> I do think that history has treated Mr. Armstrong unfairly for the essential act of his cheating.
> To be sure, Mr. Armstrong brought much of his disparate treatment on himself.
Perhaps history, but I think modernity has been far too kind to Mr. Armstrong. I'm floored that Lance Armstrong is still given a degree of celebrity and room as a public figure, and still more that he can make money off of that. That his celebrity and accolades were obtained fraudulently and all the while he openly and literally tried to destroy the lives and reputations of those who said as much stand in stark contrast to the space he is given today.
Lance may have trashed his reputation; but, Hamilton didn't detail Armstrong's doping until after he was serving his second, eight year suspension. (And Armstrong had nothing to do with Hamilton's claim that he was a tetragametic chimera, with two distinct DNA profiles.)
> That his celebrity and accolades were obtained fraudulently
Important to remember that when they took Armstrong’s trophies away, the next person who hadn’t yet been caught doping finished 10th. During that era of cycling, 87% of top 10 finishers tested positive for doping at least once.
That doesn’t excuse his doping, of course. It just means that at the time doping was a baseline requirement for competing at the top levels of cycling.
>at the time doping was a baseline requirement for competing at the top levels of cycling
To a great extent, that was the direct fault of Lance Armstrong. He was the chief enforcer of the code of silence around doping. 1998 could have been a turning point for cycling after the Festina affair, but Armstrong scuppered any chance of that; where others saw the shame of a sport in turmoil, Armstrong saw opportunity.
Armstrong's comeback after cancer was a story that sponsors loved, he was the first American to be a serious yellow jersey prospect for nearly a decade, so he brought an unprecedented amount of money into the sport. Armstrong effectively became too big to fail, ruthlessly dominating the sport around him. When riders spoke out, he had the power to make them outcasts. When journalists tried to reveal the truth, he had the resources to silence them in court.
The bitterness that many in the cycling community feel towards Armstrong isn't really about the doping or the stolen yellow jerseys - it's about all the lives that he ruined in the process.
> baseline requirement for competing at the top levels of cycling.
I agree, and for cheating in a sport Mr. Armstrong should be stripped of those awards given for such feats and no other judgement outside of that need be applied. However, Mr. Armstrong did not simply cheat; he actively and openly sought to destroy the lives and reputations of those who said otherwise. THAT was not a baseline requirement for competing at the top levels. For those actions outside of cycling he should be stripped of the celebrity and accolades he was given outside of cycling as well.
There have been other great American cyclists that haven't been caught with doping. Like Greg LeMond: fantastic tour winner, a major critic of doping in cycling, and one of the first to express doubts about the legitimacy of Armstrong's victory.
That is the great American cyclist people should be admiring.
I don't think it has much to do with being American. Cycling worships the greats no matter where they are from (take Pantani for example). It's an extremely tough sport with people who historically came from tough backgrounds. When a cyclist gets badly injured and you see them cycling on - it's because they have no other choice. They will lose their livelihood if they don't. None of this excuses drugs but it might explain why people identify with and often admire them no matter what country they come from.
as the article touches on here, there's two things that Lance Armstrong deserves criticism for: one is being a cheater.
the other is being a raging asshole who was outspoken against doping, published multiple books professing how clean he was and how all the doping rumours were just people out to get him, claimed the whole country of france was dishonest, accused his competitors of doping, accused other cyclists who he didn't even race against of doping... all while he was not only pumping himself full of drugs to win races, but also running his team's doping program and pushing his teammates to risk their own health by taking performance enhancing drugs.
the second part of this is what he doesn't deserve any forgiveness for.
The book "The Secret Race" by Lance Armstrong's teammate Tyler Hamilton gives a good perspective on what was happening at the time. At one point Hamilton was standing on an Italian street trying to hide the blood dripping down his arm from a botched transfusion, which was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.
Armstrong's big crime wasn't doping. Everyone at the top was doing it. His crime was going after his team mate Hamilton and the journalists who exposed his cheating for libel. To go to court and call the truth a lie, and a lie the true is a crime. Armstrong is a narcissistic liar. I wish the Sunday Times had done him for millions.
