Revisiting Lance Armstrong’s First Tour Win
Also: A less competitive Scrabble, Glenn C. Loury’s frank autobiography, a life of Ian Fleming, a flood of bookazines, and more.
If you follow cycling, you know that this year’s Tour de France will be different from what most of us were expecting—a throw-down between 2021 winner Tadej Pogačar, two-time winner Jonas Vingegaard, perennial favorite Primož Roglič and former Road World Champion Remco Evenepoel. That’s because a crash at last week’s Basque Country race took out Vingegaard, Roglič, and Evenepoel. Roglič didn’t break anything and will still likely make the tour. It’s unclear if either Vingegaard or Evenepoel will.
It was shaping up to be one of the most exciting Tours since Lance Armstrong’s early Tour wins, which Boris Starling remembers affectionately in The Critic despite Armstrong’s admission to using performance-enhancing drugs:
That 1999 Tour needed Armstrong quite as much as he needed it. The previous year’s race had been a disaster: it began with the Festina team being expelled after one of their staff was stopped at customs with more drugs than a Grateful Dead roadie, then lurched through multiple police raids and rider protests. Only half the field made it to Paris, and even that had looked unlikely at times. A charismatic, articulate cancer survivor whose nationality would help open up the sport to vast new lucrative markets was the perfect symbol of rebirth.
Too perfect, of course, as it turned out. But the illusion lasted for years. Why did so many of us believe in him? Because we wanted to. For every journalist who said “this doesn’t smell right” (take a bow, David Walsh), there were millions of fans sucked into the narrative the pedalling cancer-Jesus peddled so seductively: suffering, resilience, redemption, triumph.
Yet:
When I think of Armstrong’s Tour wins, I think of a damaged, unpleasant man who has nonetheless given me some of the most thrilling sporting moments I’ve ever seen.
I watched him give Jan Ullrich “The Look” on Alpe d’Huez in 2001, staring into the eyes of his great rival and seeing he had nothing left. I watched his magnificently defiant time trial through 500,000 hostile spectators on the same mountain three years later, brilliantly described by the author Daniel Coyle: “a shaking forest of fists inches in front of his wheel. It seemed as if he was riding down some endless collective throat … He sprinted for the line, low and hard, fists clenched, teeth bared: an image of freshly peeled ferocity, a face that did not ask for applause or love or understanding or anything except the animal respect due a superior force.”
I watched his insanely quick reflexes and superlative bike handling to avoid Joseba Beloki’s horror crash on the way into Gap in 2003. I watched him fall on the way up to Luz-Ardiden that same year and then ride everyone else off his wheel, red-eyed with rage and determination. And each year, when the race was done, I watched his team’s Trek bikes glitter in the dark near the Arc de Triomphe.
I remember watching those moments, too—some in the basement of a friend’s house in Denens, some at my wife’s grandmother’s house in Lavigny, some at a pub in Morges because we didn’t have a television at home when we lived in Switzerland. This isn’t a popular thing to say, but there was something exhilarating, almost pure, about Armstrong’s rage to win.
In other news, Dominic Green reviews James Kaplan’s “meticulous” 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool in The Washington Free Beacon: “There are not enough books about jazz, America's art form. There should be more books like 3 Shades of Blue, which elegantly combines musical history with musings on social history, cleverly interwoven biographies, and a bracing dash of music theory.”
While you’re at the Free Beacon, why not check out my review of Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Ian Fleming: “The first shocking thing about Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of James Bond creator Ian Fleming is that it is over 700 pages long and includes almost another hundred of notes. The second shocking thing is that all of them are necessary.”
Evan Goldstein reviews Glenn C. Loury’s frank autobiography in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Glenn C. Loury begins his new memoir, Late Admissions, with a promise: ‘I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them.’ Over the next 400-odd pages, Loury, a professor of economics at Brown University, bluntly details a litany of public scandals and private misdeeds: a crack-cocaine addiction; abandoning a child; myriad extramarital liaisons; soliciting prostitutes; multiple arrests. And on and on . . . Loury has spent decades in the thick of rancorous debates on race and inequality, affirmative action and identity politics, crime and punishment. Like many senior scholars, his life can be measured in a long list of journal articles, books, and awards. Words like ‘eminent’ and ‘renowned’ are often affixed to his name. Unlike most of his peers, however, his personal tribulations have been front-page fodder, his career held up as a microcosm of the ‘dilemmas, temptations, and betrayals of an era,’ as Paul Krugman once put it.”
Podcast: Will bookazines replace magazines? “Magazines have fallen on hard times – especially the weekly news, fashion, and celebrity mags that once dominated newsstands. The revenue from magazine racks has plummeted in recent years, and many magazines have stopped appearing in print or shut down altogether. And yet, there is something growing in the checkout aisle: one-off publications, each devoted to a single topic, known as ‘bookazines.’ Last year, over 1,200 different bookazines went on sale across the country. They cover topics ranging from Taylor Swift, Star Wars, the Kennedy assassination, K-pop, the British royal family, and as host Willa Paskin recently observed, the career of retired movie star Robert Redford.”
