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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Lance Armstrong is racking up awards like this, which is preposterous. Salon sets the record straight.
Jan 3, 2003 | In an emergency development, Salon hereby announces the bestowal of its inaugural Sports Person of the Year award.
In most cases these awards exist as an excuse to get a little free publicity ("Table Tennis Illustrated named Timo Boll its Sportsman of the Year today"), but Salon's award is being introduced because someone has to acknowledge poor Serena Williams with an award that's not segregated by sex. She's our first winner.
Williams was named the Female Athlete of the Year by both the Associated Press and Reuters. But the most prestigious Sportsman of the Year-type award, or at least the best known in this country, is Sports Illustrated's. That one went, outrageously, to Lance Armstrong, the four-time Tour de France winner. The Sporting News chose Notre Dame football coach Ty Willingham, which gets a nod of approval from this corner just because it's such an oddball pick. He took over a 5-6 team and led it to a 10-2 record, not counting the New Year's Day bowl loss. That's nice, but hardly Sportsman of the Year stuff. But it's Notre Dame, so it, you know, matters. Funny.
But Lance Armstrong! He's by most accounts a great guy, and he's a great story, having beaten cancer and all, but he won one race in a sport so obscure that most Americans can't even name another of its events, and so limited that its skill set can be described thusly: pedaling fast and not falling over. I understand: Armstrong, also AP's Male Athlete of the Year, is really, really good at pedaling fast. To say he's good at pedaling fast is like saying that Ronaldo, the Brazilian soccer star who was Reuters' Male Athlete of the Year, is good at kicking a ball.
But then again: No, it isn't. You can watch Ronaldo play match after match and he'll surprise you time and again with his creativity and skill. Keep watching, and you'll keep seeing things you've never seen before. Once you've seen Armstrong pedaling for a few seconds -- Zip! There he goes! Unf! He's going uphill! -- you've seen the show. Forever.
For reasons almost entirely lost on most Americans, including your humble servant, bicycle racing is popular in Europe. Good for Europe, which also has a taste for cheesy techno music, men who don't wear socks, and starting world wars -- not to imply that all of those things are bad.
But in this country we rarely think of bike racing. We pay attention at most once a year, during the Tour de France, but only to the extent that an American is in the lead. In a dog's age of sitting around bars and living rooms and talking sports, I have never once been in the presence of a conversation about bike racing that was not a conversation about the movie "Breaking Away." And I once had a roommate who was a bicycle racer! Even he never brought up the Tour de France.
Armstrong is the second bike racer to be named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year in the last 15 years. (Greg LeMond was the other.) In the same period, there have been two winners -- Joe Montana and Don Shula -- from football, the sport that dominates the American landscape. I think I speak for the American people when I say: Enough with the bike guys. Sports Illustrated's "Stories of the Year" issue ranked Armstrong's Tour de France 12th, eight places behind Williams' emergence, which is about right.
If he weren't astride a bicycle or wearing his racing gear, would you even recognize Lance Armstrong? And even when you do recognize him, it's probably only because he's the only bicycle racer you know: "There's a guy in one of those bike suits. Must be Lance Armstrong." Can you name any of his rivals?
