I picked up a copy of Lance Armstrong’s autobiographical work for no particularly reason, though somewhere in the vaults of my decaying brain I did recall some major controversy concerning his Tour de France victories. That could only mean one thing; Armstrong was embroiled with the rest of those cheating, drug taking, and performance- enhancing European bikers whose evil deeds seem to dominate the cycling news year after year. Working on the old adage that there’s no smoke without fire, I had little doubt in my all-to-quick-to-judge mind that Armstrong was as guilty as hell. No one could win the gruelling Tour de France without a little help-up from the pharmaceutical companies.

Of course I know virtually nothing about bike racing or any type of racing for that matter. That whole world of racing, be it horses, dogs, humans, humans on bikes or humans in machines, none of it has impacted on my little ping pong universe. Though I do know a thing or two about winning and losing and the absurdly fine line that often separates the two. So it may be said that I you know just one sport really well, you probably understand all sports. Leaving out the particularities and idiosyncrasies, what all sport boils down to is the obsessive human desire to win and the equally obsessive desire to avoid defeat.

As for cycling, I do enjoy it and always have done. It’s that sense of freedom and independence that you get with your very first bike and that exhilarating feeling has never quite evaporated. My connection with cycling these days is limited to getting on my bog-standard Halfords bike and dragging myself off to the local train station and back each day total for the week – 20 miles. Somehow I don’t think Armstrong would be much impressed with that. I can however boast something rather more ambitious, though I have to travel back some 40 years to recall my epic bike journey from London to Athens on route back to Oz. With a good mate and a couple of cheapo bikes we set off in the rough direction of Greece with barely a minute of preparation or forethought. With the exception of a short train journey by-passing communist Albania, which was out of bounds for almost everybody, we arrived in Athens some six weeks later in great health and great spirits. The Alps held no fear for two intrepid Aussie adventurers. Of course, that was then and this is now. The four mile trip to and from West Drayton Station is adventure enough these days.

So much for youthful reminiscing, what of Lance Armstrong’s story? Since kicking off the Sporting Polemics project just over a year ago I have been taken aback by the quantity of excellent and engaging sports books; biographical, autobiographical and plain and simple great story-telling. Sure there is plenty of junk out there, but lurking amongst the junk are some real gems and Armstrong’s story is definitely one of them.

As soon as I’d finished reading his story I began to quiz my friends and colleagues about Lance Armstrong and it transpires that I was one of the few people on the planet who was unaware of his amazing exploits on and off the bike. I am now totally hooked and can’t wait to get stuck into his second volume. Is there a third?

As you would expect from an athlete who fully recovered from a near certain death at the hands of testicular cancer, an athlete who then went on to win the Tour de France an unprecedented seven consecutive times, not to mention his successful IVF treatment that allowed him and his wife to produce a young son, there would be no shortage of philosophical wisdom scattered throughout the book. As the title makes plain, his story is not just about the bike but about survival and what it means to live.

Some of the most poignant lines come early in the story. Armstrong, reflecting on the debilitating nature of cancer comments;

‘People die. That truth is so disheartening that at times I can’t bear to articulate it. Why should we go on, you might ask? Why don’t we all just stop and lie down where we are? But there is another truth, too. People live. It’s an equal and opposing truth. People live and in the most remarkable ways. When I was sick, I saw more beauty and triumph and truth in a single day that I ever did in a bike race but they were human moments, not miraculous ones. P4/5

Now that is the essence of the dialectic. Opposing truths that together form a single whole. With these simple but profound lines, Armstrong is set to take his readers through a powerful story of adversity and eventual triumph. Armstrong, continuing his reflections on his life, his illness and the Tour de France, writes:

I had learned what it means to ride the Tour de France. It’s not about the bike. It’s a metaphor for life, not only the longest race in the world but also the most exalting and heartbreaking and potentially tragic. It poses every conceivable element to the rider, and more: cold, heat, mountains, plains, ruts, flat tires, high winds, unspeakable bad luck, unthinkable beauty, yawning senselessness, and above all, a great deep self-questioning. Armstrong continues, During our lives we’re faced with so many different elements as well, we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope. P70/71

Who amongst us could not relate to these few lines? Who amongst us could not be a little moved by them?

Underlining the entire Armstrong story is Lance’s idea of what it is to be human. He explains:

One definition of human is as follows: characteristic of people as opposed to God or animals or machines, especially susceptible to weakness, and therefore showing the qualities of man. Athletes don’t tend to think of themselves in these terms; they’re too busy cultivating the aura of invincibility to admit to being fearful, weak, defenceless, vulnerable or fallible, and for that reason neither are they especially kind, considerate, merciful, benign, lenient, or forgiving, to themselves or anyone around them. But as I sat in my house alone that first night, it was humbling to be so scared. More than that, it was humanising. P73/74

From mere survivor to a more fully conscious human being. That I suppose is the race that we are all running whether we know it or not. Armstrong elaborates:

For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities. P98

And in a broadside to the very insular nature of the modern professional athlete obsessed as they are with wealth and fame, Armstrong concludes:

Too many athletes live as though the problems of the world don’t concern them. We are isolated by our wealth and our narrow focus, and our elitism. P163

By the last page of the book I had little or no interest in the on-going accusations of drug taking in the cycling profession. The story of Lance Armstrong soared way above those sordid tales. After what Lance Armstrong had been forced to endure through both chemotherapy and his IVF treatments I very much doubt if he would tolerate anything artificial buzzing around his body. On the contrary we get the picture of an athlete who has grown to a much higher moral plane, an athlete whose inner humanity drives him up the mountainsides of Europe rather than some quick fix doping mixture. If anyone has an alternative view they better come up with some pretty hard scientific data to back up their claims.