For those interested in the Armstrong saga it's worth listening to his interview in the Peter Attia Drive podcast. For personal reasons that I won't go into here I still feel betrayed by his cheating and vindictive lying, but hearing about what has been doing since partially redeemed him in my eyes.
Having just listened to it seemingly being proud[1] and coming across as completely unrepentant. The podcast only reenforced my view that Armstrong should not be given any form of celebrity or space on any platform. He needs to just go away.
1. "More than anything I'm just really proud...proud I didn't quit...with no support or anything."
In this context he was (1) asked about what he thinks his legacy will be and has mentioned that it would have been different if you asked in 2013, and (2) is talking about being proud of his achievements/choices after his professional cycling career ended, during a period when he was sort of universally reviled by many people. So I can sort of understand why he says "no support." And "quit" in this context might mean "suicide," for what it's worth.
It sounds like he mostly just rides mountain bikes around his hometown somewhere in Colorado and occasionally does a chat with cancer patients who are interested in that.
1) Armstrong was (is) an asshole who destroyed careers and lives, which is part of why they threw the book at him as opposed to others
2) That said, 7 in a row is still incredible. While he had a few incidents, he was always able to recover and never had an injury or illness that knocked him out. If Roglic could say the same, he'd probably have won at least 2 Tours if not three
3) Of course they're still all doping. WvA winning on Ventoux... Pogacar winning Tours de France and Flanders? Pas normal
4) Speaking of all still doping, the ongoing involvement of former dopers really goes against a stated desire for clean racing. Inigo san Milan making bones with his "zone 2" bullshit...dude was team doctor for Saunier Duval. University of Colorado should be embarrassed
5) all that said...who cares? The NFL barely tests because who wants to watch 1950's football? Same with cycling. I'd rather see van der Poel do inhuman things. Cadel Evans era was boring
Regarding #5, the main reason why these substances are banned is that they have long-term health consequences beyond what normal performance in the sport might do to the athletes. It's not just a matter of "ok maybe we just have separate clean and doped leagues so we can have literal supermen running around the sportsball field".
That being said, the NFL already chews through athletes anyway so maybe they've already silently decided "football[0] is just inherently doped now".
> I'd rather see van der Poel do inhuman things. Cadel Evans era was boring
How does doping make cycling a more interesting sport? I'm a mediocre fan, but Armstrong winning every year was boring. I would think that most fans like to see battles on climbs, attacks, etc... Doping makes you fastre, but whether it takes 45 or 42 minutes to do a certain climbs doesn't matter.
I think the answer there doesn't have much to do with doping, but rather super-teams. Especially teams focused on a single event like US Postal was. Reduce the size of each team to 7 or 5 and chaos would ensue (for good or bad). Do you want F1 or NASCAR?
In my view the problem with doping is not that pros take it. The problem is that when pros take PED and do basically impossible stuff this trickles down into amateur and youth sport. So you end up with teenagers and amateurs taking everything they can get without any doctors supervising how much they take. So you have teen athletes ruining their health while trying to make it to the top because it’s the only way to perform at the levels necessary.
That's the outcome of making doping illegal and not really related to the pros doing it. When you ban doping you make it safe (for some definition of it) only for those who can afford professional supervision, which is super expensive because the doctors doing it are braking the law, too.
I do care, I'd never put my time (my worth from marketing perspective) into watching these money-infested events, it doesn't matter if its cycling, football, hockey etc. Constant money chasing deformed these sport events into something I can't respect and won't expose my kids to due to all the toxicity, with the usual hard talk prior it about the reasons.
Also, if somebody is giving their 99.9% to the effort it doesn't matter what the objective results are, the effort should be respected regardless. This kind of competitiveness goes directly against all good that sports can and should bring into healthy society.
Luckily there are plenty of sports where money is scarce and folks do it mostly for the love of sport itself.
You don't want people competing on doping. Doping freely would ultimately lead to bodily destruction being a minimum requirement to compete at a high level. A PED competition is something that is more appropriate for laboratories and test subjects (hopefully non-human.) Is cycling supposed to be a sport or a carnival act?
