Simpson was clearly struggling the day he died; but then, everybody struggles on Mont Ventoux. “Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful,” writes French philosopher Roland Barthes. “Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate...makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.” A little way below the summit, Simpson began to weave all over the road, and fell down. Deliriously, he begged fans beside the road to put him back onto his bike. They did, and he went on, but collapsed again and died just short of the top, killed by a combination of heat exhaustion, amphetamines, and alcohol.

This is the hero in whose memory the sentimental little gifts are piled around his monument. To be sure, his death was sad and unnecessary. But something else died with him, which nobody seems to notice. Many of us who followed the Tour de France began to see it as a contest between pharmaceutical experts instead of finely tuned athletes. Recent years’ scandals and exposés have only reinforced that impression, and I can’t say that the Tour holds any more interest for me.

The December 14 front page of The Barre Times Argus featured two sports stories almost side by side. At least I suppose you could call them sports stories. The lead story described the release of the long-awaited Mitchell Report concerning the use of performance-enhancing drugs by professional baseball players. The second told of possible suspensions and penalties facing local high school athletes because of their promiscuous abuse of illegal substances. I don’t know whether the newspaper’s editors decided on the juxtaposition of the two articles, but it couldn’t have been more appropriate. They’re closely related.

While allowing for the tendency of older folks to deplore current morals and mores, I think it not unfair to deplore what’s happened to our games. I can’t remember many lectures or sermons from our coaches about sportsmanship, self-discipline, fair play, and being gracious winners or losers; it must have been assumed we didn’t need to be told. We knew that if we broke what were then called “training rules,” we’d be off the team for the rest of the season. But somewhere in the 1950s, about the time television began changing the way we look at sports (as well as the amount of money an educational institution could realize by fielding a championship team), a different attitude crept into games. It’s best expressed, perhaps, by a saying variously attributed to either Red Sanders or Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” No longer did we hear the tributes to the runner-up, without whom the winner couldn’t have done nearly so well.

Which brings us to the present: whole networks dedicated to sports babble and film clips, dozens of millions to be made by outstanding marquee players, athletes dwelling in mansions built with funds provided by the fans who pay amazing prices to watch their heroes in the flesh.

It turns out, though, that often that flesh is artificially augmented. What we’re watching are chemically enhanced androids. The Mitchell Report has named 85 players, virtually all of whom deny abusing banned substances. That’s no surprise; denial of obvious moral failures has become a familiar pattern in the home of the brave. What’s surprising to me is that nobody seems very upset that their heroes — think of the people you’ve seen wearing favorite players’ jersey numbers — are in fact moral midgets willing to cheat to win and make the big money. The reaction to the Report has so far been a resounding so what?

Here’s what: Baseball has always been considered our national pastime: America’s game, if you will. How many of us really believe that its commissioner will, as he promises, “act”; and what does that mean? How many of us think that Barry Bonds’ home run record will be disallowed? Or that Roger Clemens will be denied the Hall of Fame? What has happened to the Tour de France could happen to our iconic sport unless every suspicion of chemical performance enhancement is removed.

Which brings us to our local high school athletes, who, after a party, in a dummkopf move deserving of a Darwin award, actually posted their delinquencies on the Internet. It will be interesting to see what penalties will be assessed by both state authorities (for drug use and underage drinking) and school sports coaches (for, presumably, breaking training rules or agreements). It won’t do to say that kids will be kids, and half-excuse it. They’ve denigrated the sports they play, as well as the abstract ideal of dedicating yourself to something larger and more important than yourself. There have to be personal consequences for that.

And yet, when you look at their heroes, dodging reporters’ questions and speaking through their attorneys, it’s hard to blame the students. We’ve come a long, long way from the day (in 1920, to be exact) when a disillusioned little baseball fan accosted Shoeless Joe Jackson of the infamous Black Sox as he left a grand jury hearing on corruption in baseball. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” the kid famously pleaded. Would that we still had the innocence to be disillusioned.etting and represents the original stalk from which we came: our ancestry.