Disclaimer: Lance Armstrong is awesome.
Sorry for staying on the subject of A&E’s Intervention, but curiosity forces me to return to this show that does more harm than good. I haven’t seen today’s episode; I’m still hung up on the last intervention for Chad.
His full name is Chad Gerlach. His troubles started at 13, when he got sent to juvenile for felony arson. Two years later, reintroduced to freedom, Chad’s father, Peter, got him involved in bike racing.
Although hard drugs hadn’t destroyed this teenager’s life yet, he was already an addict. Addiction of his strain is congenital.
Non-addicts can’t imagine what this innate unquenchable predilection is like, but they shouldn’t feel left out or neglected. Not being able to imagine what it feels like to be an addict marks just one instance when ignorance is a gift.
A characteristic of addicts like Chad is that they are easily obsessed. Once they take an interest in an activity, they delve into it with deep fangs and don’t let go until they’re frothing at the mouth. This activity becomes their life, their preoccupation, so it makes sense that, fresh out of the doldrums of juvie, Chad let bike racing consume him.
Day in and day out he rode with the fervor of a future champion. His addictive personality made him hunger for complete mastery of the sport until he started winning races of increasing importance.
In this way, he gained recognition. It didn’t hurt that his father took him to races around the world. The international biking circuit suddenly knew of the young and mighty Chad Gerlach, who, according to fellow Sacramento racer, Rich Maile,
… was given a set of tools that most of us don’t understand. I’ve seen that guy turn himself absolutely inside out racing and go places most of us absolutely cannot imagine.
In 1996, at the age of 17, just two years after juvie and still the notorious bad boy, Chad Gerlach was invited to join the US Postal team with Lance Armstrong. This was the year that Armstrong learned of his cancer, so Chad could’ve made a run at becoming a legend, but for some unspeakable reason he decided to insult Armstrong, accusing him of being “soft”, of having a soft stomach, instead of sticking to his cycling.
This insult, according to A&E, resulted in Chad getting kicked off the team, and this was precisely the blow the young biker/arsonist/addict couldn’t take.
Next came racing on less popular pro teams, but these environments didn’t suit Chad. He managed to get booted off four teams before resigning himself to the streets.
In other words, it was shortly after his descent from the glory of US Postal, the glory of the Olympics and the Tour de France, the glory of the bike racing world, which was everything to Chad; it was shortly after this vertiginous descent that Chad began his stint as a crack cocaine addict on the streets.
Panhandling became his profession, and some say he was able to raise $2,000/month to support his habit.
But I’ll stop now and leave with these questions: Do you think that Lance Armstrong is to blame – at least in part – for Chad Gerlach’s descent? So what if Chad called him soft? Is that reason enough to raise a raucous and get the 17-year-old booted?
Does getting called a name by your most capable and fierce competitor justify ruining their chances at proving they are better than you? Or was the great and laudable Lance Armstrong too selfish, insecure, and worried about losing his spot to Chad as team leader of US Postal during his medical leave of absence that he complained enough about Chad’s attitude problems to inadvertently send him to a life of hard drug use?
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Chad was 17; Lance Armstrong was the adult. Sounds like Lance Armstrong behaved like more of the child. Still, it sounds like Chad was pretty unstable to begin with. If it hadn’t been Lance Armstrong, it could very well have been somebody else.
@WriterX: I disagree. 17 is the perfect age to be taught when to keep your mouth shut and that there are consequences for things you say and do. If Lance would have allowed the disrespectful punk to remain on the team, it would have reinforced the self-entitlement that seems so pervasive with today’s youth.
Like perez hilton recently learned, there are consequences for running the pie hole. If you don’t want to face those consequences, keep it shut or learn how to talk to people respectfully and politely.
It would be a mistake to believe that Chad was kicked off the USP team for a single incident. By all accounts, there was a pattern of (bad boy) behavior that led to Chad being dropped. Perhaps the insult you refer to was “the last straw”, but it is a gross over-simplification to state that Lance couldn’t take criticism and booted his rival over one (poorly advised) comment.
With logic like yours, Chad never has to be responsible for his own actions and his own behavior. He has blamed his parents getting divorced for his bad behavior… yet his siblings didn’t go off the rails like he did (nor do 99.9% of people whose parents split up). You blame Lance Armstrong for getting him kicked off, but Chad never apologized for his behavior. Perhaps if he had made amends, he could have salvaged his spot on the team. But it’s never about being on a “team” with Chad, it’s all about him.
You go on to say that being on less popular teams “didn’t suit Chad”, and that he then was kicked off four (4) more teams before leaving cycling. I suppose it was Lance’s fault that Chad was kicked off those other four teams as well. No sense imagining that it was Chad’s behavior that resulted in getting the boot, because he’s not responsible for anything, right?
I suppose if I don’t get a promotion I’m hoping for, I can just fall into homelessness and drug addiction, and none of it will be my fault. It will be the my manager’s fault for dealing me a crushing dissappointment. What a relief, now I don’t need to worrt about being responsible for anything anymore.
Chad was a spoiled, self-centered, irresponsible little brat. If you watch the follow up on Intervention, you’ll see that even when he’s clean and sober he’s still a selfish, self absorbed jerk.
If this were a movie, and Lance had ensured to team to continue with Chad, and everything worked out, it would have been testament to the wisdom of Lance. However, this wasn’t a movie and Lance had other things to consider. Chad, whether attributable or not, was immature and paid the price.