And Miles To Go Before He Sleeps

Artistic or athletic perfection is never assured. Just because Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, it doesn’t mean his next canvas will be The Last Supper. David, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the Pieta, coming from one man awes us. Rembrandt, Picasso, and others who can awe us repetitively are rare humans.

Athletes, who sometimes raise their craft to art, can also be one-hit wonders or long-lived icons. Bob Beamon, Mark Fidrych, and Bill Walton produced singular achievements, but fate or injury or something cut each of their careers short.

Today we witnessed another other worldly performer return to the ranks of merely human. Lance Armstrong’s achievements in endurance sport have spanned more than two decades. As a teenager, he was beating men sometimes twice his age in short-course triathlon. Switching to cycling, he won the world championship at age 21, a stage of the Tour de France at 23. And of course, after surviving metastatic cancer 3 years later, he returned to cycling to win 7 consecutive titles at the Tour.

This year, in his 13th and last Tour, he came prepared, fit, and backed by a powerful team. On the first day, he raced an individual time trail faster than all of his rivals for the overall title, hinting that he might still have sufficient prowess to contend for yet another victory, or at least a top three finish. Even after a potentially crushing flat tire on the cobblestones of the 4th day, he showed anger and energy in attempting to claw back the minute he lost there.

But today, luck, and his own will to win, finally deserted him. First, his front tire came off the wheel just at the base of the penultimate climb of the day. His team brought him back to the main group of riders, but the effort to return drained so much of his energy that he lost a minute on that climb. Still, with another descent, and another climb to go, he had an opportunity to remain a respectable contender, among the leaders still at nearly 39 years of age.

But then, just before the top of that next to last climb, another rider clipped his bike. Lance did not fall off, but his bike became entangled when the other rider did. Lance, standing on the road just below the summit, instantly felt his drive to win fly away, smothered on the pavement under his supine steed.

The Lance who would do anything, who would bruise any egos, ride through rain and cold in January thinking only of the roads in France in July, the Lance who, for seven years, did not let his fire to succeed go out, would have aggressively snatched his bike up, mounted jumping from the side on the fly, and tear off down the hill, hell bent to catch the next man up the road, and the next, and the next, then dance on the pedals, standing for miles with his metronomic cadence of 95-100 pedal revolutions each minute, sweat pouring, eyes acutely focused on the blank spaces behind his forehead, the emptiness inside which must be filled, can only be filled with winning, conquering, and finding the limit of his endurance, only to go beyond it.

The Lance who fueled his races with anger and contempt, who held any real personality in check for all those years, crushing marriage, romance, friendship, and nice guy image along the way, that Lance melted away in that moment. He stopped, seemed to grasp in a flash that resistance now is futile, that the body does begin to slow down, and that maybe, just maybe, seven wins in a row is enough, and he’s gotten everything he’s going to get from the road, and now it’s time to start another path.

He got back on his bike, escorted by a team mate from Slovenia, Janez Brajkovic, who seemed to channel Lance’s emotions in his own Slavic face. Braikovic’s job, of course, would be to pace Lance back to the contender’s groups a minute or two up the road. But Lance was not pushing with the singular drive we all assumed is immutably part of his core. Lance’s doppelganger appeared puzzled, wondering why he had to hang back with this old man, when the race was flying away in front of them.

We’ll never know what Lance was really thinking during that hour or more after his flat in the roundabout, but I hope he was re-committing himself to a new set of goals, ones he could now translate into action, there on the roads in France from the Alps through the Pyrenees and on to Paris over the next two weeks.

Because Lance has one last lesson he can put before us, for those who wish to learn. Having shown how to fight for life, then how to dream beyond belief, and how to marry unique physical gifts with unquenchable thirst for perfection, he now has a chance to show us grace, wisdom and leadership, when all hope for personal glory is gone. I hope he will choose that path, to continue to demonstrate what’s possible in life.