Winning the Real Race

When I was fourteen, I rode my bicycle from Seattle to San Francisco in five weeks. I used to dream about riding across the country. Can you imagine Iowa on a bicycle, all that flat land? Or the Rocky Mountains? Or crossing the Mississippi River? Dipping your bicycle tire in the Pacific Ocean and then triumphantly dipping it in the Atlantic? Well, I used to imagine that.

Then I went off to college and sold my bicycle and never pedaled more than twenty miles on a bicycle again. And then I got married. And then I had kids.

But Lance Armstrong! What an inspiration! Overcoming cancer, training his wrecked body, pushing himself up hills and winning, winning, winning. Getting married didn't stop Lance Armstrong. He got married, too, you know, in 1998--after he survived testicular cancer. He had the forethought to bank s p e r m, so he and his wife were able to conceive their children (a son, born in 1999 and twin daughters born in 2001). None of this stopped him from his professional bicycle racing career. His wife was by his side when he won his first Tour de France in 1999.

She wasn't by his side this time, though, for his triumphant seventh win in a row. No. Now, he appeared with his children and his girlfriend, singer S h e r y l Crow. He divorced his wife in 2003 and hooked up with Ms. Crow soon thereafter.

So here's the thing. When I see Lance Armstrong on television, crowing about his win, grinning about his achievements, basking in the glow of admiration--all I can think is that he couldn't even keep his marriage together for five years. Five years. His children are now shuttled from home to home, place to place. His children are the ones who pay the price for his inability to keep his marriage together.

And sure. I know. It takes two people to make a marriage work and there is no possible way we can assign fault. Marriages, even celebrity marriages, are private. Who knows what happened behind closed doors? But I can't help myself. When the world showers confetti on someone for grit and sheer determination, I can't get past wondering what the ex-wife thinks about all this. And how the children feel seeing daddy holding hands with someone who is clearly not their mother.

That's the legacy, I suppose, of my own parents' divorce. I'm much more impressed by, say, Cuppa and Anvilcloud's thirty-five years of marriage than I am by one guy winning seven bicycle races in a row. I imagine that the Armstrong children, the almost 6 year old boy and the almost 4 year old twin girls, know what I mean.