Lance, Again

Well, it looks like it's over for Lance Armstrong.

The US Anti-Doping Agency released a 1000 page report last week, detailing all of the evidence against him. Lance resigned from his position as Chairperson of his Livestrong Foundation. Nike announced it was dropping their sponsorship; a bunch of others dropped him soon after the Nike announcement.

So, is this the end? Lance finally exposed as the cheat and liar that he is? Has he lost all the respect of the cancer community, now that he has had to drop the "cancer shield," as one writer put it -- that sympathy trump card he held because he was a survivor?

It's such a morally ambiguous situation, isn't it? You hate the cheater, but you love the survivor. You hate the liar, but you love the fundraiser. You ask if he could have ever raised the money he raised if he hadn't won, and you ask if he could have won had he never cheated. I don't know. I just don't know.

But I do know that there's been very little discussion of this issue in the last week among the cancer folks that I associate with online. When the accusations first came up weeks ago, I wrote here about the spirited defenses of Lance that cancer patients and survivors were putting up. The current silence might be interpreted as something like disgust, that people just don't want to admit that they were wrong in defending him. My guess, though, is that it's more that people are thinking that they said all there was to say, weeks ago, and they still support him.

As I've been reading others' reactions, trying to get a sense of where people stand, I came across an article by Ian Robertson called "Why Lance Armstrong is Still a Hero: 'Great Men are Almost Always Bad Men'." Robertson argues that any time you scrutinize someone's life, you find things that are bad. I think of Christopher Hitchens' well-known critique of Mother Teresa -- a hero to many, but a human being. I've often thought of how hard it would be to be named a saint in today's world, with so many more temptations, but also with so many more ways to be scrutinized.

And goodness knows Lance was no saint. Even apart from the cheating and lying, he was known to be a bully and an all-around jerk.

But, says Robertson, this is also a guy who stood up to testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. And then he got back on his bike and conquered mountains. Even if he hadn't won all those Tours, that would still all be pretty dang impressive, wouldn't it? That kind of courage is certainly worthy of admiration.

So that's where we are. A courageous man, but a flawed man. One who has ultimately done some good. And as a cancer patient, I hope he still, somehow, is able to do more good from here.