As if I wasn’t already thinking about Lance…Armstrong, that is (because who has not given at least one nanosecond of thought to the current swirl of events around cycling’s icon for the last many years); I was reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl over the weekend, in which the male protagonist prefers to go by his middle name, Nick, instead of his first name, Lance, because the latter sounds too slick, entitled and, yes, untrustworthy; an apt coincidence given Lance A’s situation.
Until yesterday, I hadn’t given too much thought to what I actually thought-thought about The Lance Events. My conversations on the topic tended to the anodyne agreement with others, “yes, I think he probably was doping” and “yes, the zeal of the investigation seems extreme, but…” And so on. But then in the way ideas have of coming upon us suddenly, apropos of nothing, I had this series of thoughts about The Lance Events, which pertain not so much to Lance, the individual, but to sports in general and why we participate in them and what “sport” is about.
