POLITICS MAY 30, 2011
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The moment when it started to seem obvious that something might be up with Lance Armstrong—that the sudden dominance of Americans in a sport they had previously ignored might be built on shaky foundations—had nothing directly to do with Armstrong himself. It was the end of the talent-light 2006 Tour de France, robbed of its stars both by Armstrong’s retirement and Operation Puerto, the officious anti-doping investigation that ended with bans for many of cycling’s strongest contenders. A previously obscure American named Floyd Landis, the prodigal son of Pennsylvania Mennonites who had spent years as a support rider for Armstrong, had taken a thin lead through the race’s early stages, but his advantage collapsed dramatically on the mountainous approach to the Alpine village of La Toussuire, when Landis could no longer handle the pace and simply cracked. “Landis,” one live-blog proclaimed, “is just dead.” He finished twenty-third in the stage, and his hopes for victory seemed over.
The next day’s race was the most astonishing sporting event I’ve ever seen; Landis literally seemed to defy the physics of cycling. Because so much resistance is absorbed by the leading rider in a pack, even the greatest individual rider cannot outpace an engaged Peloton over long distances, and the sport’s strategy depends upon finding the moments (the end of a long mountain climb, usually) when the marginal advantage a great single rider enjoys can be leveraged. But on a long mountain stage, a day after his race seemed over, Landis broke away from the pack, a full hundred and twenty kilometers from the finish line, and simply kept on going for a whole afternoon, riding away from all the best cyclists in the world, a little boy escaping. Landis, a solid professional but never in a decade-long career considered a star, won the stage by nearly six minutes. The Guardian compared him to the sport’s greatest champions—the Belgian Eddy Merckx, the Frenchman Bernard Hinault—and wrote that Landis’s coup “stood comparison with anything his illustrious predecessors achieved.” L’Equipe, somewhat more cynically, published a cartoon of Landis as a mouse, wearing the leader’s yellow.
If the French were predisposed towards a certain skepticism, it was because they had spent the better part of a decade watching Armstrong do basically the same thing: finding new reserves of energy when he should have been tanked, seeming to obey his own special physics. The Texan’s iconic triumph came in 2001, near the summit of the Alpe d’Huez, when he and the second-greatest rider in the world, Jan Ullrich, had more or less shed the rest of the field. Armstrong glared into Ullrich’s eyes and simply pedaled away. One superhuman Yank a dyspeptic Gaul might accept—if grudgingly, if skeptically—but two? There were not many possible explanations. Perhaps the American riders—who somewhat obnoxiously touted their superior training regimens, their single-minded focus on the Tour, and the elaborate, expensive wind-tunnel technologies they used to improve their bikes and gear and to shave seconds off their times—had, in their relentless quest to win, simply mastered the science of the sport in a way the Europeans never had. Or perhaps they had cheated.
The allegation noose, years in the weaving, began constricting pretty tightly around Armstrong’s neck last week, and it is his former teammates, his ex-friends, who are doing the tightening. Landis was disgraced, stripped of his title, and eventually accused the Texan of doping, too. Armstrong’s longtime teammate, Tyler Hamilton, appeared on “60 Minutes” last Sunday and said Armstrong had taken performance enhancing drugs. Yet a third American teammate, George Hincapie—perhaps the only one of this cadre beloved by the European cycling press—reportedly told a grand jury of still more doping transgressions, these committed by he and Armstrong together. And yet—because this is Armstrong, and because of the special symbolism he has acquired—the drama has provided a fascinating window into the decade-long battle between Americans and Europeans over the idea of American exceptionalism, and it has revealed each of these two cultures on opposite coasts of the Atlantic at their worst, their most reptilian.
