Last week Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. And it was just a month ago that Joe Paterno was stripped of over a hundred of his wins. Normally I'm a big fan of justice, and I'm a lot more rule-positive than most sports fans, but this retroactive editing of history strikes me as a weird kind of punishment.
(Continuing my recent tradition of basing posts on Onion articles, here they are making a similar point.)
For one thing, I'm wondering just how much punishment it is. Imagine you're just starting out in cycling and you have the choice: Use drugs, win the Tour de France seven times, and spend a decade as the greatest in your sport, make a ton of money, then lose your titles and reputation, (but keeping the money.) Your alternative is: don't use drugs, and you'll spend a few years as an anonymous also-ran before you have to retire and get a real job. In that case, you still have your reputation - or at least you would, if anyone knew who you were.
Of course, as a sports fan I've been thinking back, trying to come up with any instances where my favourite teams and athletes might have benefited from some retroactive justice. The best I can come up with is back in 1989, the Blue Jays were eliminated from the playoffs by the Oakland Athletics, the latter lead by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. We now know that both of them used steroids, so I think they should be stripped of their World Series title that year. Yes! The Jays won the Pennant!
But you can make a better argument for Armstrong's punishment than Paterno's. In Armstrong's case, the punishment is to remove achievements gained by breaking the rules. In Paterno's case, it's an arbitrarily chosen punishment for wrongs committed away from the game. I suppose the motivation is that now that he is dead, he can't be directly punished. The only thing we can take away from him is his legacy, so that's what they've hit at.
But here's the problem: as countless people have pointed out, part of the core problem in the Penn State scandal is the reverence we give to sporting heroes like Paterno. Essentially, we assume that a person who achieves great things in sports must be a morally sound person. And now the disappearing-wins punishment is the same thinking in reverse: if we find someone is not the moral paragon we assumed, we have to change history so that he didn't have great achievements in sports. Perhaps it would be a good lesson for all of us if we just had to live with the fact that one of the best ever at his job ended up disappointing us.
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