The Extra Edge

I spent almost half of my life in the pool and my life is focused around school and swimming. I first began swimming at the age of 4 and ever since it has been a big part of my life. Through swimming I learned how to compete and win or even lose, I met many of my friends and made enemies. Swimming is my source of joy, but also sorrow and it taught me many things about life that only training a sport can teach. As I grew older, swimming became more intense and as I got faster the competition got tougher. It all quickly progressed, in less than a decade between the ages of 8 and 18, I went from a small boy still learning how to swim all of the strokes to a 6'2" swimmer who is about to enter college competition. My experience with sports is limited to only swimming, because I have never trained any other sport at the same level as I swim. As an athlete it is very easy to admire someone for achieving great success even in a different sport. When I was growing up, I looked up to all athletes from different sports as role models as someone that I would like to be when I grow up. One of these models was Lance Armstrong, a seven-time Tour de France champion. He won one of the most difficult bike races in the world three times!!! That man is the definition of success. Besides winning Tour de France, he is a cancer survivor and father.
It was a great shock to me when I first heard that Armstrong was found to be cheating and eventually got all of his titles stripped away. As a teenager I was shocked, I did not understand what would motivate someone so great to cheat. I began to doubt his achievements and started to believe that the only reason that he achieved this success is because he cheated. As I grew older I began to realize why someone would cheat, why someone would take that extra edge to get themselves over the finish line faster and secure that first place. I first got Lance Armstrong's autobiography It's Not About the Bike My Journey Back to Life about two years ago, but I was not able to push myself  and read something written by someone who can be seen as a disgrace to sportsmanship and competition around the world. I was able to convince myself to finally read the book to try and understand why someone would do such as thing, why would someone risk their entire reputation just to secure fame and glory above everything else, maybe the novel will give me an answer to any of those questions or at least can make easier for me to see and hypothesize why Armstrong did what he did.
The author begins the novel, by describing his deep patriotism and close connection with his bike, "I want to die at a hundred years old with as American flag on my back and a star of Texas on my helmet" (1). For Armstrong the bike is the most important part of his life, but the question is for me, why did he have to cheat to get to the level that he is at? Would it be simply better for him to achieve what he could have achieved without cheating? Would he be as good without cheating or would simply go as unrecognized? Was the blood transfusions the thing that got him over the edge?
Lance Armstrong goes on this very interesting tangent about how in the city that he grew up in, Plano, he was unrecognized, because the people there only played football, "In Plano, Texas, if you weren't a football player you didn't exist" (21). So, Armstrong took a different approach to be famous, by attempting to work in a way more difficult sport, "having your feet clamped to the bike pedals churning at 20 to 40 miles per hour, for hours and hours and days on end across whole continents" (41). This description gives the reader the insight to the great difficulty of the training and competition for road biking, but so far I do not see why someone who is slowly progressing with training and made the US cycling team right after finishing high school would want to try and cheat, because his career seems to be about to take of regardless. Obviously, like in any other sport his starts and early international races were not easy and he did not win, "my results continued to veer up and down, as crazily as I wove through a peloton. I'd attack at time. I'd just go" (55). So far the this biography had given me a lot to thing about why someone who is slowly progressing to international fame would want to cheat even before he got diagnosed with cancer.