For half a decade—the one at the beginning of the 2000s when the rest of the world was trying to decide whether American exceptionalism was an unsustainable bubble of hype or an unprecedented achievement in social engineering—no athlete loomed larger in the European imagination than did Armstrong: relentlessly driven, disdainful of cycling’s traditional pieties, emphatic about the superiority of his own training methods and innovations. Americans had few misgivings about Armstrong. In 2004, when an Air Force officer wrote a monograph outlining the “Best Practices for Inspiring Pro-American Sentiment,” she made the example of Armstrong chapter one. There were hints he might run for governor, and The Washington Monthly even pushed him as a potential presidential candidate. Still, the cyclist inspired a degree of continental loathing at the time reserved for one American in particular: One academic even wrote a paper examining the parallel, titled “Lance Armstrong and George W. Bush: French anti-Americanism and Texan Traditionalism in Le Tour and War.”
By 2006, these attitudes were hardening. Armstrong had sued London’s Sunday Times over doping allegations that the paper reprinted (some from former teammates, some from his masseuse); publicly challenged a L’Equipe story headlined “The Armstrong Lie”; and gotten into an angry confrontation with a journalist during the Tour. (The French can say “angry confrontation with a journalist” in the same outraged tone they usually reserve for “defiled the Mona Lisa”—there is a broad national sense of the sacred.) But the episode seemed to give life to each culture’s half-correct idea of the other: The Americans correctly spotted a European officiousness, a obsession with obeying obscure rules that have become somewhat estranged from their original morality, and the Europeans correctly noted an American fondness for their own exceptionalism, a conviction that the normal rules do not always apply.
Perhaps as a result, there has been a special relentlessness to the degree to which Armstrong has been pursued: When he briefly returned to cycling in 2008 and 2009, he submitted to 24 unannounced tests by the authorities, all of which he passed. The fervor of the quest can seem a little unhinged, particularly given how many of Armstrong’s competitors have actually tested positive for banned drugs. Alberto Contador, who has won three of the last four Tours, had excess levels of clenbuterol in his blood during the 2010 race; Oscar Pereiro, who became the 2006 champion after Landis was disqualified, tested positive for heightened levels of salbutamol; the great German champion (and 1997 Tour winner) Jan Ullrich was banned from the Tour after being linked to a doping conspiracy, as was the Italian hero Ivan Basso; and on and on. You could even make a case that, with the exception of the Spanish rider Carlos Sastre, there is less evidence that Armstrong has been doping than any other champion in the last decade. In the enthusiasm with which the Armstrong case was pursued, you could see echoes of another, deeper crusade: the conviction that, like the claims of American exceptionalism then echoing forth from Washington, Armstrong’s prowess was built on an unsustainable bubble, too.
Cycling has a morally bulimic approach to performance enhancing drugs—permitting binges, and then following close behind with purges—and there is little question that doping is endemic in cycling, and in sports. The question is whether that means we should deny ourselves heroes.
The American response to this has been clear—a more or less outright refusal. It has taken nearly a dozen separate allegations that Armstrong altered his body chemistry illegally to make a real dent in his reputation. You could argue that this radical postponement of judgment is only fair, given that the field seems to have been doing the same thing. But there is also the suspicion, trailing at the edges of this case, that we have been indulging the national characteristic, both beautiful and sick, that has marked the whole past decade: a willingness to believe resolutely in stories that are quite obviously too good to be true.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and Rolling Stone, and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.
Follow @tnr on Twitter.
8 comments
I find it hard to imagine how Armstrong could NOT have doped. His thought process would have been A) All potential contenders for Tour victory take Epo B) Cheating is when a competitor seeks unfair advantage C) There can be no unfair advantage from Epo if all competitors take it D) Taking Epo is not cheating. He would also have acknowledged to himself that there was no point in taking Epo unless he was going to lie about it.
