Lance Armstrong should not have skulked off in disgrace after it finally came out that he really had been doping all those years. After his recent assertion that no one can win the Tour de France without doping, it occurred to me he should just approach Monsanto about sponsoring a cycling team. They're totally into putting chemicals where they shouldn't be. They could use the whole sport as their publicity campaign.
Too bad no one thought of that while there was still time.
Showing posts with label Lance Armstrong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lance Armstrong. Show all posts
Monday, July 01, 2013
Thursday, February 07, 2013
Wannabes
While watching this video of Mark O'Connor, Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer playing "College Hornpipe" I was tempted once again to put away the fiddle/violin and never touch it again. Who do I think I am? Some kind of Darol Anger wannabe? Then I remembered: of course I'm not. I'm just a guy trying late in life to learn something I wish every day I'd started trying to learn much sooner.
People use the term "wannabe" to deride the efforts of someone trying to perform something that someone much more prominent does much better. For instance, during the height of Lance Armstrong's career, a delivery truck driver referred to someone he thought was hogging the road in a flashy jersey and tight shorts as "a Lance wannabe." I heard that particular term from a number of other scornful motorists. Pick the name of someone famous in the field in question. Accuse the poor schlump doing the best they can in the same discipline of aspiring to be seen in the same spotlight. Instant dismissal.
The downside of recorded media is that any one of us gets to compare our efforts to the performances of the top people in any area that interests us. We can rate our own performances, although the first wave of auditions for American Idol shows that far too many people don't do it very well. For all that we can learn from watching and listening to the experts, many of us will never reach their level. You have to be fine with that.
To get better at something, find what expert guidance you can and then refuse to quit. Keep doing it. Someone who does not ride thinks a ten-mile ride sounds long and a 50-mile ride sounds like the realm of super athletes. Yet after a few months of consistent riding even longer distances will seem quite plausible. Sure, it's not as fast as in a car (most of the time) but cycling also trains your mind to a different sense of time. A non-rider won't believe how an hour on the bike can feel quicker than 30 minutes on the same route in a car.
The spoken or imagined judgment of onlookers can be more discouraging than the size of the mountain one has to climb to achieve basic competence, let alone impressive performances in subjects that may only seem difficult from outside.
"Who cares what people think?" you might say. True, you do have to shut out thoughts and opinions that hold you back. But people will feel freer to brush you aside if they've written you off as a poser. To a cyclist that can be dangerous. To a student musician not so much.
No one asks, but if they did ask me what I want to be I would just say, "better."
People use the term "wannabe" to deride the efforts of someone trying to perform something that someone much more prominent does much better. For instance, during the height of Lance Armstrong's career, a delivery truck driver referred to someone he thought was hogging the road in a flashy jersey and tight shorts as "a Lance wannabe." I heard that particular term from a number of other scornful motorists. Pick the name of someone famous in the field in question. Accuse the poor schlump doing the best they can in the same discipline of aspiring to be seen in the same spotlight. Instant dismissal.
The downside of recorded media is that any one of us gets to compare our efforts to the performances of the top people in any area that interests us. We can rate our own performances, although the first wave of auditions for American Idol shows that far too many people don't do it very well. For all that we can learn from watching and listening to the experts, many of us will never reach their level. You have to be fine with that.
To get better at something, find what expert guidance you can and then refuse to quit. Keep doing it. Someone who does not ride thinks a ten-mile ride sounds long and a 50-mile ride sounds like the realm of super athletes. Yet after a few months of consistent riding even longer distances will seem quite plausible. Sure, it's not as fast as in a car (most of the time) but cycling also trains your mind to a different sense of time. A non-rider won't believe how an hour on the bike can feel quicker than 30 minutes on the same route in a car.
The spoken or imagined judgment of onlookers can be more discouraging than the size of the mountain one has to climb to achieve basic competence, let alone impressive performances in subjects that may only seem difficult from outside.
"Who cares what people think?" you might say. True, you do have to shut out thoughts and opinions that hold you back. But people will feel freer to brush you aside if they've written you off as a poser. To a cyclist that can be dangerous. To a student musician not so much.
No one asks, but if they did ask me what I want to be I would just say, "better."
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Hero Villain Lance
A local athlete came home from some marathon in Colorado with yet another story about what an arrogant, antisocial pud Lance Armstrong is.
The details don't matter. It was something about using his leverage to get into a closed field AND take a preferential starting position. Our local reporter said that the race organizers and other competitors weren't happy about it, but somehow the organizers allowed it. There was grumbling. No one was apparently very disappointed when The Great Man did not hang around to socialize, yet Lance's immediate disappearance after the race offended about as much as his abrupt entry and brusque push to the front row.
