July 4, 2005:
Lance Armstrong is going to win the Tour de France again this year, making millions of Europeans angry.
That's partly because lots of people will resent a winner (I never really liked Michael Jordan), but also because sports figures almost always function as national allegories (a fact everyone remembers with some pleasure every four years at the World Cup, when the efficient Germans, the tough Englishmen, the creative Brazilians, and the athletically gifted but undisciplined Cameroonians (oh, tragedy!) work out the world's semi-conscious version of the cultural genome project on a series of soccer fields). And Armstrong is as American as they come, a fact which, given the general (and justified) anger at the United States about in the world today, means that his victory will feel to many bicycling fans like a win for a set of cultural values that they are not only hostile to but afraid of.
In Armstrong's case those values have a lot to do with winning, labor, and modesty. I'm not sure that it's absolutely true that Armstrong works harder than other people, but the coverage in the United States absolutely pushes that line, and it's clear that he believes it. This means that for him his wins are the product of his labor and his alone; the uncomfortable corollary of such a position is that anyone who loses just didn't work as hard as Armstrong did. Where modesty comes in is that Armstrong doesn't seem to believe in protecting other people from his belief.
If you understand this, you understand why Armstrong's victories in the Tour, which have been by and large by enormous margins of time, are so offensive to so many people: they appear to sustain the Calvinst, American idea that people who work harder deserve more, and its uglier corollary, that people who have more have worked harder and therefore deserve it.
(The stupid blindness of such a system is, of course, that it assigns moral value to material success, rendering things like social class invisible. Molly Ivins' quip about George W. Bush--that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple--aptly captures where such a system can have devastating social consequences. And that's on the top end--when it comes to the politics of welfare or socialized medicine, things get a lot nastier. Sometime ask a large group of people what percentage of the U.S. budget is spent on “welfare”; you'll get guesses ranging from 10 to 30 percent, when of course the real number is not only in the low single digits but is also fairly complicated. Anyway. Back to Armstrong.)
You understand why, then, so many Europeans would like to believe that Armstrong uses performance-enhancing drugs: it would ground his success in cheating, thereby depriving him of the moral ground for feeling unashamed for what he's accomplished. (You see the same thing happening with Barry Bonds, who is, incidentally, another athlete who refuses to apologize for his success.) Unfortunately, despite years of scheduled and random drug tests (including one on the first day of this year's Tour), no one has found enough evidence to make the case stick.
My understanding of the structure of this form of cultural desire comes with help from the Nietzsche of the Genealogy of Morals book. There, Nietzsche insists that the invention of morality occurs as a way for the weak to acquire power without acquiring strength; face-to-face with the strong, the weak invent morality in order to make the strong feel guilty for being powerful. The power the weak acquire by convincing the strong to distribute their power (either by sharing it, or by limiting its use) is disguised as non-power, as a theological or natual ground to which the (ab)use of power does violence.
Ironically, Nietzsche's major example of this structure was Western Christianity, the very same complex of ideologies that produces the Calvinist relation to labor and success that has become one of the identifying features of contemporary Americanness. In a world where Americans work, on average, 25.13 hours of work per week per working-age (i.e. 15-64 year-old) person, and the French work 17.95 hours per working-age person--that is, only 70 percent of what Americans do--such a feature acquires an explanatory power that reaches well beyond the ability of a single person to keep winning bike races.
The larger race is, in such a scenario, the race for national supremacy, which is of course not without venal fantasies of its very own. What's interesting about the current moment is, however, that if the United States is “losing,” it's not really because of a general European resistance to US power of the type Nietzsche described, but rather because of two major forms of the direct (“strong”) exercise of power: the violent insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, on one hand, and the growing strength of China, whose ownership of trillions of dollars of US Treasury bonds gives it an immense amount of potential leverage over the American economy.
None of that will matter over the next three weeks, of course, during which Armstrong will cement his status as the greatest Tour rider ever, just before he retires. More than any human I've ever seen, Armstrong is driven not simply to win but to crush the spirit of his competitors, and his victory in the Tour's first stage on Saturday did just that. My sense is that he wants to win this Tour by such a margin that his shadow will extend over next year's race, which will only be won by someone else at Armstrong's sufferance. You heard it here first: the 2007 Tour will be won by Armstrong's ghost, its figure a nice measure of his inhuman devotion to winning.
What works in bicycling does not work especially well in global politics, as our president is finding out to his chagrin. When the stakes and the rules do not limit so severely the form and place of competition, it may not be quite as clear what or how you're supposed to do when you work. And there are lots of other people out there, it turns out, willing to work as hard as you, or harder, often because they have so much more than you to lose.
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