Throwing the first stone of compassion to Lance Armstrong?

Just read the news about Lance Armstrong admitting to Oprah that he doped, is a liar, and a cheat, and that those medals being stripped from him was the right and just thing to do.

Strangely, I feel nothing but COMPASSION for the guy.

He’s coming clean. Finally. That’s got to be hard and freeing at the same time.

I live in the same town as Lance and work out at a gym that previously had his name on it. It was a gym dedicated to his achievements as a cyclist…with pictures of his journey, quotes by him, jerseys framed and mounted on the wall.

I hadn’t been to the gym in a while and after Lance had been stripped of his medals, I returned to a completely new gym. It had been completely remodeled and just as his medals had been stripped, so were all the memorabilia, his name, any semblance of the man was now gone from this gym.

I thought “Wow…this shit is really over for him.”

I thought about how that must make him feel, how does the guy walk around town with his chin up, how is he greeted when he steps in to the Live Strong head quarters located in East Austin, across from the UT Charter school that I’d love for my sons to go to?

We hold humans to such a high standard, which we should, but there has to be compassion for the mistakes and poor choices people make. There is always a reason for people’s poor choices whether it be ignorance, a void they are trying to fill within themselves or in their lives, and it is only in making these poor choices and hopefully learning from them that they gain the wisdom needed to become better, and do better.

Of course, I’m not discounting the exceptions needing to exist for those people who are just TAKERS- you better believe I detest those types and Armstrong could very likely be one of those types, but compassion comes through first for me because I know I don’t know the whole story to anyone’s story and surely won’t be the first to cast a stone at them.

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