Daniel C. Dennett as Pangloss: Matthew Lau reviews Dennett’s memoir, I’ve Been Thinking, and revisits his long feud with Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin: “Critics have charged him with ‘ultra-Darwinism’ and ‘Darwinian fundamentalism.’ Dennett’s own description is more accurate. Without irony, he has likened his Darwinism to the adaptationist determinism of Professor Pangloss in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. Like Pangloss, Dennett thinks ‘things cannot be other than what they are.’”
Why more artists are forming limited liability companies: “Realistically speaking, artists like to dream big—about the big sale, the big break or the big museum retrospective—but achieving more success can mean shouldering more risk and a lot that can go wrong. Perhaps someone slips and gets hurt while visiting the artist’s studio or a sculpture tips over at an art fair and damages another artwork. Or maybe you’re Jeff Koons and you’ve plagiarized another postcard, photograph or advertisement. We live in a litigious society, and a single adverse judicial ruling can cost an artist everything they own.”
Rare Aztec manuscripts have been acquired by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History: “These Aztec documents from the late 16th and early 17th centuries recount the founding of San Andrés Tetepilico and chart Tenochitlan’s wider history. Though these artifacts belonged to an anonymous family for generations, INAH just announced that it were able to raise 9.5 million pesos ($570,000) from a group of entrepreneurs to purchase the relics. There are only 500 known Mesoamerican codices in the world, and 200 of them are in Mexico’s National Library of Anthropology and History (BNAH).”
In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton attended a course taught by Robert Lowell in a room overlooking Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. There were five registered students and fifteen auditors: “The dynamic of the seminar briefly held Plath, Sexton, and Lowell together in a tight orbit. Sexton caught Plath’s attention by fearlessly taking up personal aspects of her own life as her subject, and Lowell had a guiding hand in releasing Plath from self-imposed structural constraints on her verse. In class, Sexton, by her mere presence, was a help to Plath with substance, while Lowell was a help with form.”
Mattel launches a “less competitive” version of Scrabble: “The new double-sided Scrabble board will still feature the original game for those who want to play the traditional version. But the new game on the flip side will include helper cards, use a simpler scoring system and be quicker to play.”
Maureen Corrigan reviews Lionel Shriver’s new novel Mania: “A contrarian, Shriver has also steadily pushed back against “woke” culture in interviews and essays. Though she voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and supports reproductive rights, in 2022 she endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his failed presidential bid. Of late, her most controversial statements have addressed transgender people and the influx of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, into the United States and Britain. Shriver — who lived in the U.K. on and off for three decades before recently setting up shop in Portugal — has advocated the preservation of what she’s called a ‘coherent culture’ in Britain . . . Were Shriver not such a superb satirical novelist, we ‘woke’ types could just ignore her and be done with her offenses and contradictions. But alas, her latest novel, Mania, is one of her best — in part because the subject is one of her queasiest.”
Matthew Walther on becoming a “safe adult”: “Not long ago I learned that I had become a ‘safe adult.’ This appellation was afforded to me by the diocese in which I reside upon my completion of a mandatory online training session offered by VIRTUS, which describes itself as a ‘program and service of the National Catholic Risk Retention Group.’ VIRTUS training has become ubiquitous in this country. Thousands of Catholics each year who wish to serve as volunteers in almost any capacity—teaching catechism, running a parish nursery, cleaning up the church grounds on weekends with the youth group—are required first to undergo a criminal background check and then to take part in its seminars. VIRTUS is now so commonplace as to be considered unremarkable, just another feature of Catholic life, like Lenten fish fries or the annual bishop’s appeal. Virtually no one challenges the half-articulated reasons for its existence, or imagines that there could be anything sinister about such a program. I am not sure these are tenable—I almost said ‘safe’—assumptions.”
“Poe feels right, even when he’s wrong,” Joseph Bottom writes in the latest installment of Poems Ancient and Modern—a new Substack I highly recommend.
Amit Majmudar writes about Robert Frost’s suppressed details and repetition: “These elisions, these suppressions of information, give the poem a power that a novel many thousands of times its word count would squander in detailed internal monologues and back stories. We know just enough to share the husband’s surprise and bafflement and slow, retrospective realization. This is an instance poetry where outdoes conventional prose fiction as a storytelling medium. The story could have been boring or commonplace. The telling rescues it and makes it immediate.”
The question is how much of Lance Armstrong's determination was inherent in him and how much a side effect of the drugs. Granted they couldn't bring out anything that wasn't there, but it could well have been greatly enhanced.