The last decade should be regarded as a sporting golden age.
In that time a fair argument could be made that fans have seen the greatest
club football team come to dominate Europe, while the greatest national
football team ever assembled fundamentally changed the sport. Possibly the best
three tennis players ever to have played the game have fought personal duels
over multiple of Grand Slam finals,
while one of the greatest rugby union teams ever assembled finally won a world
cup. Eight years ago, two of cricket’s heavyweights slugged it out in what was
widely acclaimed as the greatest test series ever played. In athletics Usain
Bolt has redefined what a human body can achieved whilst entrancing the world
with once in a generation charisma. In American Football, Tom Brady, Aaron
Rodgers, and Peyton Manning have ushered in an era of offensive dominance
through sheer passing power while in baseball Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of
the Bambino in one of the greatest turnarounds in sport. In swimming Michael
Phelps won a record number of Olympic gold medals.
Wherever you look, across a wide range of sports there are
figures of revolutionary brilliance, singlehandedly changing what is deemed
possible and how the game is played. These are absurd times and will be
remembered as such for years to come, and yet to truly enjoy the times fans
have to close their ears to the incessant whispers of suspicion. In no era have
elite athletes been so scrutinised based on their choice of doctor and never
has a passed drug test invoked such suspicion. There are many causes for this
environment but one stands out above all others.
There is, of course, one achievement left off the above
list, one that no longer exists even in record books. Lance Armstrong capped
the greatest sporting story of all time by, not just winning but, dominating
his seventh Tour de France in 2005. The whispers were present even then, so
much so that his acceptance speech was an attack on all those who had accused
him. He told them he was “sorry you don’t believe in miracles.” It is,
therefore, fitting that his sporting legacy is to kill the miracle. When 16
year old Ye Shiwen stormed to 400 and 200m medley gold medals at London 2012 an
American coach verbalised the silent fears of many by raising the spectre of
doping. It was an unfair and widely criticised attack but it was also a sign of
the times. Miracles don’t happen and 16 year old girls don’t swim 50m faster
than male Olympic athletes.
The manner of Armstrong’s deception has made the damage so
much worse. He evaded drug testers for years by managing his life around
deceiving them. He received advanced warning of testers, hid needles in Coke
cans, and lied his way out of a failed test. For years he was the most tested
athlete on earth, the holy grail of the anti doping police and yet he remained
free to commit his crimes and steal his victories. The damage done to testing
has been devastating. Passed drug tests mean nothing when the greatest cheat in
sporting history was caught with witnesses not blood. Marion Jones was famously
the first athlete to ever be banned for drugs without failing a test but it is
now a familiar occurrence. It casts suspicion on all athletes, creating a time
when the absence of proof becomes proof in itself. In the midst of this mess Spanish
police uncovered tens of blood packs as part of Operation Puerto, silent
witnesses to uncaught cheats which may now be destroyed rather than investigated.
The whispers would matter less had they not been proved so
right in the Armstrong’s case. The years between 2000 and 2013 saw a titanic
battle for the soul of cycling between those journalists who saw nothing but a
cheat in Armstrong and those who bought into his cult of personality. Armstrong
himself was a large part of this battle, confronting and attacking his growing
legion of doubters. It made his believers all the more sure, all the more
betrayed. The battle became cruel and bitter as his return to cycling was
described as an end to cycling’s “remission” and that the “cancer of cycling”
had returned. All the time he was defended by people now unable to believe
anyone’s self defence. It has given all conspiracy theorists the faint air of
respectability. Right too often to be stopped clocks, they are instead the
realists, those who can see beyond the superficial brilliance of so many. They
exist in a world without heroes, only a list of the yet to be caught.
The case of Armstrong introduced a new term into the
sporting vernacular, omertà. It is the all pervasive silence of the peloton
which protects cycling from outsiders with questions and from insiders with
truths to tell. Perhaps a belief in the honesty of competition was naive, but
now it is simple idiocy. The omertà is the final spit in the face to all honest
fans. It’s a tacit admission that, while fans may want genuine competition, the
athletes would not let something as important as a bike race up to chance.
Instead the result is determined beforehand by the quality of your chemist.
Years after the fact, Armstrong’s colleagues lined up to confess their and his
sins. It was apparently the peloton’s open secret and cyclists admitted
bullying out of the sport those competitors who spoke out in favour of clean
racing. The omertà is the painful truth that a sport lied to its fans and lied
in full knowledge. But its damage is worse than that. The omertà is a clear
message to fans. To the athletes, the fans don’t matter, they don’t need to
know and athletes themselves must be protected over all other interests. The
fans are excluded, reduced to being inhabitants of Plato’s cave, watching the
shadow competition on the wall for so long they have forgotten what genuine
contest is.
Armstrong wasn’t just a winner, he was a dominant animal. He
surveyed the Tour with the air of a conquering general. It was a form of
brilliance utterly without parallel in his sport as the Tour ceased to be a
sporting event but became a month long victory parade for cycling’s one true
King. Now, like all former Kings the ghost of Armstrong wanders amongst his
former top table. Team Sky are left unable to enjoy their celebratory champagne
as they yell at empty chairs. “We are clean,” they scream, “we are different,”
they plead as their congregation looks on with pitying silence. Their madness
is compounded by the curious parallel world they inhabit where they are
celebrated more in failure than in success. If they can crack, if they can
lose, if they’re weak; then they might be real. It is sport’s saddest truth;
Armstrong killed brilliance.
Once longevity was proof, but that has been discarded now.
Now any competitor is a future Armstrong, if he can be guilty then anyone can
be guilty. It is the suspicion that hangs over all achievements. Perhaps no one
can be that much better than their rivals, perhaps humans can only do so much.
Harder, faster, better, faker. Instead sports fans are left to look at
cycling’s hollow victories and ponder the damage a failed test could do to
their sport. A presenter of the Football Ramble idly joked about Barcelona’s
doctor but what if they were cheating? What would become of tiki taka? What if
Federer, Nadal or Djokovic were doping? Could tennis survive? And the greatest
fear, what if Bolt was a fake? Could sport recover? The man who saved athletics
would be the man who killed competition.*
We don’t want to think these thoughts, we don’t want these
people to be cheats but the fear remains. This is a fear not just of cheats,
but of success itself. If one man is too good, if one man becomes our sport
incarnate; what if he were just another Armstrong? We live in an age where
Tours de France remain without a victor as a clean cyclist cannot be found to
acclaim. An age where baseball records may be asterisked as potentially unclean
and where 99 blood bags sit in Spain under the custody of a court as legal battles
continue to see if their secrets will be revealed. This is the house Armstrong
built, it is made of cards and I fear an oncoming storm.
*To be clear, there is no suggestion any of these people are
drug cheats.
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