Tour de Force

But lately the sports headlines have been almost as depressing as the front page: Allen Iverson’s problems with the law; the looming possibility of another disastrous, World Series-killing baseball strike; and the shocking death of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile, among other things.

Those looking for an uplifting sports story hoped that Tiger Woods would win the British Open this past weekend and put himself in position to win golf’s Grand Slam. Alas, Tiger’s game imploded on Saturday amidst some of the worst weather conditions ever seen in a major golf championship–even by the standards of the British Open, where you can assume that the English wind and rain will play havoc, even in mid-July. Tiger’s troubles demonstrate what makes golf the greatest sport of all: It is often cruel and unfair, just like life. In golf, as in life, even the best of us have our off days; occasionally the world’s greatest players are humiliated by the game, just like us weekend duffers. All you can do is grind it out and “play the ball where it lies,” and to Tiger’s credit, he was gracious after his atrocious round on Saturday.

So, Tiger won’t win the Slam, at least not this year. But there’s another terrific sports story involving a dominant American in Europe right now–cyclist Lance Armstrong and the Tour de France. Last month during the World Cup, I tried to convince some of my more benighted Standard colleagues that soccer is a great sport. Now it’s time to tout another sport that doesn’t get much attention in America–cycling.

If you wanted to, you could argue that the Ironman Triathlon deserves to be considered the most grueling sporting event in the world, but in my opinion the Tour de France wins that distinction, hands down. It’s three weeks of absolute physical and mental brutality, with only a few rest days inserted to break up the torture. Riders burn up to 9,000 calories during each day of racing, spending anywhere from three to six hours in the saddle in mid-summer heat, with the most insane stages going through the Alps and Pyrenees. Besides these demands, the Tour also presents other real dangers. It is no simple thing to have a peleton of some 150 cyclists streaming along in tight quarters at 30 mph; one rider’s mistake can send dozens of them crashing to the pavement. It’s also no cinch for riders to make the death-defying descents on the opposite sides of the mountain while approaching speeds of up to 70 mph. Not for the faint of heart, obviously.

Yesterday’s Stage 14 of the Tour ended in Provence with the notorious climb to the summit of Mont Ventoux–the climb on which British rider Tom Simpson suffered a fatal heart attack in 1967 from a combination of heat stroke and amphetamine use. Armstrong finished third in the stage, but more importantly, he retained the yellow jersey (signifying the race’s overall leader) and gained nearly two minutes in the standings on his closest rival in this year’s Tour, Joseba Beloki of Spain. The upcoming week includes three more difficult stages in the Alps, but barring a major catastrophe, Armstrong will likely be standing atop the podium in Paris next Sunday, enjoying his fourth straight Tour victory. He would thus become only the fourth rider to win four straight Tours, and would need only one more victory to equal the record of five titles, held jointly by Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, and Spain’s Miguel Indurain, who was the king of the sport in the 1990s. Only Indurain won all five titles consecutively; Armstrong, who shows no signs of slowing down at age 30, could equal Indurain’s feat next year.

As he’s done in previous Tours, Armstrong has displayed the killer instinct that defines great champions. He matched Beloki most of the way up Ventoux, and when the right moment came, he put the hammer down, sprinting away by employing an inexorable, fast pedal cadence. Whenever he does this, Armstrong always gives a brief, intimidating glance back at his opponent while he opens the gap, as if to say, “You think YOU are going to take away my yellow jersey? Let’s see you try–come and catch me if you can.” Armstrong’s talent for demoralizing his opponents is astonishing to watch, on par with the way Michael Jordan once imposed his will at the end of basketball games, and the way Tiger Woods now dominates (most of) golf’s major championships. But with Armstrong, there is the added amazement of knowing that just a few years ago this man was facing death from testicular cancer that had metastasized to his lungs. Somewhere in the back of his mind, on brutal climbs like Mont Ventoux, you just know he must be thinking: “What is the pain of this, compared to months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments? I could be dead right now.”

What makes Armstrong even more admirable is the classy way he’s handled his success. After every Tour win (and this year as well), he has endured accusations from some European cycling fans that he simply must be using drugs or engaging in blood doping to be so dominant. He doesn’t bat an eyelash–and he doesn’t need to, since he’s never once failed a drug test. Armstrong knows that his dominance results not from cheating, but from his physical gifts and the simple fact that he trains harder than any other cyclist in the world.

Here’s another small but telling example of Armstrong’s integrity: In the opening Prologue stage of the Tour, an individual time-trial, Armstrong had the right to wear the yellow jersey as the Tour’s defending champion. But he didn’t want to rest on his laurels; he wanted to earn the jersey in this Tour before wearing it again, so he raced the Prologue in the colors of his U.S. Postal Service team. (He won the stage, of course, and earned the yellow jersey.)

Though he’s now the undisputed master of a sport that most Americans still don’t follow closely, Armstrong hasn’t exactly been ignored here, given his inspiring personal story. I suspect that his remarkable achievements as a cyclist would probably garner much less media attention in America if his tale of triumph over cancer victimhood wasn’t so tailor-made for the age of Oprah, Matt, and Katie. (Similarly, Greg LeMond didn’t get much press in the States when he became the first American ever to win the Tour in 1986. It wasn’t until he came back to win two more Tours in 1989 and 1990, after being shot and nearly killed in a hunting accident, that he was feted by the American celebrity machine.) But no matter. For Lance Armstrong, and for those of us who have the privilege of watching him, even amidst all the other bad news, sometimes the world is still a pretty amazing place.

Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at The Weekly Standard.