tlaporta@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

“A man that millions looked up to as a motivational person lied and cheated. How meaningful are those Livestrong bands now?”

That is how one friend of mine summed up Lance Armstrong’s decision to drop his fight against allegations of him doping evn route to winning seven Tour De France titles.

Welcome to the United States of America and our obsession with athletes.

Millions looked to Armstrong as a source of inspiration and hope. Was it because he not only completed the most grueling cycling race on the planet, but won it seven times? Possibly, but my money is on the fact that he beat cancer.

Armstrong is not the only individual in our country to beat cancer, but the fact that he was arguably the most dominant athlete in his sport put a special light on him and his cancer fight. A man that raised unreal amounts of money in the name of cancer research and inspired millions has fallen from grace and is being stripped of his seven titles.

Did Armstrong dope? I don’t know. I’m not here to argue the man’s innocence. I am here to argue about the platform we put our athletes on.

I’m not one of those people who think athletes shouldn’t be honored for their efforts and accomplishments. But the amount of pressure and expectations they are held to today is simply unreal. At the end of the day, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Chad Johnson, or AJ Allmendinger (google him) are normal people like me and you. They just happen to be amazing at some of the world’s most popular sports. Because we are in America, a country with a fascination for all its sports like no other, when these men make a single mistake, they probably should just bring a wooden cross with them to their next press conference.

Now please understand me, I am not arguing for or in favor of any of the above athletes. I do not know if Armstrong doped, or if Chad Johnson really did abuse his wife. What I do know is that, unfortunately, cases of domestic abuse happen in this country every day, and most of those offenders don’t get the publicity that Johnson did.

The point is that we, as Americans, put our athletes on a pedestal so high that if they so much as sneeze and we hear it (thank you ESPN) we shake the pedestal until they fall to their untimely and messy death.

As comedian Daniel Tosh once said, “I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Michael Phelps fell from the graces for smoking weed, or that we as a country looked up to a swimmer to begin with.”