The Tour de France should follow Mr. Fox’s advice. It is one of the greatest sporting events in the world but has a serious problem that threatens its future. Cyclist looking for every edge cross the line by using various illicit means to gain an advantage. The race is awesome as it contains team and individual competitions, extreme challenges to body, mind and spirit, and the beauty and majesty of the route itself. Watching individuals compete under these circumstances is mesmerizing and inspiring. The problem with drug doping is that it destroys the incredible achievement of completing the tour and removes from our view models of heroic virtue. The distrust generated by so many examples of drug use takes away the enjoyment of watching one rider rise above another. We are not sure if it was virtue or chemistry that made the impossible possible. Once riveted on the three-week human drama of man versus man, self and the environment, we now can only see the I.V. and syringe.

The Tour is not unique in this regard; every sport is facing the same kind of problems. When love of self in the form of money, power and fame become the primary reasons and motivations for competing then sport will continue its downward spiral and be a means for developing vice. Individuals and society must value the human person above material things. The primary goal of athletes, coaches, parents, and businesses should be to provide a glimpse of God through the good, the true and the beautiful that can be found in sport.

Until then, the practical solution is weekly, mandatory, drug testing for every rider who wishes to compete in the Tour. A rider who misses one week is out. This is an expensive, invasive and unfortunate solution but it would restore our faith in each rider and bring back all that is good in the Tour de France.

You might think I have written enough about Adam “Pacman” Jones, the NFL defensive back who received a one-year suspension from the NFL due to his poor behavior, but he and his lawyer continue to provide such clear examples of what not to do that I couldn’t resist brining attention to it one more time.

ESPN reported, “Suspended NFL player Adam “Pacman” Jones received several driving citations in a traffic stop last month in Williamson County, Tenn., where he has a home.
Jones was pulled over June 10 at 8:30 a.m. in his orange Lamborghini sports car because the tags did not match the car, WKRN-TV in Nashville reported.
Sheriff’s deputies said he had switched the plate from another vehicle he owns. He was cited with a registration violation, as well as a residency violation for having a Georgia license and failure to show proof of insurance.”

The Baltimore Sun reported, “An attorney for suspended Tennessee Titans cornerback Adam ‘Pacman’ Jones accused a sheriff’s deputy in Franklin, Tenn., of targeting Jones in a June traffic stop, saying there was no reason to pull over Jones’ orange Lamborghini.

Attorney Worrick Robinson said he has been told the deputy had talked of his intention to pull over Jones when he had the chance. ’It was not because he was speeding. It was not because he was swerving or that he failed to obey any traffic signal or any other traffic laws,” Robinson said of the traffic stop. “He pulled him over. He had heard that Mr. Jones did not have a valid driver’s license.

News of the June 10 ticket issued in this Nashville suburb surfaced Tuesday. Robinson said he got a copy Wednesday of the ticket, which cited Jones for a 30-day residency violation with a Georgia driver’s license and no proof of insurance or registration. That citation included the notation that the deputy made the stop because another deputy told him the cornerback had no driver’s license.”

All of the traffic citations appear to be true but his lawyer, doing him no great favor, points out all the things he was not doing such as speeding or swerving. He wants to focus on the fact that a deputy acted on information about a possible violation of the law. How can you miss an orange Lamborghini? What’s the point?!? Once again, Adam is doing something he should not be and once again, he has a team of lawyers trying to divert our attention from the facts by telling us all that Adam did not do. How about just telling the truth?

I hope that it is not too late for Adam who recently wrote a public letter of apology with the promise of reforming his way of life for the better. As a father, responsible for my children’s formation, I still have time to work on the “speed walker” in our family but I know it will not be easy because dying-to-self is a challenge for all us

At 104 km, the escapees led the bunch by 7:50. The chase was not hard, however. The peloton was together, and no riders had trouble following the pace.

