Lance Armstrong. Beneath all of the controversy, the comeback from cancer, the seven consecutive Tours de France wins, the hero worship from some and blistering hatred from others, to the stack of books written about him and a documentary titled The Armstrong Lie, to the Oprah Winfrey interview to the onslaught of litigation and the USADA lifetime ban from all competition, and just a week ago, USA Cycling announcing that he would not be allowed to ride in a Gran Fondo in South Carolina that raised money for Meals on Wheels, there’s long been an undercurrent of truth about the story that rarely gets brought into the discussion.
Call it the Armstrong Paradox: If long ago Lance had decided to never touch a banned drug, no one would know who he is. As Tyler Hamilton detailed in his book, The Secret Race, when EPO started oozing through veins of the Tour de France, the speed and endurance of the peloton kicked up a notch in a fashion that clean riders were marginalized into obscurity. Talented, hard-working roadies who were driven by dreams of being the next Merckx, Lemond or Indurain ultimately, one way or another, encountered the hard fact of the professional cycling culture that Hamilton did: They had to make the decision, get on board with the drugs or forget it. Surely there were those who were chafed at the notion of artificially cranking up a red blood cell count, or using steroids or human growth hormone or so on—and said forget it, either for personal ethics or because they heard the stories of 18 riders dying over the course of four years, late 80s to the early 90s, from a drug, exogenously-manufactured erythropoietin, aka EPO, a drug modulated through recombinant DNA technology for patients with kidney failures. (As hematologist Dr. Randy Eichner explained to the NYT back in 1991, abusing EPO can lead to blood clots that can trigger stroke and heart failure even in a super-fit 20-something with sub-5% bodyfat. Said Eichner, “”Pretty soon you have mud instead of blood; then you have trouble.”)
Here’s where the paradox involving Armstrong surfaces: Armstrong’s mad thirst for not only winning but for bulldozing through his rivals was why he became a superstar. It wasn’t just that he won—it was the hell-fury he brought to his craft. Watching Armstrong race was like watching a blade-thin Hindu-yogi-warrior in action, fresh off a vision quest in the mountains and borderline psychotic because of it, go into battle, drunk with the belief that he was unkillable. Watching Armstrong race was unreal. Like the 2004 15.5k-time trial, watching Lance bike up Alpe d’Huez and on a fence-less road through a tunnel of 90,000 fans, including plenty of venomous, seething haters. The nuts were jumping out in front of him, screaming and spitting at him. Of course, they might have well as been spitting gasoline into a an open furnace, fueling the obliteration of everything in his path.
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Armstrong’s grit had no turn-off switch. He was always on, always working, always strategizing, always pushing. Like legendary wrestler and wrestling coach Dan Gable, the 1972 Olympic Gold medalist. Gable’s high-school record: undefeated. College: 181-1. As a head coach, his teams won 16 NCAA championships. He drove himself and his athletes unmercifully into the shadows of total human effort.
As characterized in Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War and other journalism, the Texan was ruthless in pushing everyone and everything around him to breakthrough levels of performance and invention. As Bicycling Magazine reported on the Alpe d’Huez thriller, Armstrong’s “obsessive preparation” was the source of his success.
For Armstrong, a man of exacting preparation, the singular importance of today’s stage was not lost. Months ago, he rode the climb more than a dozen times in practice, and his sponsors sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into special lightweight carbon fiber bikes and wheels, airy skinsuits and even lightweight pedals and shoes.
You know who this also sounds like? The late Steve Jobs. About two years ago I read the Walter Isaacson biography on Jobs and the parallels between Jobs and Armstrong were many. Both were abandoned by their fathers. Both became obsessive competitors, ruthless when it came to achieving and demanding excellence, and criticized by some for how harshly they treated others. Jobs was described as someone who made it routine to drain every ounce of talent and capacity out of those who worked for him and wasn’t afraid to crush an individual’s morale. Armstrong has been similarly described. Both identified enemies and sought to thrash them without regard to what might be fair and honest. Jobs died not long before the investigation surrounding Armstrong began to heat up. At the time, both were cultural American icons.
