Experts discuss why some of us struggle to believe champ might have cheated.
By By Cindy Stauffer
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:40
Disbelief.
Then gloom.
In conversations around our dinner tables, with neighbors and at work, we can’t and won’t accept the fact that this man who was our hometown hero may have taken testosterone to boost his performance and win the Tour de France.
The story is still being written on Landis. The results from a second test on a urine sample taken from him during the tour — the first one showed questionably high levels of testosterone — are expected to be released Saturday. But his own family expects him to be stripped of his title, and everyone is bracing for a long fight over what happens next.
In the meantime, we are left to stew over how a tale that initially looked so thrilling and upbeat now has turned into something else altogether.
Our funk is kindled by two elements: both our perceptions of Plain culture and the qualities that outsiders hold dear about them, as well as our long-held belief in the American dream, experts say.
The media coverage of the race, both locally and nationally, has focused on Landis’ beginnings in the Mennonite community and the small town of Farmersville.
We have read how his family does not have a television set. We have seen the footage of his parents and siblings in their Plain dress.
Though he left that community 10 years ago, Landis has been built up as a Plain Superman, an uber Mennonite, a man who learned early in life the Plain credos of hard work and discipline and succeeded because of them.
Of course, the real picture is a bit more complex than that.
“It’s those that assign that iconic status to a group of people, those who are not part of the community itself, they have that sense of it being pristine and untouched,” says Brinton Rutherford of the Lancaster Mennonite Conference. “That’s always a danger, no matter what group you may be thinking of.”
And the local community might have even deeper feelings about that, says Jack Heller, a psychology professor at Franklin & Marshall College.
“Nationally, it’s more of, ‘Isn’t this archaic? Isn’t this an interesting fact?’ ... I talked to my family on the West Coast and to them, Mennonites are people who wear plain clothes,” he says. “I don’t think they have a rich understanding of the kind of moral tradition that runs through that culture.”
But people must remember that Landis left that community and adopted another lifestyle, says Urbane Peachey, a retired Mennonite minister.
“This is happening all the time in society,” he says. “People pursue a lifestyle in a way that is different than the way they were raised. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that Floyd Landis should reflect the values and lifestyles of the culture in which he grew up.
“He probably did, but maybe, maybe not in all the ways people expected.”
In a book about Lance Armstrong, writer Dan Coyle observes that a former teammate of Landis once noted that when the former Farmersville man moved into the cycling world it was as if “Landis had just been defrosted from some distant past and needed to figure out everything anew. His life was nothing so much as an experiment, one that might have been titled ‘Reactions That Occur When an Unfrozen Mennonite is Mixed with America.’ ”
More recently, Sunday Times writer Paul Kimmage observes, the experiment might be more aptly titled, “Reactions That Occur When an Unfrozen Mennonite Becomes a Professional Cyclist.”
“If the analysis of the B sample supports the initial findings of unusual amounts of testosterone, then that will be a massive disappointment,” Kimmage writes, “all those qualities we admired that made him different; all the hope we invested that Floyd would buck the trend.”
If tests do show that Landis was doping, Rutherford says another lesson can be learned.
“It speaks to the fact that Plain people are human people too,” he says. “It’s tough to escape that humanity.
“Inside the Plain culture, there may not be quite so much shock or disbelief. Plain folks themselves would recognize their humanity.”
Landis’ story also cuts away at our stubborn belief in the American dream, that anyone can succeed through hard work and determination.
It’s a belief that is being worn down more and more.
Says Rutherford, “Just look at the sports scandals that have rocked baseball and football and all those icons going down, or President Clinton with some of his moral shortcomings and the disappointment there.”
Heller says, “In the context of how poorly things seem to be going in the world, a lot of people’s reactions that I’ve heard have been, ‘OK, it’s just one more thing. ... It’s one more thing that isn’t the way I’d really like it to be.’ ”
Europeans would take a different view of all of this, Heller notes.
“You know, they look at Americans as naive. I value that naiveté,” he says, “but I think from their perspective, a European perspective, they’d say, ‘But, of course.’ ”
For now, some are holding onto their hope that the story about Landis will have a happy ending, and that he will uphold all the ideals and dreams that have been placed upon his 150-pound frame.
“My impression is that people are adopting the position of let’s wait and see,” Peachey says.
Says Heller, “I’m sort of on hold. I still see a lot of gray in this.”
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