To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults. Telling the individual who just thoroughly dominated the greatest sporting event in the world that he has a lot to learn is equally abstruse. Any cultural endeavor which preys upon emotion at best hopes to be magic delivered from the lie of being truth. At worst, it spawns a spectacle deduced to being a caricature of itself. And this is the problem with trying to draw any tidy conclusions about what occurred in this year’s Tour de France.
I wrote before the race began regarding Mr. Armstrong:
But fuck him if he doesn’t pull it off. the rest of the world has retreated into American style voyeurism. we like our entertainment cheap, lacking all subtlety and with strong representations of dominated and dominator. people could give fuck all about good/evil, clean/dirty, doped to the gills/straight edge etc. etc. the fact is the masses demand something more than repentant versus unrepentant when it comes to the tragi-drama that is life and we want this illusion mimicked in pro-cycling. Objectively too numb to view the resulting farce and blind to the refuse of broken lives and mental collapses and damaged lives, we demand our sportsmen to transcend not just our own mediocrity but the very realm of possibility. Cycling is one of the few venues where glimmers of this dumb craving can be realized.
Armstrong did not deliver. His goal was two-fold; total victory and total subjugation of the entire race, all its participants and the entire sports media into his agenda. He speaks in the second person, because he honestly believes it moral and right and real to do so. His ego consciously takes everyone and everything that surrounds him into its service as a piece of this apparatus. But despite his cunning, his treachery and his delegation of everything into his business-mechanism/cause/ego he lost and Pistolero won. Bruyneel screaming at Contador to wait for Lance, an announcement of a new team during the race, Armstrong hindering the comfort and routine of his team leader through denying Alberto cars, water and literally his seat on the team bus-didn’t change the outcome of the race one iota- it just destroyed any potential narrative that wasn’t that of Mr. Armstrong’s.
The job of every individual employed by a pro-cycling team other than a select group of elite riders, is to insure the total comfort of the protected athlete. Soigneurs, directors, mechanics, cooks, press liaisons, hangers-on, agents, doctors and domestiques act to insure there are no true choices or decisions to be made by the athlete. A great cyclist should only ever need to think with his blood; not his rational mind. The physical body of the professional cyclist is a tool that is best not hindered in its ability for incredible, impossible action by a nagging conscious brain. Armstrong did his best to upset this world and force Alberto Contador into doubt and nervous reflection, and hoped for a physical breakdown which would at least bring Contador’s performance down a notch.
And it never occurred. Contador talked about the terrors off the bike during this year’s tour. On the bike it was different, tranquillo. The strengths that make him the greatest cyclist in the world; a near impossible power to weight ratio, the quiet self-absorbed selfish cocky adolescence that permeates almost every great endurance athlete partly allowed Pistolero to triumph. But in the end, Contador foiled Armstrong for the same reason all true supermen, regardless of their chosen endeavors and accompanying insurmountable odds eventually succeed. Contador, shares an important trait with Mozart, with Einstein, with Lance Armstrong, with each and every great whose actions transcend the possible; namely the ability to suffer and act with such a totality of exertion that any space left anywhere for anything else to exist is destroyed by their own force of will. Contador spoke of emptiness on the bike, of nothing else mattering except his physical action. Contador vanquished the mighty Lance Armstrong and all he inhabits with his legs; and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Sport had yet again betrayed reality, given power to the powerless and a skinny, shy high-school drop-out from the wrong part of Madrid profanely destroyed a dumb narrative of what should have occurred, and no force this side of positive test will change it. Congratulations Alberto. Despite everything that stood in your way- you showed the world a tiny, seemingly insignificant kernel of objective truth; Albert Contador is the greatest cyclist in the world. Thank you.
