OCTOBER 17, 2012
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When the most recent cycle of witch-hunting began, I dug into drawers until I found my old bright yellow LIVESTRONG rubber bracelet, one of some 84 million sold for $1 to finance Lance Armstrong’s cancer foundation. I slipped it on. I felt snarly and mean again. We’re going to be okay. We are going to, as Lance instructed us, “take responsibility for ourselves and be brave.”
In July 1999, after Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France for the first time, I had run out and bought my first good bike. I chanted LanceArmstrong, LanceArmstrong to help me push up hills. I felt a kinship. We shared the same kind of cancer (fittingly, his case was much worse). A few years later, when mine recurred, I chanted LanceArmstrong, LanceArmstrong to push me through chemotherapy.
He became the closest I’ve ever had to a hero in sports, and so I was anxious when we finally met ten years ago; would he turn out to be yet another dumb boy or distracted celeb?
Lance had asked me to moderate a panel at Stanford on athletes and cancer with him and several other athletes. It was lively and candid. On our way out of the arena, a woman stopped Armstrong and asked him to address a topic that hadn’t come up--how had his faith, his belief in God, helped him as a cancer patient?
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In his direct, borderline chilly way, Lance said, ''Everyone should believe in something. I believed in surgery, chemotherapy, and my doctors.''
The questioner looked disappointed, but I felt a surge of relief. Armstrong had stood his ground. He and I had agreed earlier in the day that the intrusion of faith-based treatment can be pernicious, almost like blaming the victim, and Lance had pointed out that ''Good, strong people get cancer and they do all the right things to beat it, and they still die.''
As we left, Lance grinned. ''I guess I won't be able to go into politics when I stop bike racing.''
I guess he was right about that.
I’m not worried about Lance. In the private time we spent together in Palo Alto (that was the fee I charged to come out and moderate the panel), he was engaged, warily friendly, twitchy with energy. When I brought up his rumored drug use, he was quick to express anger (more of an intimidation technique, I thought, than an emotion). This was a hard case, still the emotionally abused kid who smothered his psychic pain with real pain on a bike.
Two years ago, in my memoir, I interviewed myself about Lance. I asked, How would you feel if all the rumors about his use of performance enhancing drugs turned out to be true?
I answered, I’m willing to live with it. Let’s assume that Lance’s doctors have been so skillful that he never tested positive. Can we move on?
I still feel that way.
Last week, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which had stripped Armstrong of his seven Tour de France championships and banned him for life from professional cycling, released more than 1,000 pages of testimony from 26 people, including 15 cyclists, about Armstrong’s persistent and highly organized use of blood transfusions and banned drugs.
(A far better, and equally persuasive, read is The Secret Race, by a former team-mate, Tyler Hamilton, and Daniel Coyle.)
In response, Armstrong tweeted his lack of concern and his lawyers floated the possibility of him taking a lie detector test. It’s easy to believe that Lance could beat the test--his icy control is legend. It’s also possible that Lance, beyond delusion or denial, doesn’t really consider himself a cheat. After all, there was a level playing field on the Pyrenees--wasn’t everybody juicing?
And that, of course, may be the point that takes us beyond pro bike racing – a sport that even I, like most Americans, can raise little passion for – and beyond Lance Armstrong, who has done more good than harm in his life but should be penalized for breaking the rules for which he signed up.
There is something faintly sinister about the Anti-Dope Party, whether it’s campaigning through cycling, the Olympics, baseball, or football (where it seems to have pretty much decided to fail). Wasting funds, energy, and the attention of citizens, the anti-dopers generally stay a half-life behind the dopers, who are driven to keep giving us the bigger, faster, more spectacularly vicious thrills we demand. By now, even fantasy leaguers understand that performance-enhancing techniques don’t promise success beyond the chance to heal faster from harder and more frequent workouts.
As one who shoots steroids (a result of three cancer operations, a la Lance), I still can’t crush a fastball, much less ride up mountains at speed. (Typically, Lance sniffed at my fifteen-mile cycling routine as barely worth getting on a bike for.) But I do understand what doping can do, and done carefully it can be useful. In American sports, it has been generally available at least since the early Sixties. The promised reefer madness trail of death and twisted lives has never materialized, and certainly not on a scale of the damage caused by the conventionally encouraged violence of football.
Don’t cry for Lance Armstrong. That bully can take care of himself. Watch out for the righteous, wrong-headed anti-dopers, distracting us from the more immediate and perilous concerns of orchestrated violence. And follow instructions: Pedal hard. Take responsibility for yourself and be brave.
Robert Lipsyte, a former sports and city columnist for The New York Times, is author of the recent memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter.
6 comments
I love the cancer quote. I won't cry for him, though, as suggested. If really everybody did it, fine. If not, not. Sounds like he was the ringleader of an extra-fancy cheating operation that delivered unfair advantage. Maybe there's a murky middle ground. Anyway, I don't believe that "we" demand it -- if anything, competition demands it, but that's only because it goes on too much -- and I don't buy that anti-doping authorities are hypocritical, unduly self-righteous scolds. Them's the rules. In any case, "we" still await Lance's bracingly honest and admirably twitchy confession.
- JakeH
October 17, 2012 at 1:55am
I admit I'm a bit speechless here at this. As a cycling fan who thrilled to Lance's first storybook victories, reading the contents of the USADA's "reasoned decision" was painful. I long ago accepted that he likely cheated, but the extent of the doping program and the way he bullied his team-mates into compliance was what really struck me, and explained why the USADA pursued the case with such persistence. There was a cancer in the sport which needed to be cut out. Lance left a trail of destroyed lives and careers in his wake, and was complicit in turning a beautiful (although admittedly never spotlessly clean) sport into a drug-fueled nightmare (and I'm actually not one of the Lance "haters", believe it or not). Part of it was the unique cycling culture of the time, for which he was particularly well-suited and to which he adapted better than anybody else... Lance himself is incredibly complex, capable of acts of incredible generosity and humanity while at the same time acting the part of a vindictive bully to those who he feels threaten him (just ask the trail of former close friends and teammates) You're right about one thing, however -- Lance will come out of this just fine...
