It Is About The Bike

Years ago, when I was dealing with a cancer diagnosis and treatment, I read Lance Armstrong’s book, It’s Not About the Bike. In it he spoke about his personal battle with testicular cancer and how it changed him, leading him to re-evaluate his life and attempt to improve the life chances of other people similarly afflicted, while also regaining his health through competitive bike racing.

We know that he was successful on both counts. He set up a charity that raised many millions of dollars to support programs for cancer sufferers and their families. He also became the most successful cyclist of all time, seven times winning the most prestigious race in world cycling, the Tour of France. But we also know that throughout the pointy end of his competitive career, he was systematically doping and forcing team mates to do likewise. The claim in his book that it was not about the bike was a lie. He used his biography as a screen to hide systemic wrongdoing. Many commentators and a host of fans were willing to accept at face value, for years and years, his repeated denials and obfuscations, until – finally – the man himself confessed all before the queen of television talk show hosts, Oprah Winfrey.

The Lance Armstrong story is instructive, because it says much about how people who gain power through celebrity can take attention away from deeply embedded patterns of behaviour that ruin the lives of victims, by systematically denying their existence and/or minimising the impact on their lives. In Australia, we have recently seen an instance of this phenomenon. The long-time President of the Collingwood Football Club, Eddie Maguire, has been pushed to resign from a position he held for more than twenty years. This follows leaking to the media of a report that detailed an entrenched culture and history of racism at the club.

For international readers I should point out that the Collingwood Football Club is one of the oldest and most revered sporting institutions in Australia, akin to the New York Yankees baseball team for Americans or Manchester United to the British. Like the Yankees and Man U, its fans are fanatical and everyone else hates them.

The public responses to both Armstrong and Maguire have displayed a form of schizophrenia. Many, especially those close to the sports involved, respond by focusing on the man not the ball, so to speak. They point to the ‘good’ wrought by the person. Didn’t Armstrong bring hope and concrete help to thousands of people by the work of his charity and the public influence of his celebrity? In Eddie’s case, his tenure as president turned the club’s fortunes around and brought joy to fans nation-wide. Sure, there were failings but let’s not forget the positives. This suggests taking a type of cost-benefit analysis to the cases in point, a weighing of the plusses and minuses.

The problem here is that there is no unambiguous metric for carrying out such calculations. The net result depends on where you stand and what you value. How do we compare the gains of cancer sufferers to the destroyed careers of competitors cheated out of success by doping? What about the loss of integrity of cycling itself and the mass disenchantment of cycling fans throughout the world? What about the reputational damage to cycling sponsors and organisers and the loss of credibility of the many commentators who were fooled by the Armstrong con?

The Collingwood case raises more serious questions, at least for me as I’m only vaguely interested and invested in competitive cycling, thanks to an Australian, Cadel Evans, Australia’s only winner of Le Tour, who was almost certainly prevented from winning one or two more by doping cheats. The Collingwood report makes clear that there existed in the club a long and unheeded record of abuse and belittlement of Indigenous and African players at all levels, from the management and administration to the field. As one courageous ex-player, Héritier Lumumba has argued, racism at Collingwood is not casual; it is systemic. By this is meant that the club’s cosy culture has incubated a circular, self-reinforcing and interlocking set of values, attitudes, taken for granted realities and patterned behaviours that routinely belittles and insults black footballers. Unlike American football, black athletes are in a small minority at Australian clubs, especially Collingwood.

Collingwood’s failings were brought to a head by leakage of the Do Better report, commissioned by the board that sought unsuccessfully to keep it secret. When that failed, President Maguire, in a clumsy public relations effort, fronted a press conference and spectacularly crashed by opening his remarks with the claim that this was a proud day for the club. By this, he meant that Collingwood was publicly owning up to its failings and would accept all of the report’s recommendations aimed at lifting their game.

The media and public responses were blistering. Lumumba speaking from Los Angeles indicated that Maguire’s tone deaf comments and the club’s actions underscored the fact that they simply didn’t get it; they had no idea what systemic racism meant, still less any idea as to how to break its malign grip. Public relations seminars will in future draw on Eddie’s inept performance as a case study in what not to do. On that point, how anyone could use the term ‘proud’ a week or two after the rampage of the Proud Boys in the US Congress defies understanding.

Predictably, a few days later a still bemused but genuinely upset Maguire publicly apologised and resigned his presidency, leaving the board with no obvious way forward. Eddie managed to say ‘sorry’, but it is not clear about what, since he still seems not to have grasped why he has been forced out. His personal history is littered with public gaffes which he has always apologised for and moved on. He is, after all, Eddie everywhere, the working class lad made good, the most agreeable and good bloke at the party. Yes, he has made sexist, homophobic and racist comments, but really that’s just a bit of larricanising around. There’s no harm meant. And that is why he can never accept responsibility for the actual harm he has unintentionally caused. He simply can’t as an affluent white male see it. Collingwood’s colours are black and white, but the world is monocoloured for the Maguires of this world.

It fell to a large group of current and past Collingwood players to publicly apologise in an open letter to the newspapers. Senior managers and Board members were noticeably absent, contemplating how to minimise the damage to their business as prominent sponsors who had for years fallen over themselves to be associated with the Collingwood brand, began to crab walk away.

The similarity between the Armstrong and Maguire cases stems from the role that power exerts over culture. Malign, harmful behaviours are normalised by the fear of opposing the powerful. Armstrong’s fellow riders knew that if they didn’t dope or blew the whistle, they would be crushed; some tried and were punished. (We have witnessed a similar situation in the US Senate among the ‘gutless’ forty-three.) Those players and club officials who felt uneasy at Maguire’s repeated gaffes and his inability to confront established racist attitudes, knew that any voiced opposition would harm their careers. Evil triumphs when the good turn their eyes away.

But there are also differences in these two cases. Armstrong’s reach and harm were worldwide, in line with his celebrity super-status in a global sport. Eddie’s fame and reach are local, focused on his iconic position in the Australian media and homegrown football code. The Australian Football League lags behind other sports in Australia in recognising and dealing with issues of entrenched racism. Other codes and sports have followed international leads in ‘taking a knee’ to protest against racism in sport. The Eddies of this world continue to harbour the dominant elite’s myth of a separation between politics and sport, an outdated stance that harks back to the anti-apartheid clashes of the 1970s.

But, at a personal level, the big difference is that Armstrong deliberately and consistently set out to cheat, knowing full well the harm that he would cause, and deliberately lied to cover up his misdeeds. Eddie Maguire stumbled into a world he doesn’t understand; hence, his bewilderment and defensive response, and the willingness of many fans and others to cut him plenty of slack. This doesn’t excuse the harm emanating from his twenty-three years at the helm, and it does underscore how unfitted he is to drag the club he loves into line. But his achievements at the club will be quietly remembered, whereas Armstrong’s will not.

In Shakespeare’s ringing words:

“The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.”