Lance

My dentist follows the Tour de France. I mentioned cycling to him and for the entire time I was being scraped and flossed I learned about the rain, the cobblestones and the courage of the riders until he paused for a moment and I could see him dreaming of the French country side, the small farm towns next to battlefields, the crowds waving their flags and inflatable whales, the brutal heat of the Pyrenees, the narrow turns on cobblestone roads, and the long climb at Alpe D’uez. I then gargled and rinsed.

Cycling has skyrocketed in popularity because of the cult of Lance. He casts a long shadow over the sport, and if we are spending our summers using slow twitch muscles to fundraise for cancer research then he is as good as role model as they come. His yellow bracelets have become the most popular new men’s jewelry since digital watches decades ago, a symbol not of social affiliation but of personal aspiration.

We all wish we could be like Lance - except for that whole getting testicular cancer part (even Superman had kryptonite). The weekend roads of Marin are now clogged with the spandex hordes. The tightest fitting clothes are no longer on Castro Street, but on Alpine Dam and Lucas Valley Road. These packs of riders pound in a single line formation like a multi-segmented, multi-colored centipede as the scent of oak trees and asphalt rushes past their helmets. They signal with their hands, shout “car up” and “on your left”, and share my dentist’s daydream of perhaps winning a stage or perhaps helping a teammate to a jersey, but the only victories they have are hammering a hill in the correct gear and the exhausted satisfied nod that even though the ride was hard it was worth it.

There is, however, a bad taste to the Tour this year. Like governmental transitional problems that hit both King Lear and Iraq, the succession to a post tour Lance hasn’t run smooth. Three of the major heirs - Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich and Francisco Mancebo - were linked to a drug syndicate in Spain. While cycling has always been on the forefront of the chemical alloys to create better frames for bike, it has also been on the chemical forefront for better bodies for the riders.

One of the techniques now banned is to draw blood out a few months before the race and then return it back to the system so there are more red blood cells to transport oxygen almost, to excuse the pun, in the same vein as leukemia patients being able to extract their own bone marrow and receive it after their system has been nuked. We are entering an era were we can make biological promises to our future selves, but there is a difference in that one is bone marrow for survival and the other is oxygen for endorsements. We don’t want to destroy innovation, but we need to limit our Frankenstein urges.

And so we must return to Lance. Even if the purity of the modern athlete as been tainted with the advances of biology, there is a simpler truth is that medicine gave Lance the chance to ride again. It gave inspiration to a nation that has been too often sitting on couches and that confused golf as exercise. People went on the road and learned to love putting sunscreen below their eyes to avoid it mixing with sweat. And from a deeply personal perspective I am quite happy that my dentist can work out his issues with pain on hill repeats.

So what does Mr. Armstrong do after the seven victories and after being Sheryl Crow’s favorite mistake? This year instead of going long in France, he is going hard in New York. This year isn’t about the bike. This is the year he is going to do a marathon. Like with several of you, it will be his first.

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