<<After winning the Tour for the past five years, Armstrong has stamped his authority more devastatingly than ever on this year's race. Barring pestilence or war, he will set a record, and accomplish one of the greatest feats in sporting history, when he stands on the winner's podium in Paris tomorrow. He will also rub more salt in Gallic wounds. American dominance in any European event at any time might be resented, but this isn't any other time, and the Tour isn't any other contest. The race is part of the fabric of France, ingrained in the country's social, political and cultural history.
It began in 1903 as a byproduct of the Dreyfus affair, when an anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Semitic publisher fell out with the Dreyfusard editor of a sports newspaper and started another. It was this new paper, with its unlovely origins, that conceived of the Tour and still sponsors it, although the paper was discreetly renamed L'Équipe after the German occupation.
No other sporting event resonates on quite such a national level. For the French, the Tour is World Series, Super Bowl and Kentucky Derby combined. It has been hymned in countless silly songs and deconstructed in unmistakably Parisian intellectual fashion: Roland Barthes saw the Tour as an epic in which the riders had stepped out of ancient myth.
Sadly for France, this epic has few local heroes now. All of France thrilled earlier in the Tour when Thomas Voeckler wore the leader's yellow jersey for 10 days. But the boy from Alsace knew he would have to cede the lead eventually to that man from Austin, Tex., and Voeckler's brief glory can't alter the fact that no Frenchman has won France's very own Tour for nearly 20 years.
To make it worse, Armstrong's reign comes as French-American relations are at their sourest ever. Maybe Armstrong had that in mind when he went to the trouble last year of opposing the war waged by his friend and fellow Texan, George W. Bush, although his words - "It's wrong to go to the front without the support of Europe'' - did not dissipate the coolness with which his triumphs have been greeted.
That in turn is a projection of a more general anti-American sentiment, not to say a broader "morosité'' (a favorite word here), as France faces an uncertain future in which a sporting decline is only a part. With French political leadership of the European Union visibly coming to an end, French opposition to the American "hyperpower" can sometimes seem like impotent posturing, while Paris conducts another hopeless rearguard action against the irresistible advance of English as the lingua franca of Europe.
None of which is related with a sneer. France is a wonderful country, French is a beautiful language, and the French are often more likable than they care to pretend. And even if French cultural chauvinism sometimes has a paranoid tinge, it can't be entirely dismissed, not at least by those of us who think that "La Règle du Jeu" and "Les Enfants du Paradis" might on balance be better movies than "Terminator 3."
But there is an uglier manifestation of anti-American feeling: the hounding of Armstrong in the French press over accusations that he is involved in doping, and the repulsive sight of fans not only holding up signs of syringes as he passes but also spitting at him. This is repulsive not because of the objective weight of the accusations, but because of the hypocrisy: the French have been notably uncensorious about their own flawed idols. The same fans who jeer Armstrong cheered the stage victory of Richard Virenque, the villain of the 1998 doping scandal, which nearly ruined the Tour.
Not that Virenque was up to anything new. We scarcely need the name Balco to remind us that the doping problem isn't confined to the Tour, but for many years cycling has been in a class of its own. The extent of drug use was concealed by the sport's omertà, with disastrous consequences.
At the end of his career in the 1950's, the great Fausto Coppi said that amphetamines had been used by almost all cyclists, including himself, "whenever it was necessary.'' And when was that? "Practically all the time." He died at 40. Since then, the wonder drug EPO has arrived to enrich red blood cells, to enhance performance - and to kill. The awful evidence is young cyclists dying from nocturnal heart attacks, at least eight of them in the last 15 months.
Too often, the Tour de France does resemble epic tragedy, in which heroic ambition leads to self-destruction. Nonetheless, it remains a glorious event to follow, and it would be good to see a French resurgence. But it would be even better to see some of these epic heroes, French and otherwise, show a different kind of courage, by renouncing drugs. Just say no - or "Nuts!">>
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, 1903-2003."
nytimes.com
THE TIMES: AMERICA LAST From the last paragraph of an op-ed in today's New York Times about drug use in the tour de France: "...it would be good to see a French resurgence." What does any one country's performance have to do with drugs? Why would it "be good" for the French to do better? And most important -- why can't the Times let it be okay for an American to dominate a global sport?
Posted by Donald Luskin at 4:01 PM | link |
