It will not have escaped your attention that Lance Armstrong is now a confessed doper.
It will not have escaped your attention that Lance Armstrong took EPO and possibly forced others to do the same.
It will not have escaped your attention that Lance Armstrong lied, cheated and bullied his way to seven Tour de France titles.
In short, Lance Armstrong will not have escaped your attention.
The internet is now saturated with articles such as this one, which comment on what I have come to term Armstrongalypse. Everyone has an opinion on what he did or did not say in his interview with Oprah Winfrey and this has been flashed at us from every screen in the nearby vicinity ramming it to the forefront of public conversation. However I am not a scientist, economist or professional cyclist, so to try and come to some sort of informed conclusion regarding the case using the never-ending stream of evidence would be a fallacy, so I won’t.
My point is this: That I didn’t, don’t and will not care about Lance Armstrong.
I started riding my bike when I was 4 years old. At this age I couldn’t even spell Armstrong and the fact that my favourite colour was yellow was dependent solely on the fact that yellow is the same colour as custard. I then sparked my cycling interest proper when I was 16. I had a twelve week summer holiday, no job and no car and nothing to do; I rode my bike solely as a way to relieve boredom, but it soon became more than that. Cycling soon became an embodiment of freedom, both of myself and of my surroundings, it didn’t matter that I didn’t go very fast, but that I was perfectly happy just riding around. I started riding with groups and although I started to race and ride with other racers, cycling still had that foundation of freedom: Freedom from work, freedom from family, freedom from the computer screen nature of modern life. Cycling was a release and my passion.
Now these may not be the reasons that everyone starts cycling, but I’ll bet a fair amount of my student loan that that is the main reason a lot of people stick with the sport, not because Alberto Contador smashed everyone in the Giro or that Lance won his seventh Tour title. The recent success of British Cycling in all its forms may do the job of getting a new audience involved, but if these people start enjoying the sport for its purity and simplicity then there is no way they are going to stop because Chris Hoy retires or Laura Trott only wins silver in Rio. This is the exactly the same with Armstrongalypse. I don’t care that this man doped, yes it puts a smear on our sport for the uninitiated, but ask any cyclist if they will stop riding because Lance Armstrong has confessed to doping. I defy you to find anyone that says yes.
It has often been said that due to his international celebrity status Lance Armstrong transcended cycling. I firmly believe that this is irrelevant, and that instead Cycling transcends Lance Armstrong.