Wheel of fortune turns as Armstrong goes from hero to villain

By Anil JohnSports Editor

Lance Armstrong gestures as he rides with Floyd Landis during a practice session in this 2003 file photo

Three years ago I decided I’ve had enough of fiction. In a bid to face up to the real world, I cleared my somewhat substantial library of the literally hundreds of paperback and hardbound volumes that I had accumulated over 25 years, the amount of time I’ve been a journalist.They included dozens of fast-paced crime thrillers written by James Hadley Chase, who I absolutely adored during my teenage years. His titles such as Tell it to the Birds, Double Shuffle, You are Lonely When you are Dead and Shock Treatment set my pulse racing. The Chase cover, usually a woman striking a seductive pose with a gun in hand was simply too difficult to resist for a boy, as also the typical one-liners that his books were peppered with. How, as a 14 or 15-year-old, you could not be impressed with his characters? Especially when they mouthed such gems as “He was as useful as a fractured arm” and “You meet a woman and she starts a chemical reaction in you”. All with the effortless ease of a burst of machinegun fire.Also dumped in the Doha municipality garbage bin were the supposedly “more mature” and bulkier crime novels written by Robert Ludlum, Sydney Sheldon and Tom Clancy, sci-fi thrillers by assorted authors, romantic tear-jerkers, at least one huge volume of the Kama Sutra and half a dozen of other books whose writers tried    without much success in my opinion    to pass them off as erotica, as opposed to outright porn.Among the books I decided to keep were mostly books on nature and science and biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and Ghengis Khan, not to speak of dozens of sporting heroes.But the closest to my heart was Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back To Life which details his fight against cancer and his spectacular comeback resulting in seven Tour de France titles. I took special care of this book, dusting it often every few days with the intention of keeping it in mint condition so that my son, now 8, would be able to read it when he is 14 or 15.There’s a line somewhere in the book which I particularly wanted my son to read. After being diagnosed with the deadly disease, one of Armstrong’s doctors says something to the effect of “We are going to kick its ass so bad that it won’t come back again.” He was talking about Armstrong’s cancer, which had started in his testicles and spread to other parts of his body, including his brain.  The doctor wanted Armstrong to know that with the right treatment regimen and willpower, the monster could be kicked into oblivion. It’s difficult to not avoid a cliché here, but Armstrong was simply a man with balls. If there’s anything he had in plenty, it was willpower. But a fantastic example of his quick-wittedness also made a profound impression on me, as I am sure millions of others. As soon as he was given the cancer diagnosis, one of the first things Armstrong did was to have his sperm frozen.Why? He wanted to have children and was aware that the intense chemotherapy sessions he was due for could temporarily or permanently turn him either impotent or cause azospermia, a condition in which the body no longer produces sperm. Of his five children, the first three were conceived through in vitro. The next two were through natural process, which meant that his cancer treatment worked perfectly without causing any of his body’s vital systems to shut down permanently. As news emerged yesterday that he would be losing all his seven Tour de France titles after he said “enough is enough” and decided not to contest doping charges levelled by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), I felt my heart sink.His refusal to fight the case has led to more questions than answers. His urine and blood samples were examined hundreds of times, without a single negative test and the proof against him, which the USADA claims to have, is largely testimony-based.Is this the same man who once said “Pain is temporary.  If I quit, however, it lasts forever”?  Millions of Armstrong fans would be asking the same question. His “no guts, no glory” approach to cycling has flown out of the window. Should his book also meet the same fate?That’s the million dollar question I am going to struggle with over the next few days. Or maybe, I should just stick with fiction. For the simple reason it doesn’t hurt.