Extinguished

And so there is another star extinguished in our universe tonight.

Lance Armstrong has capitulated, given up the fight that has sapped not only him but us. In a sport not merely tainted with impropriety, but saturated in it, he has succumbed to the terrible seemingly inevitable reality that he was something other, something less, than what he insisted he was. Not an admission of guilt, for that is not the way of an Armstrong or a Bonds or a Clemens. Don't ever give them the satisfaction of saying I told you so. But, we know the truth.

There is a sadness, not so much for him, as for us. We have learned to question everything we see. Armstrong, like the others who have tarnished their  sport, has diminished the truly great, making it increasingly difficult to believe in achievement.Doubt has become a constant companion. We no longer trust our senses for they have too often been betrayed. There are asterisks everywhere we look.

Lance Armstrong was once deemed a force of nature, a freak who first defied death and then all logical limits to reach the mountaintop again and again. In the end, he was shown to be not a superman, but merely a flawed human who has now fallen to earth with a resounding thud.