Fans of the Tour de France learned today that Welsh cyclist Geraint Thomas was the first man ever to win a Tour stage ending on the brutal Alpe d’Huez mountain while wearing the yellow jersey as the race’s overall leader.
Except he wasn’t. While the Tour’s television announcers stuck to that narrative throughout their coverage, the Associated Press offered a more truthful account.
First, the AP reports the myth in its fourth paragraph:
Now he has become the first British rider to win atop Huez and the first of any nationality to win here in the yellow jersey.
In the very next sentence, though, AP corrects its own mistake:
Lance Armstrong won an individual time trial up Huez in 2004 while wearing yellow, but that victory was later stripped for doping.
To recap: Thomas’ accomplishment is historic. It’s noteworthy. He deserves the praise he is receiving. But he is not the first man to win an Alpe d’Huez Tour stage while wearing yellow. Lance Armstrong accomplished the same feat 14 years ago. The fact that Tour officials later stripped Armstrong of the victory doesn’t mean it never happened.
The refusal to acknowledge Armstrong’s previous victory — or to mention Armstrong’s name once during the TV commentary — bothers this observer. The silence reminds me of an August 2017 Daily Journal.
There are plenty of bad epithets to attach to Lance Armstrong’s name. “Trotskyite” isn’t one of them.
Still, the disgraced former cycling champ Armstrong and early Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky share one peculiar characteristic. It’s one that might apply to members of recent UNC-Chapel Hill championship basketball teams in the not-too-distant future.
The characteristic should be familiar to readers of George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984. Armstrong and Trotsky rank among the most notable victims of the real-life version of Orwell’s fictional “memory hole.”
Spawned by the desire to wipe the historical record clean of misdeeds, the concept of a memory hole troubles this observer. It’s much more difficult to learn lessons from historical failures if no one realizes that history ever took place.
Scratching out Armstrong’s seven consecutive victories from the Tour de France record books carries little political significance. And the world will spin without missing a beat if the NCAA forces leaders of the Chapel Hill campus to remove championship banners from stadium rafters.
But both actions would rely on the notion that rectifying wrongdoing requires a rewriting of history. That same notion can lead to much more disturbing consequences.
We ought to worry about a world in which people pretend that verifiable historical facts never occurred. Nothing good comes from that sort of mischief.
