Cycling: Did it drive Floyd Landis to self-destruct?
August 06, 2006
Training “takes so much time and energy – that’s why I did it in the first place. If you ride hard enough and long enough, you forget about everything else.”
In retrospect, this pre-race quote from 2006 Tour de France champion Floyd Landis should have served as a warning to us that he might be particularly vulnerable to the temptation to cheat. As one reporter thoughtfully observed, for Landis, “biking became so all-consuming: It filled in for God, for his family, for the security he’d given up.”
Landis allowed Cycling to dethrone God. He looked to Cycling for purpose and meaning in life. The answer was clear: go faster, farther on a bicycle than any other human being on the planet. Unfortunately, he also may have looked to Cycling for moral guidance, for an answer to the question of how he ought to live. If so, what did he likely hear?
See Something in the Blood: Driven to Win, Floyd Landis May Lose It All.As more and more cyclists dope and the average racing speed increases, “you either get dropped or you figure out why everyone else isn't getting dropped,” said Matthew A. Masucci, assistant professor of sports studies at San Jose State University. “Then it becomes, ‘Why would I knowingly give up an advantage?’ It’s that group mentality: ‘Well, they must not think it’s wrong.’”
At the moment, only Floyd knows whether he cheated to win this year’s Tour. For his sake, the sake of his family and the health of the cycling world, I hope that he didn’t cheat and is fully exonerated. But if it turns out that he did cheat, I can understand how it happened. If (1) you make Cycling your idol; and (2) your idol tells you to go faster and farther; and (3) fellow keepers of the faith are doing whatever it takes, including doping, to go faster than you, then doping might seem not only logical but morally defensible.
I can’t help but wonder: if Landis had not “forg[otten] everything else,” perhaps, in the stillness, he would have heard that small voice reminding him that cheating is dishonest and immoral.
Comments
I completely agree with you.
Guess it goes back to the old adage often spoken in our society "the end justifies the means". Lying and dishonesty can so easily be rationalized in our own minds, because we have our own agenda, goals, truth. We look for the truth that agrees with our truth.
In today's grey, foggy, inabsolute world, black has even become white and white black.
So often, we have seen men of integrity derided, mocked, sneered at when they "fall from grace" before the world, while those consistently living "characterless" existences are lauded as couragous and held up with admiration as those worthy of examples to us all.
Satan deceives man so slyly by using a possible seed of truth, which he twists and turns into an "acceptable" untruth.
Blinded to the absolute Truth, man meanders down that lukewarm, wide path leading to destruction, while it all "seems so right". (Matthew 7:13)
Posted by: Kate Mason | August 21, 2006 09:57 AM