“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
— Mark Twain
- Mike Wise
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Lance Armstrong, Manti Te’o and modern mythmaking
More on Lance Armstrong
Armstrong confessed, but . . .
ANALYSIS | After interview with Oprah Winfrey, debate ensues over adequacy of cyclist’s admissions.
Armstrong gets specific in interview
Former cyclist admits being a bully to his accusers, denies forcing teammates to join his doping plan.
More than a confession
Lance Armstrong expected to confront accusations of bullying accusers, deny forcing teammates to dope.
Armstrong admits doping to Oprah
During two-and-a-half-hour interview, former cyclist confesses to using PEDs, AP reports, citing source.
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Many of our greatest athletic champions come from dark, needy places. It’s a Faustian bargain inconvenient to acknowledge: The qualities that empower the truly elite athletes — ruthless drive, narcissistic focus, competitive obsession — are characteristics we’d find repulsive outside athletics. Incandescent in their sports, some of the greatest athletes I’ve ever met and covered are simply pedestrian as human beings.
That’s why the alternative narratives begin to distract from — if not completely paper over — the less savory realities. It usually starts small, ranging from better versions of the truth to outright lies, but legends grow quickly when the tribe of followers counts in the millions.
When Lance Armstrong attempted to explain to Oprah Winfrey why he lied about his use of performance-enhancing drugs for 13 years, his answer was revealing:
“This story was so perfect for so long,” Armstrong said. “I mean that, as I try to take myself out of the situation, and I look at it: You overcome the disease. You win the Tour de France seven times. You have a happy marriage. You have children. . . . It’s just this mythic, perfect story. And it wasn’t true.
“I was a bully in the sense that I tried to control the narrative.”
The past week was a dumpster fire for modern sports myths, and whatever homespun ideals remained of hard work, integrity, sportsmanship and, hell, Internet dating were also engulfed in gigantic flames.
And as we wring our hands over the inadequacies of Armstrong’s confession and the inconsistencies of Manti Te’o’s story — or, years ago, Tiger Woods’s infidelities — we have to acknowledge our role in the mythology. The stories that are too good to be true are the same ones we embrace, and retell, the most. In the 1950s, Hall of Fame basketball coach Clair Bee wrote a series of novels about a high school student named Chip Hilton whose athletic prowess was outshone only by his moral compass. Millions of copies were sold
More than a half-century later, we’re desperate for another Chip Hilton, and we’re angry when we discover our latest candidate just dropped out of Valley Falls High, bummed a smoke and traded his game jersey for a tat.
But what’s the source of that fury — their deception or our own gullibility? Before cursing what Armstrong’s bald-face lying, Te’o’s extreme naivete (at the least) or Woods’s duplicity did to you, ask yourself: What were you expecting?
Combine that insatiable appetite for folklore with the consuming desire to be the hero, and you end up with a cancer survivor believing syringes and blood transfusions are no different than “air in our tires and water in our bottles.” You get a college linebacker waxing nostalgic about the beauty of a girlfriend who didn’t exist, the first known Internet hoax to have a game ball dedicated to “her” posthumously by the coach of Notre Dame. And you get an adoring audience that misses all the red flags, mostly because it doesn’t want to see them.
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