Lizzie Armitstead hardly seemed to breathe on the start line in Rio. As the riders in the women’s Olympic road race waited, crammed into the customary pre-race grid, time seemed to stretch out and slowly turn to glue. Armitstead grimaced and writhed, head touchingly heavy on her frail shoulders, an object of gawping scrutiny for the faces pressed against fences a few feet away.
There were a few words with her British teammate Nikki Harris and not a flicker from the third member of the team, Emma Pooley, a little apart on one side. Rarely can a champion athlete have looked so painfully vulnerable at one of the defining moments of a triumphant professional career.
It had been a horrible fortnight for Armitstead, the world champion in this event, whose Olympics effectively unravelled after the revelation of three missed drug tests in the last year—the last, which could have led to a ban, rescinded after a legal challenge.
Perhaps unsurprisingly it was a strange morning generally for the British cyclists as they completed the race preliminaries on a breezy, unsettling Copacabana day that saw them cajoled to the signing-in point and then to the start line by an angst stadium announcer.
Three and a half hours later there was an element of release about the end of Armitstead’s race. She struggled at times around this brutal 141km (87-mile) course, as had seemed likely given the build-up to that freeze-frame of quiet, cruel theatre in the Rio sun.
Still her performance here had its own champion qualities. From an early mechanical problem, to a falling-away mid-race, to a late climb where she closed to the main pack, she was there but not quite there throughout. She finished 14 seconds back in fifth, without ever threatening, in the dreaded parlance, to podium.
At the end Armitstead’s looked wan and spent, but a little of the strangulating tension had passed. “I’m looking forward to getting back to the people that love me,” she said. “You open yourself up for judgement. I never gave up and for that I can be proud of myself.”
Judgement, though, will continue. The farrago of omission and denial over those missed dope tests remains. Some will maintain that Armitstead shouldn’t have been here at all, deselected on grounds of wider propriety, of perception and timing. Others will smart at the coddled self-righteousness of her response to those missed tests being flushed out, one apparently the result of a phone being switched to silent, another a failure to tick a location box.
Sympathisers will maintain that no rule of expulsion has been breached, that only three failed tests would lead to a formal case to answer. And that this is instead a morality play, a collective harrumph inspired by the darker geopolitical tension of Russia’s doping scandal, the self-regarding pressure to appear whiter than white in these things.
The same line of argument says excluding Armitstead would have been illogical. Mo Farah also missed two tests but avoided a ban a year before London 2012. Plus, this has been a very public wheel of pain for an athlete who loves her sport, whose life has been measured by sacrifice and competitive anxiety since she was plucked out by British cycling, aged 10. Everything she has achieved will now come with an asterisk.
It is possible to say Armitstead shouldn’t have been at these Olympics without wishing her ill, without suggesting she is a cheat and while still feeling sympathy. It is a point that seems to have been lost in the shared animosity of the last few weeks, an anger that emerged again at the start of the race here as Armitstead’s family bearded and berated at least one national newspaper journalist on the Rio beachfront.
“I think it’s a bit naive to miss three tests but it doesn’t say that she’s a doper,” Marianne Vos, the reigning Olympic champion, said on the Rio promenade. It seems a fair if unintentionally barbed response. As far as many fellow athletes are concerned, those who also go through this gruelling process, Armitstead did fail three times, whatever her lawyers were able to establish, however the doping authorities may have failed to carry out their job to the letter.
And in particular notwithstanding the lengthy dog-ate-my-testing-slot self-defence posted by Armitstead on Twitter, an act of blame-shifting that has further soured the public sympathies, shining a light into the self-absorbed and coddled private culture of elite athletes.
Detachment, solipsism, self-obsession, living in “the bubble”: this is a common theme in elite professional sport. Armitstead didn’t create the atmosphere of hateful suspicion, the stretched sympathies that make us assume a missed test must speak to something more sinister. But she does exist within it, and with open eyes.
In Rio the road race itself got the finish it deserved. Anna Van Der Breggen of Holland won gold after a thrilling chase at the last, the endgame opened up by a horrific crash suffered by her teammate Annemiek van Vleuten in the final descent. Van Der Breggen collapsed at the end as she tumbled off her bike, exhausted and exhilarated by a genuinely stirring piece of racing.
For Armitstead, the opportunity to shrink from the light for a while will be gratefully seized. It has been a genuinely painful trial by omission, a tale of carelessness and suspicion from which nobody emerges with credit.