With 61 km left and the fugitives’ lead down to 4:00, Auge attacked his companions and Willems followed. Two km later, the pair waited for Vogondy and Ladagnous. Behind, CSC and Credit Agricole stepped on the gas. The escapees led by 3:00 at 52 km.

With 21 km remaining, the break led the bunch by 2:36. Predictor, Quick Step, and Credit Agricole upped the tempo. Within five km, the lead had dropped half a minute, and with 10 km left, the bunch was 1:30 behind the break. A capture, however, was not certain, and Willems kept attacking his companions to keep the break’s pace high.

With one km left, the breakaway looked like it could be a winner. (Gerald Churchill, www.RoadCyclying.com)”

Breakaways often lack one essential ingredient to be successful, trust. Selfishness infects one or more of the breakaway riders and leads to distrust. Instead of working together until the end of the race, most cyclists in the breakaway begin taking advantage of the other riders who have been helping to keep the group ahead of the peloton. As they get closer to the finish line each cyclist isolates himself from the others, making any one of them incapable of maintaining the pace necessary to stay ahead of the main body. Stage three of this year’s Tour de France provided an excellent example of how the lack of this virtue led to failure and unhappiness.

“…Cancellara attacked from the peloton. With 700 m remaining, he overtook the escapees. The peloton charged after him, but the world time trial champion held on for the win. (Gerald Churchill)”. The breakaway group, the “escapees,” should have taken the first four places. If they had agreed to work together until 200 meters from the finish, trusted each other, Gerald Churchill would have written a very different ending. It might have been better to have trusted and lost, than never to have trusted!

Josh McHugh wrote, “Pistorius was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, with five digits on each hand and two toes on each tiny foot. Each leg was missing its fibula, the long, thin bone that anchors the calf muscle and forms the outside of the ankle. His parents had a choice: consign their child to a wheelchair or amputate his lower legs and let him learn to walk with prosthetics.

His father, Henke, head of the family’s zinc-mining company, asked a dozen orthopedic surgeons which three doctors in the world they would choose to perform a lower-leg amputation on their own child. Of the top three they named, two were in the US and one was in South Africa. A month before Oscar’s first birthday, Gerry Versveld removed the baby boy’s legs halfway between his knees and ankles. Six months later, Oscar took his first steps, on a pair of fiberglass pegs. Fast forward to today.

A company called Flex-Foot debuted the Cheetah in 1996, but the prosthetic blades remained a bit crude until Flex-Foot was acquired by the Icelandic firm Ossur in 2000. If you are missing a leg, owning an Ossur is like driving a BMW M-series. The current Cheetahs look a little like the rear leg of a horse or cat, extending straight down from the socket, cantilevering backward, and then angling forward sharply. But last September, Pistorius and Brauckmann went to Reykjavik to test prototypes designed for double amputees. The new ones, which Pistorius hasn’t debuted at a major race yet, make just one smooth curve, an arc of pure engineering.

Perhaps more important, the limits of the human body — any human body — are a matter of math. It takes 3,556 joules to move 80.5 kilograms, Pistorius’ weight, at 9.4 meters per second. That’s his average speed on his fastest 200-meter run (21.58 seconds). Those joules have to come from somewhere. Running is basically a matter of forcing that power into the legs and using them, springlike, to bounce the body forward. The lower legs of able-bodied sprinters return all the energy pumped into them by the muscles at the hips and knees — and they give back more, thanks to power from the calves and ankles. Pistorius doesn’t have feet, ankles, or calves, of course, so he compensates: His strength trainer estimates that 85 percent of his power comes from his hips and the rest comes from the knees. That hip- generated stride, combined with the odd shape of the Cheetah itself, means that Pistorius has to waddle slightly, his feet flailing out to the side a bit on each rearward kick. The blades make that scissoring noise as they grip the track, compress, and return to their original shape.

Pistorius’ street legs are modeled and painted to look as much like natural legs as possible, color-matched to his thighs. But covered by the flesh-tone paint is a doodled-on depiction of calf muscle a friend inked in red and black permanent marker before the Athens Paralympics. It’s an interesting tattoo, a reminder that no matter how good Cheetahs are, Pistorius is still missing a natural calf.

