Lance Armstrong is a cheater. The International Cycling Union says so, his teammates say so and 1,000 pages of documents say so. That makes me very, very sad. And maybe a little mad. But not everyone feels that way. In fact, some people don’t believe that Armstrong did anything wrong.
Read what Buzz Bissinger wrote for Newsweek after the United States Anti-Doping Agency released evidence that the Tour de France tour de force had been using performance-enhancing drugs for years:
He is a hero, one of the few we have left in a country virtually bereft of them. And he needs to remain one. Did he use enhancers? Maybe I am the one who is blind, but I take him at his word and don't believe it; he still passed hundreds of drug tests, many of them given randomly. But even if he did take enhancers, so what?
And that “so what?” is starting to make a serious dent in the way we all think and act.
“If you’re not doing it, you’re falling behind,” says South African swimmer Cameron van der Burgh (on nbcolympics.com), who took gold in the men’s 100-meter breaststroke this summer at the London Olympics. “It’s not obviously—shall we say—the moral thing to do, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my personal performance and four years of hard work for someone that is willing to do it and get away with it.”
He said this after admitting he cheated by taking two extra (rule-breaking) dolphin kicks underwater during his race.
And it’s not just athletes, of course, who are breaking rules to break records and win trophies.
Everyday average teens, for example, lie and cheat more than they used to, according to a 2008 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics. More than 80% said they fibbed to their parents about “something significant.” And more than a quarter of respondents even admitted to lying … on the survey. As for cheating, 64% said they cheated on a test in the last year—up from 60% two years before.
Another study, this one conducted in Britain, indicates that a whopping 84% of teens said they’ve regularly copied information from the Internet and pasted it right into their homework.
Here’s what a writer calling herself Emily Brown (who helps college students cheat by writing their college papers for them) says (in Salon):
My next client, whom I actively solicited on craigslist, wanted me to write an ethics paper. She had no idea this entailed irony of any kind. She had no idea what the word 'irony' meant, until I used it in her essay and sent her a link to a dictionary definition.
Why should she? After all, when Time magazine journalist Fareed Zakaria was accused of plagiarizing a few lines in one of his stories, he was suspended for a few days … and was ferociously defended by Tunku Varadarajan, who called Zakaria’s accusers “plagiarism McCarthyites” while writing for rival mag Newsweek. He continues:
So he cribbed a little: he read a lot; took notes; things got jumbled. Is that worth a man's career? I think not, and to his credit he thought not too. One admires him for fighting back, especially as those who called for his head were so pious, and yet so inhumane.
Remember all those stats I shared a few paragraphs ago about teens lying and cheating more than ever? Well, 93% of them said they were “satisfied with their personal ethics and character.” Oh, and early results from the Plugged In Poll this week (after more than 400 responses) reveal that nearly half of your fellow readers either think it’s wrong that Armstrong’s awards were stripped from him or they don’t quite know what to think about the subject.
I can’t sum all this up better than Jay Wood, professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, so I’ll wrap this post up with his words as they appear in Christianity Today and Fox News:
It's tempting to look smugly down our noses and find satisfaction in Lance Armstrong's downfall. Yes, he used illegal drugs to gain a competitive advantage in the sport of cycling. He had plenty of company. What bothers us as much as the 'juicing' is the steady train of deception he fobbed off on us fans who followed his career with such interest. We feel duped and disappointed. We wanted a hero who not only beat cancer, but who also beat the world's best cyclists on a fair and level playing field to achieve what no other athlete had achieved. Now he joins the sad and sorry ranks of so many elite athletes whose desire to win drove them to dishonesty. But set all self-righteousness aside, and ask whether or not there's a little bit of Lance in each of us. … At both elite and pedestrian levels, cheating is often motivated by the underlying desire to have worth as a person. Nothing wrong with that. But when coupled with the belief that we have worth as persons only insofar as we are winning in our various fields of competition, it sows the seeds of pride and envy. … To ground our worth in such fleeting attempts at glory should seem silly to Christians, especially when we recall that we are created, sustained, and saved by the almighty God of the universe. Alas, we all too often live in forgetfulness of this truth.
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