- hairdan
October 17, 2012 at 2:46am
Lance Armstrong and Robert Lipsyte both cheated death, so cheating in sports is nothing in comparison. Or so Armstrong and Lipsyte must believe. "Take responsibility for yourself and be brave." I ride three or four times a week, on my regular 22 mile course, and my biggest challenge is avoiding careless and sometimes angry or mean people driving their automobiles. Yes, I've been run off the road and crashed, more than once, but I do take precautions. I never ride in the afternoon, the risk of alcohol or drug addled drivers being too great. Excusing or defending Armstrong's use of drugs may be different in kind from excusing or defending those alcohol or drug addled drivers. And it may be true that the anti-dopers are wrong-headed. But all the injured, maimed, and dead bikers who have been the victims of alcohol and drug addled drivers might disagree. Take responsibility for yourself, and a few other fellow bikers too. It can be lonely out there.
- rayward
October 17, 2012 at 8:32am
"Wasting funds, energy, and the attention of citizens, the anti-dopers generally stay a half-life behind the dopers, who are driven to keep giving us the bigger, faster, more spectacularly vicious thrills we demand." Generally speaking, I think sports fans who actually care about outcomes of professional events are shallow, rather sad people, and all would be far better served by caring about something that matters. But in their defense in this matter, it is not the fans who demand doping. The fans demand competition and drama, and a team that at least sometimes comes out champions. If you could wave a magic wand that took every bit of doping out of professional sports tomorrow, each sport would, in a very short time, settle into a new normal, where the best still beat the others only most of the time, and individual plays and games can be the kind of nail-biters or blowouts that hold the fan's attentions. No, this is not on the fans. This is on the athletes, and the professional leagues. The athletes would rather win than be honest and healthy, and the leagues will happily turn a blind eye to cheating and push their athletes beyond what is humanly possible, for dollars. As for Armstrong, as inspiringly courageous as he was about his cancer, as an athlete - assuming the findings are true - he's still just another self-absorbed jock who didn't believe the rules applied to him. For my part, from atheletes, to CEOs, to psychopathic criminals, I'm fed up to my limit with asses who don't think the rules apply to them.
- IowaBeauty
October 17, 2012 at 8:42am
'Cancer Jesus' (as he's now being referred to in some riding circles) will always have his acolytes who can't see past the cancer survival as Lance's 'cover story' to dope and cheat. Lance's single-minded pursuit of becoming a professional athlete allowed him to justify everything he did to maintain his dominance. From his pressuring teammates into doping, to forcing those who didn't tow the team line to not have their contracts renewed, to his vindictive nature against those who weren't deemed "loyal" enough, to having riders or managers on other teams threatened does not justify the ten years that Lance played his games. As a long time cycling fan, enthusiast and dedicated rider myself, I've never had delusions that the super-era of doping starting with the Festina affair in 1998 through Lance's first retirement in 2007 was anything but clean. Reading the history of cycling and the Omertà that always existed within the peloton, doping has existing in cycling for a long time at some level. That nearly every rival and former teammate during that period was caught doping or later confessed to doping is long enough for anyone to realize that Lance was never clean and pure during that period. I can understand why director sportifs, doctors, soigneurs and the riders themselves did what they did because of the prize money to be made, product sponsorships, book deals, speaking fees, etc. can seduce a culture of loading the riders to perform at their maximum physical potential of riding 120km at race pace for three weeks straight. During that period where Lance and his teams dominated, the performances on the bikes were indeed super human. The race speeds of the TdF were the fastest times ever clocked. And while watching these feats, the undercurrent of doping was always there. Anyone who rides a bike on their own or with a team (even in non-prize rides) knows the level of pleasure from suffering that can found on the bike. There is a certain magic to riding a bike that you don't get playing football or baseball or soccer or basketball. Middle and long distance running come the closest. Look through the biographies of nearly every great rider and even those who are still plying their trades as domestiques and you see riders that have ridden themselves out of painful childhoods and upbringings to find their dream of riding for a team making $20K a year. Just reaching that level of riding takes talent. There are many cyclists that never doped during that time frame, denied of an equal shot at wins or stage races - the difference between making $20K a year and $150K a year in bonuses and sponsorships. I don't hate the cyclists that doped and later came clean. I can understand their poor decisions to go after the gold ring, what I can't stand is that Lance still refuses to come clean with a mea culpa. The non-riding cancer survivors look to his survival story as inspiration to keep fighting and that he got back on the bike to ride professionally is astounding but to then deny he cheated and doped for the next 10 years is just that denial. His professional cheating and ill-gotten gains do not diminish his surviving cancer but it does put the world's biggest asterisk next to his palmares. IF anything, many cycling fans are following the blow-out of the USADA report and are waiting to see what the UCI will do (if anything) about addressing the issues of doping. Perhaps the response is to allow certain therapeutic drugs to be used under tight controls for recovery purposes. Instead, us cycling fans would like to see these riders perform on their own merits without resorting to doping. Sky and Garmin/Slipstream are two teams that have publicly committed to riding clean. Perhaps we'll see more join them.
- singlspeed
October 17, 2012 at 10:44am
So cheating and then lying about it is okay? I don't think so. I'm sick of hearing about this "hero."
- heppner52
October 17, 2012 at 11:30am