So, sure, artificial legs are lighter than natural ones. Pistorius will never blow out his ankles or break a toe, though presumably his knees are as vulnerable as anyone’s to old age and trauma. But does any of that constitute an unfair advantage? Does being able to modify and tune a prosthetic limb belong to the same category as blood doping (banned) or altitude training (A-OK)? If there’s an issue of fairness here at all, it’s not that Pistorius is using technology superior to what evolution has built for human beings. As Robert Gailey, who studies the biomechanics of prosthetics at the University of Miami, puts it, running on stilts isn’t exactly a plus. The real asymmetry is that Frasure and Shirley each still have one natural leg, and it’s holding them back.

It’s also true that the Cheetahs Pistorius hopes to run on in Beijing, with their pure-engineering swoop, are in quantifiable ways better — faster — than the ones he ran on in Athens. Does that bother you? Pistorius’ handlers have a saying: If you think having carbon-fiber legs will make you a faster sprinter, have the operation and we’ll see you at the track. In their eyes, Cheetahs — for all their sophistication — are a disadvantage that Pistorius has transcended.
The International Association of Athletics Federations is supposed to decide if Pistorius is eligible for the Olympics this spring. The possibilities: If Pistorius is a black swan, a statistical freak who would have been a world-class sprinter on natural legs, too, then no problem — let him run. And, if being an amputee is what gave Pistorius something to prove and turned him into a world-class sprinter, then no problem — let him run. But if he is the vanguard of a legion of plastic track-and-field terminators whose upper speed is a function of materials science and software instead of determination and training? The International Olympics Commission better start hiring some engineers.”

Many critics are advocating the best way to approach the question of Oscar’s eligibility to compete in the Olympic Games is “guilty until proven innocent.” I think we should give someone who can run 400 meters on two prosthetics, in 46.56 seconds, the benefit of the doubt until it is proven the prosthetics provide an unfair advantage. Even then, I will still be in awe of a bilateral lower leg amputee who has the talent to balance and generate enough power to compete with the best able-bodied track athletes in the world. His courage, perseverance, and joy in pursuing an Olympic dream is inspiring and challenges all of us to reach higher. What feeble excuse can we possibly give for not pursuing our dreams?

A recent story from The Associated Press related how “Jason McElwain had done everything he was asked to do for the Greece Athena High School basketball team — keep the stats, run the clock, hand out water bottles.

McElwain, 5-foot-6, was considered too small to make the junior varsity, so he signed on as team manager. He took up the same role with the varsity, doing anything to stay near the sport he loves. Coach Jim Johnson was impressed with his dedication, and thought about suiting up McElwain for the home finale.

His performance was jaw-dropping: 20 points in four minutes, making 6-of-10 3-point shots. The crowd went wild. ‘It was as touching as any moment I have ever had in sports,’ Johnson told the Daily Messenger of Canandaigua.

McElwain didn’t begin speaking until he was 5. He lacked social skills but things got easier as he got older. He found many friends and made his way through school in this Rochester suburb, although many of his classes were limited to a half-dozen students. And he found basketball.

Even though McElwain was in uniform for the Feb. 15 game, there was no guarantee he would play — Athena was battling for a division title. The fans, however, came prepared. One section of students held up signs bearing his nickname “J-MAC” and cutouts of his face placed on Popsicle sticks. The Trojans opened a large lead against the team from the nearby Spencerport. With four minutes left, McElwain took the court to deafening cheers.

The ball came to him almost right away. His 3-point shot sailed completely off course, and the coach wondered if he made the wrong move. McElwain then missed a lay-up. On the next trip down the floor, McElwain got the ball again. This time he stroked a 3, all net. He was just warming up. On the next attempt, he got another 3-pointer. Then another, and another. In fact, he would have made one more 3, but his foot was on the line, so he had to settle for 2 points. (Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press).”

