was for years the principal sponsor of Armstrong’s team. Cycling fans by the droves have been saddened by the scandal, and many no doubt will be permanently turned off the sport.
Corruption in pro cycling is a microcosm of what increasingly has been happening in the world of sport, which in turn reflects the situation in many other realms. Seven Tours de France, more than seventy homeruns in a season, huge and quick returns on investment; it all seemed too good to be true. That’s because it wasn’t true. But before the frauds were exposed lives were ruined, fortunes were made and lost, and hearts were broken.
Yet, despite their notoriety, Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, and Bernie Madoff are small fry. The really significant gaming of the system, the truly heavy cheating in terms of the scale of the human consequences, takes place in other planes, for instance in financial centers like Frankfurt and London.
But there is nothing that rivals the corruption that takes place where Wall Street and K Street intersect, not on a map but at the core of the U.S. political and economic system. Corruption is institutionalized at the confluence of Big Money and Big Government through myriad mechanisms, most importantly campaign financing and lobbying. The almost unimaginably colossal military budget is an especially rich source for collusion, cronyism, and profitable waste. The level of success, sophistication, and professionalism involved in this corrupt universe far exceeds anything Lance Armstrong could ever dream up.
Corruption among individual politicians and businessmen is one thing: predictable. Corruption as an inherent, pervasive and systemic feature of the political economy is something else. Yellow journalism is bad enough but the massive manipulation of public opinion and law breaking by modern media empires, like those of Silvio Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch, are bigger threats to democracy.
Then there are the recent instances of massive corruption in institutions the fundamental values of which sharply contradict the corrupt acts in question. The ever-expanding child abuse and cover-up scandal in the Catholic Church is one outrageous example.
But perhaps the most disturbing instance of this phenomenon comes from a recent study that found that scientific fraud is significantly more frequent than anyone imagined. Science is, after all, the systematic search for truth. The scientific community depends a great deal on trust. If every single detail of every study had to be independently checked, publication and progress in science would slow to a crawl, with ominous consequences for the future of the human species.
Corruption is nothing new and Lance Armstrong is not the first athlete to cheat. But the spirit of our times – greed is good, seek success at any cost, solidarity is for losers – is conducive to corruption over and beyond what our fallible human condition guarantees.
