as lance armstrong joins the league of disgraced idols haimanti mukherjee asks why even after innumerable slipups by so many of them the loss of a hero still feels personal and the sense of betrayal is equally intense the story was so perfect for so long and almost impossible to live up to i wanted to be that guy everyone believed in by any means available i am flawed very flawed as a human being as lance armstrong uttered these lines in his first confession to using drugs to win all the seven tour de france titles the whole world watched in disbelief they may have had reasons to doubt the worlds most famous cyclist before what with all the allegations piling up for over a decade but the admission of guilt and the lengths he went to for the massive coverup shattered something fundamental in every human being the need to believe in another human being people whether from the field of sports politics glamour or business have fallen from grace before they will continue to fall even after this confession but with every slipup even as we get used to them there is a small yet significant part in us that feels a void sport fanatic and a fan of armstrong rudi mukherjee says i have fought with friends and family when i was in school to watch all his tour de france races live i have abused friends when they called him a liar and a cheat to say i was gutted would be an un derstatement it feels like my own brother or father has betrayed me armstrongs betrayal is particularly cruel for the ones who drew inspiration from him after he won the deadly fight against testicular cancer he was a role model a survivor an epitome of the human spirit and endurance for millions of cancer patients their loved ones and the ones who had fought the disease and won just like him psychologist deepak kashyap says the term role model by definition denotes you are modelling yourself on someone people tend to pin the virtues they hold dear on their role models expecting them to live up to them and when a role model fails this test the person is broken because his faith in himself has also been shattered he thinks if the role model cant live up to it can i and thats a scary thought why do we worship heroes author and columnist pritish nandy tweeted as a longtime lance armstrong admirer i feel more sad than cheated a flawed hero is always a tragic figure in a strict sense no mortal can be a hero because a hero according to greek mythology is the son of god and a human being and to be a human being is to be flawed but that doesnt stop us especially the young children and teenagers from holding a torch to their heroes who they think are infallible