Lance -- The Last Time, Probably

OK, one more post about Lance Armstrong.

I'll be honest -- I want to be able to defend him.

Doping is wrong, always has been, always will be, and it doesn't matter if everyone else did it. But he helped a lot of people. And I hope he and his foundation continue to help a lot of people. Will that be possible now? Will he be less of an inspiration to cancer patients?

I don't know. Two articles I read today complicate this. The first from Grantland, titled "Legends of the Fall." The subtitle is more relevant: "Lance Armstrong: A Liar, a Cheater, and an Inspiration."  It gets into the complications of this situation. Lance was an inspiration, and an unlikely one, given how few people actually care about bike racing. But his story became legendary, and his winning became necessary to keep the story going. And the story became necessary to help the people he wanted to help. It's all kind of complicated; read the story to see how. It's not as simple as I'm making it.

The other piece was from the New Republic, and it's called "Keep Rooting for Lance Armstrong." This is not as straightforwardly rah-rah as the title suggests. It's about how Lance was an inspiration for a cancer patient, and his mixed feelings about Lance (leaning toward the positive) and anti-doping crusaders (leaning heavily toward the negative).

I think all of this will fade away soon enough. It will be interesting to see how his foundation manages without him -- not without him as its chairperson, but without him as its symbol.

I think about how cancer organizations have taken such a big hit this year: Komen, the ACS, Livestrong. And maybe that's the lesson for how to view Lance: we assume (or want to believe) that anyone or anything  associated with helping cancer patients has to be genuinely good, whether it's a person or an organization. And it hurts twice as much to find out that people working for a good cause can do bad things, either in the name of the cause or somewhere off to the side. And it sucks to find that out, so it's easy to push it away and not believe it.

So I'm not going to devote too much energy to it. I've stowed away the lawn furniture and stocked up on jugs of water, and I'll wait out Sandy with my fellow East Coasters. More later, when the storm has passed.

Stay safe everyone.