And Another Thing
Lance Armstrong may not be my favorite cyclist, but I am very tired of reading some stick and ball sports writer talk about how he isn't one of the best athletes ever. Sigh. I guess it all comes down to whether you think fine motor skills are more impressive than the efficiency of the human body as an engine. I could argue until the sun comes up tomorrow about why there is more to bike racing than just having a good engine. It takes balance, nerve, aggression, quick reaction time, quick thinking, and no fear. I would truly enjoy seeing some of these reporters go out for a ride in the mountains of France. Heck, even some cat 3 climb - it doesn't have to be one of the monsters in the Alps or Pyrenees. It's more than just riding your bike up hill real fast. That's hard enough. Try going downhill on two skinny tires at speeds in excessive 50 mph with sharp turns and steep dropoffs. It's hard. It's hard not to crash your bike, it's hard to make the corner, it's even worse if you think about it. You have to understand the physics of making that corner and you have to understand your body and your bike. If you make a mistake, you crash. If something happens to your bike and you aren't prepared, you crash. You may die. I would also like to see these guys race in a crit with almost 200 other guys. I wonder if they could hold their line or keep their bikes upright. Nerves of steel and the reaction time to match. Sure, Lance probably can't score 20+ points a night in the NBA or hit a drive for 300+ yards or sink a putt at the 18th at Augusta to win the Masters. But I don't argue about how great Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods are.
Skip Bayless of ESPN.com (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=bayless/050725) has written that "Armstrong doesn't qualify as the greatest all-around athlete because cycling doesn't test enough athletic talent or skill. And he doesn't qualify for greatest performer because his sport doesn't have the equivalent of last-second shots or throws or catches, of two-outs-in-the-ninth swings or of final-hole putts. The pressure through 21 Tour stages is constant, but rarely if ever acute." Fine, he's entitled to his opinion. He gets paid to have an opinion. I just wonder why skills sports hold so much fascination for Americans. Ah, the grace under pressure aspect. So the world's greatest athletes don't choke. Does that mean it's impossible for an endurance athelete not to choke? I'm thinking back to the women's Olympic marathon - one of the favorites had a breakdown on the course and didn't finish. I think that qualifies as choking. Again, I digress. I respectfully disagree about pressure in the Tour de France not being acute. It's definitely constant and I would argue that on certain stages it can be acute - if your competition has the will and the fitness to apply it. An attack on a particularly difficult mountain stage can put the best riders in the world into difficulty. You watch them slip away from as you climb in the searing heat, with thousands of people cheering you on, willing you to pedal faster, bridge the gap and catch the wheel in front of you. If it's a good day you will do that and perhaps counter attack and drop your competition. If you are having a bad day, you lose time and the more time you lose the more pressure the next day. Perhaps it comes down to the last time trial, you have to beat your rival or at least keep you losses to a minimum. Look at what happened to poor Chicken, aka Michael Rasmussen. A former mountain bike world champion, so no stranger to the big stage in bike racing, he completely came apart at the seams during the final time trial in St. Etienne last Saturday. He crashed within the 1st 5k, had 3 bike changes and crashed again because he couldn't make the corner. Time trial bike are notoriously twitchy but he lost whatever poise he had on the bike with the first crash. Why? Because he had to stay within 2 minutes 12 seconds of Jan Ullrich in order to keep his 3rd place in the Tour. Last year Jan beat him in the final TT by over 5 minutes. Jan beat him by 2 minutes 5 seconds (maybe 6 seconds) in the first TT of this year's race. All of which meant Chicken had to ride the best TT of his life. Bad luck aside, he choked. I can't believe I'm defending Lance but I am. The man does not choke, he has withstood all attacks for 7 consecutive years. I think he's had 3 bad days during the tour in 7 years. He's almost robotic. And maybe that's the problem. He's made it look too easy so people can somehow diminish the accomplishment.
I have an argument as to why he's not the greatest cyclist of all time but that would diminish my argument as to why he qualifies as one of the greatest athletes. Like I said at the beginning, it all comes down to whether you are a stick and ball person or not. I think I've ranted enough for today.
posted by syp @ 3:12 PM
1 Comments:
What a silly article from ESPN.com. I particularly liked the idea that Armstrong should be penalized in the final analysis for "riding a perfect piece of equipment" (um, in competition with others riding the same) and having a good team behind him (unlike DiMaggio, Montana et al., right?). The whole article attacks a straw man, a claim--which I've not seen anywhere else--that Armstrong is being anointed "the greatest all-around athlete and greatest athletic performer ever."
Articles like this are why we have metaphors involving "apples and oranges" and "horses for courses." Who's to say what Armstrong would have accomplished in another sport, or what kind of cyclist Bjorn Borg or John Stockton or some Kenyan runner would have made? It's absurd to speculate.
Certainly Armstrong's dominance supports the saying that hard work beats talent if talent doesn't work hard. All sports do have two things in common, preparation and execution, and these are inseparable. In a sport like cycling the link is obvious, but it's also present just as much in sports where legends are born from easily-identified clutch moments. Larry Bird would surely be the first to trace his many clutch performances back to the thousands of shots he took in empty gyms when the competition was off doing something else. It would be interesting to create a sport you couldn't prepare for (maybe a decathlon of randomly-selected events) and see who came out on top , but we don't do that.
Bayless's candidates for all-around greatness are idiosyncratic at best. For him it seems that nothing tops the ability to compete at the highest levels of both football and baseball (in the relatively unskilled outfield, of course) without collecting many (any?) rings in either sport or, especially in Bo Jackson's case, having any lasting impact at all. Lance will be remembered a lot longer than Bo or Deion, that's for sure.
Bayless's choices and omissions are curious. He seems to love what might be called "athleticism," but picks John Elway and not Michael Vick. Women get no mention: no Babe Didrikson Zacharias or Martina Navratilova on the list. Mickey Mantle makes the list but not DiMaggio, whose streak has been identified as the single most improbable performance in the history of sports (by a wide margin). No Carl Lewis. No Herschel Walker, whose mix of football and other prowess might exceed that of Jackson or Sanders. No Pelé, Maradona, Ronaldo, Michael Owen, Zidane, etc. I could go on.
Now that Armstrong is retired, I think there are only three active athletes in major sports with a fair chance to be remembered as the best ever in their sport. These are the people it makes sense to compare Armstrong with. Tellingly, Bayless mentions none of them.
They are Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Martina Navratilova. Maybe Barry Bonds sneaks in there, I'm not sure. He has an invisible asterisk in any case.
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