One of the hotshots who used to join the Sunday morning riding group a few summers ago, when Lance was still active in or only very recently retired from the pro ranks, would launch into angry tirades about everything that was wrong with Lance any time his name was mentioned.
It occurs to me that the more he's hated, the more prickly and aloof he becomes. As a result he becomes even more hated. Not too many people like to be hated, although some will pretend it's fine with them.
Armstrong began his career with the magic blend of talent and insecurity that breeds greatness. You don't have anything to prove unless you have something to prove. The pursuit of dominance is different from the pursuit of excellence. To be a top athlete you have to win. That means you have to make the rest of the field into losers. Feathers often get ruffled. It's a rare champion who has not pissed somebody off. However, some competitors seem to do that more than others.
Personally I don't care either way. As my brother said, if everyone was doping and Lance still won then he's still the best rider. Among those who have strong opinions, that observation would surely spark a typhoon of excrement. My brother is not a Lance partisan, just a logical observer.
Professional sports are just entertainment. Pro cycling has been oozing with substance abuse since it was invented. If you think about it, the Tour de France was conceived as a publicity stunt to sell newspapers by someone who wasn't going to have to ride it. Tour riders came to hate race founder Henri Desgrange and took every chemical advantage they could get, even if it was the dubious advantages of beer and cigarettes.
Mr. Armstrong is just one among a very large number of people I will never have to deal with personally, about whom I know far more than I need to. I am not excessively aggravated by celebrity news, merely fascinated by the phenomenon. Yes, I would like to receive a little more high-fiber news from my major media outlets. I don't really care about entertainers' meltdowns. Pictures of the Sexiest Woman Alive are equivalent to pictures of the surface of Saturn in terms of the likelihood I will ever land there. But these are people. I have to think that most of them do not deserve the highest adulation or the darkest hatred that they receive because they successfully called attention to themselves. The form of the attention shapes them even if they do have massively dysfunctional personalities and would be jerks even in obscurity.
I reserve judgment because I will never have to deal directly with any of them. Even on the exceedingly rare occasions that one of the local summer celebrities appears in our shop it's very short. They come in, ask for what they want, buy it if we have it and go. It's as if they were normal.
The details don't matter. It was something about using his leverage to get into a closed field AND take a preferential starting position. Our local reporter said that the race organizers and other competitors weren't happy about it, but somehow the organizers allowed it. There was grumbling. No one was apparently very disappointed when The Great Man did not hang around to socialize, yet Lance's immediate disappearance after the race offended about as much as his abrupt entry and brusque push to the front row.
One of the hotshots who used to join the Sunday morning riding group a few summers ago, when Lance was still active in or only very recently retired from the pro ranks, would launch into angry tirades about everything that was wrong with Lance any time his name was mentioned.
It occurs to me that the more he's hated, the more prickly and aloof he becomes. As a result he becomes even more hated. Not too many people like to be hated, although some will pretend it's fine with them.
Armstrong began his career with the magic blend of talent and insecurity that breeds greatness. You don't have anything to prove unless you have something to prove. The pursuit of dominance is different from the pursuit of excellence. To be a top athlete you have to win. That means you have to make the rest of the field into losers. Feathers often get ruffled. It's a rare champion who has not pissed somebody off. However, some competitors seem to do that more than others.
Personally I don't care either way. As my brother said, if everyone was doping and Lance still won then he's still the best rider. Among those who have strong opinions, that observation would surely spark a typhoon of excrement. My brother is not a Lance partisan, just a logical observer.
Professional sports are just entertainment. Pro cycling has been oozing with substance abuse since it was invented. If you think about it, the Tour de France was conceived as a publicity stunt to sell newspapers by someone who wasn't going to have to ride it. Tour riders came to hate race founder Henri Desgrange and took every chemical advantage they could get, even if it was the dubious advantages of beer and cigarettes.
Mr. Armstrong is just one among a very large number of people I will never have to deal with personally, about whom I know far more than I need to. I am not excessively aggravated by celebrity news, merely fascinated by the phenomenon. Yes, I would like to receive a little more high-fiber news from my major media outlets. I don't really care about entertainers' meltdowns. Pictures of the Sexiest Woman Alive are equivalent to pictures of the surface of Saturn in terms of the likelihood I will ever land there. But these are people. I have to think that most of them do not deserve the highest adulation or the darkest hatred that they receive because they successfully called attention to themselves. The form of the attention shapes them even if they do have massively dysfunctional personalities and would be jerks even in obscurity.
I reserve judgment because I will never have to deal directly with any of them. Even on the exceedingly rare occasions that one of the local summer celebrities appears in our shop it's very short. They come in, ask for what they want, buy it if we have it and go. It's as if they were normal.
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