- AaronW
May 30, 2011 at 8:02am
Nice round-up. Hincapie's statement is the icing on the cake, since he's never been sanctioned and had no face to save in ratting himself and Armstrong out (unlike the case with both Tyler's and Landis' "he did it too!"). The real question is, why have so many dope-taking riders (like Hincapie) gone months or years without being caught despite ridiculous amounts of testing? It must be because the team management and doctors have implemented fairly sophisticated anti-detection programs. If that's the case, it suggests that anti-detection programs are as engineered into the sport as those ultra-light bicycles, and that pro cycling is infected with Mafia-like levels of corruption. Unfortunately, I can't think of any credible way to salvage this situation. The good guys here (the ones who don't cheat) will finish list, if they even make the race at all. Allowing doping, besides publicly accepting the damage to riders' health, risks turning the sport into a low-brow freak show, kind of like WWF wrestling, and losing the support of major corporate sponsors. (P.S. sorry to be pedantic, but "committed by he and Armstrong" should be "committed by him and Armstrong")
- MICRM
May 30, 2011 at 11:32am
Not mentioned is Armstrong's extraordinary lung capacity, the medical explanation for his performance; give the same performance enhancing drug to all cyclists and Armstrong will still win. I suppose one could make the same case with respect to Barry Bonds; whatever advantage he obtained with the drugs, he still had to have the right technique to swing the bat and hit the ball over the fence, which anybody familiar with baseball knows is no easy feat and requires much more than strength. I am not condoning cheating by anybody, but let's not forget that drugs alone will not convert Walter Mitty into Armstrong or Bonds.
- rayward
May 30, 2011 at 12:05pm
@rayward, it's true. Most of us couldn't beat a clean Lance Armstrong even if I we spent months training, got the best EPO money can buy, and attached lead weights to his bike. But that's not really an issue here, is it? In elite competition, riding doped against a clean opponent certainly makes a difference between at least first and second place. (Ask Jan Ulrich - multiple second-placer and confirmed doper - if coming in second is as good as winning.) And Floyd's 2006 ride suggests even more of an impact - in the TDF field, a good day's "jolt" can probably make the difference between first place and a double-digit finish. Doping also introduces another random element - the degree to which a rider's particular body responds to the drug. All drugs have different effects on different people, as a result of different genetics/ physiology. For many ordinary drugs, the differences are quite dramatic, and there's no reason you wouldn't expect the same for performance-enhancing drugs. Take two cyclist of equal "clean" ability who dope on EPO before a race. One of them might have a significant advantage against the other simply because his body metabolizes the substance differently thereby giving him a greater performance boost. If there's a slight difference in the two athletes' natural conditioning, it's even possible the result would have been different if they both rode clean.
- MICRM
May 30, 2011 at 1:51pm
What is the point of winning a sporting competition such as bicycling? Is it to prove "I am a better competitor than the others?" Is it to win the prizes, financial, glory, babes (male or female to taste)? The only possible measure against cheating is to allow non-punitive classifications of all enhancements. Best competitor without drugs. Best competitor on steroids. Best competitor on doped blood, etc. It's sort of like a sexual Olympics where one would list best competitor without enhancement, best competitor on Viagra, etc. Sometimes a prize is just a prize.
- skahn
May 30, 2011 at 6:46pm
I don't know about Armstrong's lung capacity, but in most cases the performance-limiting factor for endurance athletes is circulatory capacity which is the product of cardiac ouput--i.e. the volume of blood pumped per unit time--and the blood's oxygen carrying capacity which is, in turn, a function of red cell mass. Through training athletes can increase their cardiac output--a marathoner's or a cyclist's resting heart rate is low because the stroke volume, the volume of blood pumped per cardiac cycle, is high, however the only legimate way to increase red cell mass is to exercise at altitude or simulated altitude, and that will only get it up so high. Erythropoetin--Epo--will quite dramatically increase red cell mass, and contra MICRM, because the dose can be titrated to effect on the bases of very simple blood tests--spinning a hematocrit is easy--any cyclist who uses Epo can be fairly confident that he'll get the effect he's looking for. The tragiccomic thing about Landis's doping is that it's quite possible that he derived no performance-enhancing effect from the testosterone that he used. What he did was slap a number of recombinant testosterone patches onto his scrotum in hopes that it would speed recovery from his hell stage. The testosterone he used is chemically identical to normal human testosterone. Athletes have a belief that such a testosterone bolus helps with recovery but the scientific evidence that it does any such thing is lacking, and if you look at how testosterone works, which is by modification of gene expression at the level of the cell nucleus, it's a little hard to imagine how it could possibly exert any effect in the ten or twelve hour window Landis needed for it to kick in. It may well have been an ultimately very costly placebo.