Seeing Jason, hearing his story, makes us acutely aware of the infinite blessings in our own lives and compels us to want to share what we have with him and others. We want to see the underdog win because we quickly come to care about, maybe actually love, him. We hope he can find the way to overcome what appear to be insurmountable obstacles. Jason’s triumph brings us great joy, a glimpse of the Divine, and inspires us to face whatever may come our way with perseverance, fortitude, patience and all the other virtues we are called to perfect in our daily lives. His performance is so dramatic that it shocks us into awareness and gives emphasis to what sport was intended to be, a means for developing virtue. Let’s hope the underdogs inherit the earth…and sport.

“Hitting a baseball has been described as the single most difficult feat in sports. And for good reason. Imagine the quality of hand-eye coordination required to make contact with a little white sphere traveling at over 95 miles per hour, using a 2 ¾ inch wide piece of wood being swung at over sixty miles per hour. Consider the intense concentration. A batter standing just 56 feet from the pitcher’s hand has only about 45/100’s of a second to decide if he’ll swing, predict where the ball will be, instruct his muscles to move, and bring the bat to a point of impact. If all goes well, the bat and ball rendezvous a few inches in front of the plate. The ball is crushed to half its diameter, springs back, and is launched on its return flight at speeds close to a hundred miles per hour. Timing is essential. The difference between a hit over second base and a foul near first or third is a swing mistimed by 0.01 second. Baseball is the only sport where being a failure seven out of ten times is considered to be outstanding - only about a dozen players in each major league bat .300 annually. A basketball center who sank only 30 percent of his baskets or a quarterback who hit his receivers only 30 percent of the time would be selling insurance instead.”

Given the challenge of just making contact with a ball, stories about players making promises to hit a home run in a major league game and then actually doing it, seems the stuff of urban legends. For young Matt Herndon fantasy became reality courtesy of Mike Sweeney, DH for the Kansas City Royals.

“Matt Herndon is an 11-year-old kid from Overland Park, Kansas, who was in the hospital on Wednesday night with a brain aneurysm when he got a call from his favorite baseball player, Mike Sweeney. As Sweeney is his favorite player and the time seemed right, Matt asked Mike to hit him a home run in that night’s game. Sweeney, being the nice guy he is, goes out and does just that!

After Sweeney’s first-inning 2-run blast off Sidney Ponson — just his second of the year — you can see the excitement adding some juice to his trot. ‘I never ran so fast around the bases after hitting a homer,’ he says. Then, as Pat Borzi of MLB.com reports:
Thursday morning, Sweeney almost teared up when describing the postgame phone message he got from Herndon. The boy had called many of his friends in Overland Park to tell them of Sweeney’s call.
‘He said they couldn’t get the game at the hospital, but when I homered, all his friends from Overland Park started calling,’ Sweeney said. ‘He said, `You did it, Mike!’ ‘David said that Matt told him this was the greatest day of his life. That boy’s got some courage. He’s a hero now.’”

It is amazing what can happen when sport meets grace and players become doers of the Word (Mt 25:31-46). Be like Mike!

After passing the puck to a teammate and with his back to the opposing players, Tomas Holstrom of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings was violently checked into the glass. He lay on the ice with blood dripping from the two cuts on his forehead that required thirteen stitches. Clearly, this was a purposeful, “cheap” shot by two players from the Anaheim Ducks, Rod Niedermayer and Chris Pronger. They both skated in fast and hit high.

“I was very surprised about the call,” said Niedermayer. “All I did was take a few strides, finish my check and hit him with my shoulder.” You don’t want to see anybody hurt out there, that’s for sure. I’m glad he was back playing.” A couple of months ago, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said fighting is part of hockey and believes some people have been “running off a little too fast on the topic.”

