London – One of the most poignant stories to tear-stain sporting history took place as ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson walked out of a Chicago courtroom.
He and seven other White Sox players were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series in exchange for $5,000 each.
And, at least as legend records it, a worshipping boy asked hopefully of his hero: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Shoeless Joe could not bring himself to answer.
It is a similar sense of crushing reality that continues to engulf the feelings of many of us now the full extent of Lance Armstrong’s calculated drug cheating is laid bare.
Of course, we had lost our faith in Armstrong long before the US Anti-Doping Agency’s excoriating report was published on Wednesday, telling of “the most sophisticated, professional and successful doping programme that sport has seen”, including the chill tale of grooming riders to take part in the illicit act.
His admission at the end of August that “enough is enough”, meaning he would not be fighting the allegations on the pretext that to do so was futile in the face of a witch-hunt, had done that for us.
By then you had to be blissfully naive or implicated to think otherwise. How many who knew performance-enhancing poison was being administered, injurious to young bodies and sporting truth, failed to speak up? Too many. And for too long.
Now, they wish it would all go away, hitting out at the few brave individuals who did raise questions about Armstrong when it was the most unfashionable thing to do and at Usada, who are merely doing their job thoroughly. The Armstrong loyalists, along with some of cycling’s apologists, blame “axe-grinders”, the exact phrase employed last night by the cheat’s punchy lawyers.
Unlike Shoeless Joe, who was illiterate to the extent that he would wait at dinner for his teammates to order off the menu before repeating a dish he had heard them order as his own choice, Armstrong was not only educated but a prolific publisher.
Just down from my bookshelf comes It’s Not About the Bike — My Journey Back to Life, detailing his recovery from stage four testicular cancer and a 40 per cent chance of survival in inspiring, moving detail. Then we have Lance Armstrong’s War, which purports to be an “extraordinary story of greatness pushed to the limits... the true story of a superlative sports figure”. It added that many thought him a “secular saint”. We remember those yellow Livestrong bracelets, the handiwork with his eponymous cancer foundation that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to research for cures, and those inspiring notes he wrote to give hope to sick children.
Armstrong has not got away with it. He deserves all the opprobrium because raising money for the sick is not an excuse for drug-soiled cheating.
Nobody is all good; nobody all bad. It is just hard, as Shoeless Joe Jackson’s fan found out, to accept the deep failings of those who asked us to venerate them so much. – Daily Mail