Who Strong-Armed Lance Armstrong?
A story about ego and karma.
As a seven-time winner of the Tour de France he rode to the heights of fame and success, and now, stripped of his titles because he did it in a way that earned him the almost universal scorn and contempt of his former fans, Lance Armstrong is the fallen angel of cycling. He doped. He lied. He attacked and destroyed people who spoke the truth. He had that much power, and he didn’t hesitate to use it.
No guilt?
Does he feel guilty about what he did?
Although he’s the only person who can answer that question, from observing him in the interviews he did with Oprah and Mike Trico, it doesn’t look like it. “I wouldn’t change a thing.” he repeated several times to Mike Trico. When Oprah pressed him on it, he was frank, and the picture that emerged was not of Lance being full of regret and remorse.
“Was it a big deal to you, did it feel wrong?” (Lance) “No. It’s scary.”
“Did you feel bad about it?” (Lance) “No. Even scarier.”
“Did you feel in any way that you were cheating?” (Lance) “No. The scariest.”
He didn’t feel what he did was wrong, he didn’t feel he was cheating, and he didn’t feel bad about it. Guilt, apparently, is not his thing.
That seems to have helped him to be such a convincing liar. If you look at the recordings of Lance saying things that we now know were patently untrue, it is amazing. He played the role of the falsely accused hero, and even now, he still looks totally convincing.
I’m always intrigued by people who aren’t bothered by guilt, possibly because I’m one of them. I often joke with my wife that I don’t have the guilt gene, whenever she tries to make me feel guilty.
Is it possible to develop a healthy sense of self and ethics without guilt nudging us in that direction? Apparently so. I did not turn into a narcissistic sociopath, and I actually like the way I turned out.
A hero no more.
There’s a tendency to want to paint people as either completely good or completely bad. Before the truth came out, he was the hero and none of the accusations that were leveled against him stuck. We saw him as the hero, and that meant he had to be 100% good. We didn’t want to see the flaws that were there. But human beings rarely reach that level of saintliness, and Lance didn’t either.
When the truth became harder and harder to deny he eventually went on Oprah and made a confession. He did use doping, and he did it in every Tour de France where he won the title. Ouch! Our hero had clay feet. He had lied. Now the opposite script was activated. For many of his fans he became the villain, 100% bad. But the vast majority of us are a mixed bag, not completely good, but not evil incarnate either. We, like Lance, are somewhere in between.
What karma teaches.
Lance Armstrong is no longer the hero we once believed him to be, but neither is he a completely lost soul. After he went through the ordeal of the cancer treatments and became a cancer survivor he started the Lance Armstrong Foundation.
Having gone through the journey of cancer and cancer-treatments himself, he had the urge to do something to help others who were facing the same ordeal. Once you’ve walked a mile in someone else’s shoes you know what it feels like. It creates empathy and compassion.
That’s the result of karma.
Is it possible that all the drugs and hormones he used were partly or completely responsible for his cancer? There’s no way to know for sure. But it’s not outrageous to believe that they could have. Whatever the cause of his cancer may have been, it taught him something. It changed him.
Karma teaches responsibility, which is one of the faces of love. It may not have taught him to stay away from the performance-enhancing drugs, but it taught him compassion, another face of love. That love became the fuel for starting the foundation with the sole purpose of providing support for cancer patients and their families. He put his fame to good use by helping to raise millions of dollars to help people in need.
Our #1 job.
But the ego is not so easily conquered.
Who strong-armed Lance Armstrong into lying and cheating? None other than his own ego.
Shame, blame, fear and guilt are indicators that our ego is running the show. A lust for power is another way our ego may assert itself. I think it’s safe to say Lance didn’t suffer from excessive shame or guilt, but because all his money and power were based on a lie there was plenty of fear that he would be exposed and he was ruthless, blaming and suing those who spoke the truth about him.
We all have an ego, and our number one job is to keep it in check. If we don’t, it will take over and we can end up with the lying, cheating and bullying that were such a big part of his effort to keep the lie going.
Yes, an ego-driven life brings on karma. But on the upside, it is not punishment, it’s simply there to teach us how to love.
A karmic cycle.
According to David Walsh, a journalist who admits to having been obsessed with trying to expose Lance for years, he could very well have gotten away with it if he had just decided to stay retired. Perhaps it’s for the better that he didn’t, this way the karmic cycle — no pun intended — could run its course sooner rather than later.
The learning doesn’t happen until all the results of our actions start coming back to us. It’s a bit like riding your bike down the mountain. Life is easy, you’re going fast, and it takes no effort. The longer you do this, the harder and longer your climb back up is going to be. All that elevation that is working in your favor on the way down, you will need to regain with the hard work of riding up-hill. That’s karma. There is no free ride, it’s just that the payment is presented later, often when we’ve forgotten all about the way we created the debt in the first place.
The karmic cycle has three parts to it. It begins with our actions, followed by the short-term results, these were all good for Lance. It’s only when the long-term effects started showing up that the full results of his actions became visible. That’s when the up-hill ride began, as well as the learning.
He was being sued instead of being the one suing others. The money that had been flowing his way for all those years began to flow the other way as he had to defend himself in lawsuit after lawsuit. The respect, the adoration and the power that came with his titles after winning the Tour de France, quickly evaporated once the truth came out.
Success, to have staying power, needs to be built on something other than the ego, which forever tries to find shortcuts to get short-term results while creating a long-term karmic debt.
Two kinds of people.
The other day I heard someone mention: “It’s only illegal if you get caught.”
He’s separating the world into two kinds of people, those who get caught — the losers — and those who don’t — the winners.
It’s a common viewpoint, especially among those obsessed with winning at all cost.
I like to separate the world into two kinds of people too. Those who understand karma and those who don’t. Those who realize that karma is a real force understand that the real race, the real battle is with their own ego.
As a cyclist Lance had to separate himself from the peloton if he wanted to win, but he would have been better served by learning to separate himself from his ego. It’s no easy task.
It may be true that we have to pick our battles, but this is one battle we can’t afford to lose, and we have to fight it sooner or later.
Sooner is better.
