Bill Burr has this great bit on Lance Armstrong, which I won’t repeat here. Just travel back with me for one second, when Lance Armstrong won one Tour de France after the other. Remember that time? I sure do. I remember a multitude of articles, claiming he won due to his extremely scientifically based diet and training regimen. It was like his team had cracked some secret code, while all the other teams were a bunch of clueless buffoons, “Science? Huh? Duh?” Somehow, everyone bought into this notion, that not only were the other teams so much dumber than Armstrong, they were even too dumb to just go copy Armstrong’s workout routine.
Back in those days, if you dared to even suggest that Armstrong might be taking something more than just vitamins, you’d have to deal with an army of fans, ready to beat you into submission. “You can’t prove that!” they’d say. Well, just use your common sense, just for one second. If you’re the competitive type, you know what it’s like. And deep down, you know that a guy like Armstrong would pull out all the stops to win—ethics and what others thought be damned. It’s just the way it is. What did you expect?
A few years down the road, everything came to the surface. Suddenly those fans vanished quicker than a magician’s rabbit, along with all talk about Armstrong’s cutting-edge training tactics. The same level of hero worship that Armstrong once enjoyed, flipped to outright demonization.
A few years later, comedian Bill Burr appeared on Conan O’Brien’s talk show and did his now famous bit. The crux of the matter is simple: everyone was taking stuff back then, so what’s the big deal? As Bill Burr put it, “Our roided up guy… beat your roided up guy.” It’s just common sense, but somehow only comedians have the guts to say it like it is.
By the way, remember when Team Sky had their winning streak at the Tour de France? They had victory after victory, to the point that they had to craft this whole elaborate explanation for their dominance. They said it was all about their superior scientific approach, unlike the other riff-raff who apparently didn’t even know what science was. Ringing any bells?
Isn’t it quite eerie, how things repeat themselves?
And as you know, I’m reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, who has this to say about it:
“Look at the past – empire succeeding empire – and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?”
It’s something else, that Marcus Aurelius, himself a Roman emperor, had the sense to see that the Roman Empire would one day come to its end, right around when it was at around its peak. But like he says, there’s a certain rhythm and predictability to life. That should inform how you deal with whatever you’re going through in your life. And that brings us to the following quote:
“In all that happens, keep before your eyes those who experienced it before you, and felt shock and outrage and resentment at it. And now where are they? Nowhere. Is that what you want to be like?” … “And when faced with a choice, remember, our business is with things that really matter.”
By the way, dealing with our limited time on this planet is something that Marcus Aurelius addresses repeatedly in Meditations. Here’s a relevant quote:
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”
That’s definitely a brain teaser. Let me put it a slightly different way. Imagine yourself playing the main character in one of those typical 1990s movies, where you were supposed to die on a certain day. In the first ten-twenty minutes we see what’s good about you, and we see the bad stuff. Suppose you were to be hit by a car, but just at the last moment your guardian angel gives you a nudge and saves your life. What does the rest of the movie look like? As always: food for thought.
Yours truly
Vincent J. Dancet