- AaronW
May 30, 2011 at 11:46pm
"The American response to this has been clear—a more or less outright refusal" From the cycling sites I frequent and the racing friends of mine, you could split American cycling into two camps. Those who "fawned" over everything Lance and those that cheered for the rest of the American cycling scene. Anyone who thinks for a minute Lance wasn't doping this entire time is in denial. Reading the usual pablum about "his physical freakishness made him better" and how "cancer transformed him from a chunky middle-of-the-pack, DNFer (Did not finish) of the Tour, to a slim, trim, pedaling machine" seemingly overnight one can't but be suspect of how he did it. The sad reality is, Lance was and has always been known to be a blow-hard and a narcissist par excellence. Look at the entire history of the Postal Team during Lance's reign almost every cyclist that left to go on to another team ultimately were found to have doped. Lance brought a lot of money and attention to the sport via his "life story" as a cancer survivor. Something that is genuine and inspiring and yet using that to effect a comprehensive doping campaign on the teams he led and ruled with an iron fist of loyalty. Any coincidence that his former teammates and then rivals get busted for doping while he seemingly rides "clean"? Coincidence that Lance makes large financial donations to the doping agencies in charge of testing and subsequently never is found to be doping. That being said...watch the classics and the major tours and getting the opportunity to see the drama that can unfold makes cycling so interesting. Understanding the tactics and it's chess played on two wheels. The idea that cycling has ever been a truly clean sport is wishful thinking. Stimulants, pain killers and now PEDs have a storied place in cycling. It's the underbelly of the sport. Try riding 25+mph over rolling terrain for 100+ miles a day for three weeks and you understand the stress on the body let alone the capacity to recover enough to keep going. I've seen some amazing moments in cycling and wonder if the same events would happen if half of the top riders weren't doping. Would Lance have given Jan that same look on Alpe d'Huez? Would Floyd have survived his solo-attack to go on and win the tour? Would Marco Pantani still be alive? Would Bjarne Riis (aka Mr. 60%) have been successful as a Tour rider and eventual DS for the CSC team? What about the rumors of Miguel Indurain? Or the positive test by the great Eddy Merckx? These guys would have still been greats but only just slightly less. Will cycling ever be truly clean? Probably not, but compared to all other professional sports - MLB, NFL, Soccer, Hockey, even Horse Racing. Cycling is far cleaner. Another aspect of the divide between the culture of bicycle racing in America and Europe stems from how the two developed independently from the 30s on. In Europe, cycling (much like soccer) was and still is seen as a sport that a kid from a poor or working family could escape and make a name for themselves in sport. Whereas in America, those entering the sport of bike racing, it developed as a decidedly middle/upper class pursuit of the sport. Still...I love watching the sport, just as I love watching soccer. The drama, the grace, the athleticism are what I enjoy. Less so the hero worship.
- singlspeed
May 31, 2011 at 12:39pm
One thing that struck me - watching the Tour de France - the sheer beauty of the countryside. It's breathtaking. I saw part of a race in Aspen. The riders were coming down the road from Independence Pass - unpaved, way above timberline. They must have been doing 60 when they hit town. They just flew past, a brilliantly colorful blur. Anybody who can do this at all has my respect. But the doping really hurts the sport imo, not least because it casts aspersions on the truly great and makes people cynical about something difficult and beautiful.
- Sophia
May 31, 2011 at 12:50pm