Wikipedia has an extensive section on fighting in hockey that includes this excerpt, “There are many reasons for fights during a hockey game. Some reasons are related to game play, such as retaliation, momentum-building, intimidation, deterrence, attempting to draw “reaction penalties,” and protecting star players. There are also some personal reasons such as retribution for past incidents, bad blood between players, and simple job security for enforcers. The incredibly detailed description of rules and codes for fighting is ridiculous.

European, Olympic and collegiate hockey forbid fighting and it is punished by immediate ejection. The list of rules and “etiquette” for fighting in the NHL shows what can happen when dysfunction is the rule of the day. Fighting would not be necessary if players agreed to be men of honor and referees actually controlled excessive violence. Somehow, officials are able to do this in other sports. The argument for fighting is wrong and built on a false premise that fighting is the only way to control excessive fighting!

There is a difference between tough appropriate physical contact as part of the game and a bare-knuckle fistfight or worse yet, a mugging. All of the rationalizations for fighting in the NHL could easily be applied to the NFL, which is more physical but does not “accept” as part of the game individual fistfights.

Isn’t it time to promote honor, talent, and skill as the true enforcers of the game?

I would begin by saying, “I am here today with my client, Adam Jones, because we believe that the Commissioner needs to consider that there are 283 other NFL players who broke the law this year and did not receive anything close to a one year suspension. You may think that we are asking the Commissioner to dismiss or reduce Adam’s penalty but nothing could be further from the truth.

Adam and I have spoken at length, and we both agree that the penalty was fair and just. He realizes that there are consequences to his actions and that he is responsible for his behavior. Although he is not perfect and has a lot to learn, Adam wants to restore honor, character, morality, and virtue to the game of professional football and he plans to dedicate his one-year suspension and the rest of his life to living that ideal.

Adam hopes that the Commissioner will strictly enforce the rules and sanctions necessary to teach all members of our NFL family how to live a “good” life and be models of virtue for the rest of society, especially for our youngest fans and supporters.

Regrettably, Adam’s past actions cannot be erased but beginning now, you will see the manifestation of his sincerity and commitment. Thank you for coming today and helping us to reclaim the game by making sport a means for developing virtue. If there are any questions, Adam and I would be happy to answer them to the best of our abilities.”

Yep, that is what I would say.

Last month, ‘the Greek soccer league was preparing nervously for another weekend of play as the authorities wrestled with the seemingly intractable problem of violent fans. The country’s stadiums reopened last Sunday following a two-week ban on team sports imposed after the death of a 25-year-old fan in a brawl between rival soccer hooligans last month. (Niki Kitsantonis April 19, 2007)

These are not isolated incidents.The extreme violence displayed by fans at sporting events around the world indicates that there is a serious problem affecting all of society. Sport as a means for developing vice or virtue is not the exclusive domain of athletes as we can see by the martyrdom of Manuel Riacuteos. ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friend’ (Jn 15:13). This good man lost his life because too many people in our society have been poorly formed and therefore lack the ethics, values, and morals necessary to live a good life. Although these irrational sports fans are a symptom of the broader societal issues of narcissism, relativism, and materialism, we must work to change the current culture of sport from vice to virtue. Isn’t it time to reclaim the game before one more good person is killed?

Based on my experience with international student-athletes here at Belmont Abbey College as well as at other institutions, I found that these student-athletes bring more than just their tremendous physical talents. A very high percentage of them are more mature and decidedly more focused on taking advantage of every opportunity they are given. I am amazed at their dedication and pursuit of excellence in all that they do.

Without referring to specific names, it is not uncommon for me to see an international student-athlete with a double major and grade point average of 3.9. While competing at a high level this individual will positively contribute to student life, participate in cutting edge internships and prepare for medical school or other graduate studies. And if that wasn’t enough, all of this is done with humility, integrity and charity.

Although there are always exceptions, I am convinced that these individuals make a college, a league and America a better place. They will be the first to tell you about the incredible opportunities this country has to offer and by their presence they remind us of the extraordinary blessing of living in the United States of America. Hopefully we can have as positive influence on them.