Waiting to Decide

photograph by Wladyslaw Sojka, taken from Wikipedia

I'm surprised I didn't see it coming, but I certainly didn't. It fell out of the sky like a ton of bricks and now every newspaper and television news program is beating it to death.

Floyd's positive urine test.

I have to say first off that I have totally suspended judgment on this. I am waiting until the B sample comes back, and I think everyone else should too. But I can't express how disappointed I will be if it too is positive. It will break my heart.

This whole situation reminds me of my days as a high school English teacher. It happened so many times, much more frequently than I ever thought it would. I'd sit down with a stack of papers written by my class and start reading. Halfway through a 4-page essay on Macbeth, I'd stop short. The language would change dramatically, from confused, 15-year-old, "I-don't-get-this-Shakespeare-guy" kid-speak to ridiculously highfalutin, academic, professor-type words and syntax. It was so obvious. Every time, I found myself dumbstruck that the kid thought he could get away with it.

I'd type the sentence into Google, and immediately the source would pop up. Usually, it would be straight from PinkMonkey or Cliffs Notes; they didn't even plagiarize quality writing. Discovering these stolen sentences made me want to scream. It made me want to beat the kid over the head with his laptop and fail him for the rest of his high school career. But more than that, it made me want to cry. I took these instances of cheating very personally and wondered what had happened with the world to make the kid resort to such measures.

Now, as I consider this newest doping scandal, I feel exactly the same way. If it does turn out to be true, I wonder why, why it had to happen. On the one hand, I'm certainly no morally pure person. I've done a few questionable things, like we all do: told a few white lies, talked behind peoples' backs once or twice. Even in school, I've taken shortcuts here and there, read a few (OK, perhaps several) books in English that I was really supposed to read in French, etc.

But the vast majority of these dubious behaviors occurred, like they did with my English students, when I was younger, still figuring out what was right and wrong and who I am as a person. As a teacher, I had to get over the urge to pummel the plagiarists in my class. Often, when I confronted the kids, they were (or at least seemed) genuinely ashamed of their actions. I didn't believe that all of them would never cheat again (in fact, I'm sure some have and will), but I did believe that they were still young and could learn from this experience and that they weren't yet doomed to become corrupt and evil people.

In the case of a thirty-year-old cyclist in the world's biggest bike race, I'm not willing to cut him the same amount of slack. Floyd Landis is a big boy. He should know right from wrong. As I said, I'm not making judgments yet. And God knows I'm hoping with all my might that he can prove he's clean. I put my trust in him and rejoiced in every triumph he made during the Tour. But if he's dirty, then I think he should suffer every consequence there is. You only get so much time to learn how to do it right, and for kids to learn to be good people, they should see the cheaters disgraced in front of everyone.