As far as adherence to the rules and ethics, Armstrong and Jobs were also similar. As Isaacson reported, Jobs lived and worked in a dimension where he didn’t really believe that the rules applied to him, part of the so-called “reality distortion field” that he projected.
Consider this opening sentence from a NYT article last May: “If Steve Jobs were alive today, should he be in jail?” The story digs through an assortment of sketchy business dealings at the hands of Jobs, from price-fixing to backdating stock options. A law professor is quoted in the story as saying that Jobs was “A walking anti-trust violation…I’m simply astounded by the risks he seemed willing to take.”
Imagine the riot that would have transpired if Steve Jobs had been arrested and sent to jail. That Jobs wasn’t particularly kind to his workers and his competition, and that he was willing to push against the law or even break it to get the results he coveted—few seemed to care, as long as he delivered the iPhone. He was admired for the single-minded purpose. It was part of the hero-worship, and Jobs became a template for the shatter-all-the-conventions mentality of Silicon Valley.
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When it comes to evaluating the blowback that Armstrong received following the investigation and lifetime ban—and the public acknowledgement that he had been lying for many years—it’s difficult not to consider that he was a scapegoat of sorts. Did Armstrong lie? He did. But professional athletes lie all the time. Even in a sport like triathlon that we like to think of as being pure. Go to a pre-race press conference at the Hawaii Ironman and ask the favorites how they’re feeling. They lie left and right, and who blames them? It’s only after the race that you find out if they were battling a flu bug or were hobbled with an injury, or what they’re actual strategy was.
Did Armstrong use PEDs and did he lie about this? Yes. But what became vividly clear in The Secret Race was how PEDs have played a role at the top of the cycling world since the late 1990s. The sport was over-run. If you were a successful professional cyclist, you were using drugs and lying about—all apparently part of a their alternate universe, where telling the truth would have been a betrayal of the cohort.
Considering how rampant PED use was in cycling, it seems like a lot of prominent players—governing bodies, team directors, major sponsors, etc— were either really easy to fool almost all of the time within this Secret Race universe, by a bunch of skinny bikers, or they knew and just weren’t motivated to do anything about it.
Prominent players were either complicit, turning the other way or keeping their distance and ignorance intact because they didn’t want to know about it one way or another. There were too many millions of dollars at play for everyone to simply be outwitted by a bunch of canny cyclists who spent most of their time on the saddle, hollowing out their cheeks by riding for seven or more hours a day. Let’s be frank about this: No one tried to control things when it became clear that a drug like EPO was providing a fantastic edge. The result was that PED use in professional cycling became like jaywalking in NYC: so deeply imbedded and a part of daily life that its just the way it is.
The public furor over the matter has motivated the sport to crack down. It’s been bloody and at least to some degree effective. But the crackdown has focused on the riders. They’re the ones who have paid the price. Armstrong was an especially visible symbol of it it all, and the case can be made that he was a political scapegoat, and he’s been hit hard, tagged with the word ‘fraud.’ Armstrong got dropped by all of his sponsors, for example, but those sponsors, race organizers and the bike industry itself had already made their fortunes from Armstrong’s work. Not to mention magazines like Men’s Journal and Outside that saw their numbers spike upward every time they figured out a new reason to stick him on the the cover. Lots of money was made—and the only one I’m aware of that has had to give some money back is Armstrong—along with his titles.
It’s as if all of the anger and frustration with cycling’s cheating scandal has been blasted directly at one person. Armstrong’s ability to be a front-page story made him the primary target. He may have doped and lied about it, but again, if he hadn’t done both of those things, most people would have never heard of the guy. It would have been someone else winning those Tours, and that someone would have been doping too.
