From a Hero to a Zero, the same story told again

An injury or any other type of illness that prevents an athlete from training can be one of the hardest and most difficult things to overcome. As an athlete, I also had many failures and injuries in my career. This year I was not able to train for 3 months and when I got back, I was greatly out of shape and I was not able to compete and train at the level that I did before. When reading Lance Armstrong’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike My Journey Back to Life, the author dedicates the second part of the novel to his story of training after his cancer was discovered and treated. The treatment of the illness caused Armstrong to fall behind on training and was not able to come back in the way that he wanted. The novel discusses the great amount of effort that it took to get back into training after experiencing the worst possible chemo and cancer treatment, “the sickness was in the details, in the nasty asides of the treatment. Cancer was a vague sense of unwellness, but chemo was an endless series of specific horrors” (126). Illness can cause people to begin to see the patients as victims almost and that makes the audience see athletes, such as Lance Armstrong that survived through cancer as heroes that should be talked about. Lance Armstrong can be seen as a hero, because not only he is a great cyclist that was the most well-known and most achieved cyclist in the history of the sport, but also, because he is the story of overcoming difficulties in order to pursue his dreams and achieve. It almost seems that Lance Armstrong could be seen as a national hero. The treatment and the illness are also shown to be life changing events for him, “I had never embraced my life. I had made something of it, and fought for it, but I had never particularly enjoyed it” (169). This is reflected in the book, as the author shifts in the middle from only talking about training and having a huge need to be successful and succeed at everything he does to becoming more about enjoying life and seeing the beauty and other things that are associated with it, but more bright side of life was also greatly associated with the treatment of cancer, which was truly horrible, “I had nightmares. I had strange physical reactions; for no apparent reason I would break out a sweat. The slightest stress or anxiety would cause my body to become shiny with perspiration” (172). The author describes many horrors that continued throughout his life, such as the need to constantly visit a doctor for monthly check-ups or the medication that he was forced to take. The struggles described in the book are horrible and make the reader want to stop reading, but Lance Armstrong was able to overcome these and “on September 4, 1997, I went … to announce my return to cycling for the 1998 season” (176). This is where the story of a hero begins, someone who for many years was left outside the cycling world and wanted to come back into and become a champion or at least a well-known figure, but he was denied spots on many of the top and most prestigious teams. Armstrong then continued to train hard and tried to figure out what went wrong with his cycling, “I went home. The problem was simply that I was rusty, so for two solid weeks I worked on my technique, until I felt secure in the saddle” (216). Eventually the hard work paid off, “I was the first American riding for an American team, on an American bike, ever to lead the Tour de France” (227). The rest of the story is very simple that Lance Armstrong went on to compete in the Tour de France and win it a total of seven times. When all of this happened, he was seen to be the greatest American patriot in the world and everyone praised him for that. This story took a turn in 2012 when he was disqualified for doping and all of his titles were stripped away. The interesting part is why would an athlete that went through so much do this? Or was that the reason that he got to be so good? Anyway his story is a story of a brave hero, who fought through cancer and returned back to the thing that he loved his bike. It is cruel of society to strip him away of the glory that he had before, but we like to maintain a moral image and that causes us to be the people that we are today, trying to maintain our status of glory and pride and purity.