Competition
Sports, somebody once said, is the “toy department of life.” While true for us fans who spend too much time and money following these “trivial pursuits,” it certainly doesn’t apply to the people who actually “play the game.” Case in point: Lance Armstrong. His career finished, his reputation destroyed, and his charitable foundation threatened, he’s looking at a series of possible lawsuits that could cost him tens of millions of dollars he was paid for various endorsements. All due to a doping scandal.
His only defense - if we can call it that - is that everybody else was doing it. “Level playing field” and all that. Of course, it’s true that just about every other top bicycle racer seems to be similarly guilty. Chalk it up, Armstrong seems to be saying, to his “competitive urge.” Let’s look at that.
Competition has roots deep in our biological inheritance. It was the motive force in the formation of humanity: competition for the means of life with other animals forced certain bipeds to band together, their cooperation leading to abstract thought, speech and society. Within the first human bands, though, competition had to be controlled. Primarily, the establishment of kinship and courtship rules dampened the traditional competition - violent and sometimes fatal - between mammalian males for access to females. In this way violence was directed outside the group.
Sports are a product of the transference of that primordial competition to more peaceful pursuits. Trouble is, our present form of social organization distorts and deforms our inherent urge to compete. The notion of being the best has become confused with that of being the best paid. In a society characterized by its deep divisions and enormous inequalities, the pursuit of happiness - and the income security needed for it - is easily overlaid with greed, envy and the pursuit of privilege.
You have to wonder, what’s worse for someone like Lance Armstrong: the humiliation of exposure as a liar and cheat, or, the prospect of being poor.