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Not that making a sport fair isn’t a hard job. It’s next to impossible, with all the gray areas and ethical predicaments involved. Consider the World Anti-Doping Agency’s mission of trying to keep sport clean. It’s no simple task to even define what ‘clean’ is. For example, here’s how a substance or method gets put on the WADA Prohibited List. It has to meet at least two of the three criteria:
- It has the potential to enhance or enhances sport performance
- It represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete
- It violates the spirit of sport
There’s all sorts of subjective hiccups that can come into play in trying to define and apply the standards.
Let’s take nicotine. Nicotine is not prohibited, either before, during or after competition. Next time you’re doing a triathlon—although your fellow racers may have something to say about it—you can freely light up a cigarette in transition and you will not be tagged with a penalty. Surely, the nicotine is a risk to the health of the athlete. But according to Ben Greenfield, female athletes may be able to get some body-composition benefits—a potential performance enhancer—by chewing on some Nicorettes. So nicotine can enhance performance, it’s bad for you, and doesn’t seem aligned with the spirit of the sport. That’s three-for-three by my count. On this list it should go. So should sugar-laden electrolyte drinks, if you subscribe to the idea that the carbs can help you in an endurance race but may also contribute to type-2 diabetes. Or rotting your teeth.
But this is just the beginning of the complexity involved in assessing whether a substance should be banned or not. Perhaps the most knowledgeable expert on the topic in triathlon is Mark Sisson. Sisson was a professional triathlete in the early days of the sport but also spent 13 years as the International Triathlon Union “Anti-Doping” commissioner. In a blog post, Sisson talked about how there was a time that if you ate a poppy-seed muffin as part of your pre-race breakfast, you had a good chance of getting caught for having metabolites of opium in your system.
Sisson explains the challenges involved in simply conducting and collecting a good test, but also the loopholes that false-positive situations create. He also makes a compelling argument for why we should just let go of the trying to govern PEDs at all. The concern about the “actual or potential health risk to the athlete” is a farce, Sisson suggests, because the business of professional athletics is not in the least about health:
World class athletes tend to die significantly younger than you would predict from heart disease, cancer, diabetes and early-onset dementia. They also typically suffer premature joint deterioration from the years of pounding, and most endurance athletes look like hell from the years of oxidative damage that has overwhelmed their feeble antioxidant systems. Most people don’t realize it, but training at the elite level is actually the antithesis of a healthy lifestyle. The definition of peak fitness means that you are constantly at or near a state of physical breakdown. As a peak performer on a world stage, you have done more work than anyone else, but you have paid a price. It is again ironic that the professional leagues and the IOC, the ones who dangle that carrot of millions of dollars in salary or gold-medalist endorsements are the same ones who actually create this overtrained, injured and beat-up army of young people. They don’t care. These organizations then deny the athletes the very same drugs and even some natural “health-enhancing” substances that the rest of society can easily receive whenever they feel the least bit uncomfortable.
When I think about how much cycling has become linked to drugs, I think about the NFL. I’m not that especially tuned to pro football, but if you test positive for a banned substance, your penalty? Sit out for four games. I assume players get caught using either steroids or HGH, and I imagine it’s reported somewhere, but I can’t recall an uproar. Considering the beatings they give and take and the whole gladiator quality of the sport, how could you even begin to say, “Don’t take performance drugs—they might be unhealthy!” It’s ludicrous. It also seems to be forgiven. It’s as if, ‘Hey—here’s a sport where every week from August to December you go out on to a field and spend a couple of hours smashing into 300-pound high-speed human tanks, you’re going to need something more than protein drinks to make it through the season.’ I played high school football at about 175 pounds against others my size. We’d play games Friday nights and then I worked a job at the mall on Saturdays. I was such a limping mess my boss sent me home at least twice. And I think we had maybe six games in a season. In one game, the cartilage in my right knee was shredded and I had to have major surgery. I was 17. You don’t play football to improve your health, and the same goes for professional cycling. So to Sisson’s assertion: there’s a lot that should be considered with PEDs in regards to professional sports.
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A strong point that Sisson makes is that the dream of creating a fair playing field in sport is just that: a dream. Especially in sports where technological arms races exist, like endurance athletics. Let’s say Triathlete A has a budget of $1000 for a bike and Triathlete B has a budget of $10,000 for a bike, and both are similar in skill and athletic capacity. With a set of physics tests, we can quantify how much free speed Triathlete A can pick up with with better wheels alone. This really isn’t fair, but there’s no rule that says it isn’t fair, so spending a lot of money on your machine is within the rules and considered fair play. No one really puts up a fuss about this, either. Probably because we like fast bikes.
Here’s another example, one Sisson discusses, more directly related to the issue of EPO use. Let’s say you’re an elite marathoner and are good enough to make $300k per year from your sponsorship contracts. While you just say no to EPO, you do want to raise your oxygen-carrying capacity to max levels—within the rules. So you spend money to have your house outfitted into an altitude chamber, where you can push a few buttons and the machine thins out the oxygen so that you simulate 10,000-feet-plus inside. Your body responds by creating more red blood cells. Even though you live at sea level. So you get to live at high altitude and and train at low altitude, which may be an optimal way to get the benefits of altitude exposure without it degrading the quality of your training. It’s within the rules. But is that really fair compared to a runner who can barely afford shoes?
You can take the argument even further and just admit that life isn’t fair. Some of us are born with outrageous heart-and-lung function, with wicked max VO2 levels. Most of us weren’t.
Armstrong was. When he was a teenager growing up in Texas, he gravitated into the fledgeling sport of triathlon and put posters of guys like Scott Tinley and Mark Allen in his bedroom. At 16-years-old he started beating guys like that. He tore down the posters. His destiny sparkled before him. Still a teenager, he went on to become the Tri-Fed National Sprint champion.
In what was no doubt a smart economic move, he switched to professional cycling and began winning races and stages in the Tour de France. Armstrong had that combination of rarified talent and champion mind-set that comes along once in a generation. He also beat cancer. Whether he got it because he used steroids or was just unlucky, he beat it. Then he returned to the racing world. I’ve never met or interviewed Armstrong, but my read on it is that when the peloton took off like an EPO-powered hovercraft, as Tyler Hamilton wrote about in his book, Armstrong analyzed the situation with a coldest, hardest of edges, like a commander preparing for a ground war. He wasn’t about to let the enemy get an advantage on him. It was the reality and he wasn’t much for shrinking back into oblivion. And ironically enough, this was the stuff of his character that led to his incredible rise. And to his Greek Tragedy-like fall.
After I finished The Secret Race, I had hit the wall in about the drugs and cycling. It was exhausting to think about. I wasn’t going to watch the documentary, The Armstrong Lie, but I finally did about a year ago. Since then, I’ve forgotten almost everything in the movie, except for the footage of Armstrong visiting sick children at a cancer clinic. Those kids were so happy to see him. It’s all I remember from the film.
I know the case had been made that Armstrong had used Livestrong as, “The Cancer Shield,” the charge that his foundation’s work for cancer awareness and such was to a way to defuse the motivations of anyone wanting to come after him with an investigation. Maybe there’s truth in that, I don’t know, but watching the kids light up with Armstrong in the room was powerful. He certainly didn’t seem disingenuous to me. I’m not sure how you quantify how much tangible good Armstrong and Livestrong generated for the cause, and how much inspiration to those stricken with a such a horrible disease, but it’s infinitely more than I have ever given or done for a charitable cause. What would be disingenuous of me would be to judge Armstrong without taking this into account.
Which brings me to my point: Dismiss the lifetime ban. It was issued in August of 2012—so that’s more than two years. Let the guy ride in a charity bike race. And if he’s still up for it, let him race in triathlon again. He’s really good at it.
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