Unpopular opinion but I really think that all competitions should be untested like WSM. As it currently stands, the competition in most sports is about who has the resources to best hide their PED use.
Cycling had a long and dreadful history of doping-related deaths.
The rampant doping in other sports reflects an unwillingness to learn the lessons that cycling learned the hard way. Armstrong never failed a drugs test, because the tests were a joke. The biological passport isn't a magic bullet, but - when seriously enforced - it places hard limits on what dopers can get away with, no matter how devious they are.
Most sports are in denial, because they don't want to endure the painful process of actually rooting out the drug cheats. They have weak, ineffectual anti-doping programmes that are trivial to circumvent, then imagine themselves to be clean because of the low rate of positive tests.
Not only tested but samples archived to test later as drugs and assays become known to the testers.
The amount of money our governments waste on stadiums and financial incentives for sportsball teams is already ridiculous, it should at least not be completely fraudulent.
If professional, or, for that matter supposedly amateur sports were not so subsidized and blown out of proportion, as well as having regulatory and antitrust exemptions, it is likely there would be a lot less money in it and therefore less incentive to trade one's health for fleeting money and fame.
There is another article on the front page today about how the right amount of fraud is not zero. Align the incentives and doping will decline, and enforcement becomes less critical.
People enjoy watching exciting sports. They are willing to pay a lot for that entertainment, and also tend to patronize the sponsors. This incentive will last as long as capitalism.
> The amount of money our governments waste on stadiums and financial incentives for sportsball teams is already ridiculous, it should at least not be completely fraudulent.
What makes you think that "Bread and Games" is no longer relevant today? It was an effective way to keep the masses under control 2000 years ago, and it's possibly still very cost-effective today.
It's about safety, really - most performance-enhancing drugs are detrimental to the body of the enhanced.
If someone eats lots of potatoes and that gives them the energy to perform well at soccer, their performance was certainly "enhanced" by a "substance", but nobody would care.
They can be dangerous, properly administered they tend not to be. In the early part of the epo era, a number of lesser pros and amateurs killed themselves by thickening their blood with epo. Most of the serious dopers are still incredible specimens without much in the way of negative physical effects, they all had doctors monitoring them though.
The psychological aspects have possibly been more dangerous than the chemicals,
They slept with their heart monitors on. And they set an alarm to sound if their heart rates dropped below a certain level. On hearing the alarm, you then got up out of bed, got onto your bike [...] and pedalled for ten minutes to re-start your circulation.
Yes, but society generally doesn't like liars and certainly doesn't seem appropriate for them to live in luxury. And what is doping if not lying about your actual skills, efforts put into training and your mostly genetical limits
It used to be this way. Cycling was doped, everyone knew that and everyone was open about it. There’s an amusing story from those days where two top contenders in a multi stage race agree to skip the drugs for one day. They arrive at the finish line much later and much more exhausted than usual and publicly announce they will never do something like that ever again.
The ban on doping dates from 1967, I believe, when British cyclist Tommy Simpson dropped dead from his bike during the Tour de France from having taken too many drugs (in combination with alcohol, too - truly these were different times).
It's easy to say, why don't we have an olympics where people can do whatever they want. Take any drug that they want.
The problem is, are we ok with people burning out their bodies in their 20s? And ending up dead or with horrific side effects that torture them for the rest of their lives?
And how much agency do some of these people have in their late teens early 20s when they start doing these drugs? Are we just allowing their parents and governments to put crazy things in their bodies, effectively ruining their futures, so that they can win?
The drugs used in cycling are extremely dangerous. Dozens of cyclists have died from doping, and those are just the ones we know about. Look up a documentary about Marco Pantani if you want to see the horrific effects of doping. He wrecked his body to the point where he couldn't sleep for long periods without risking a heart attack. He had to cycle at night on a stationary bike to stay alive. Sadly he passed away at only 34.
If we adopt this system where we just let people dope as they wish, we're signing their death warrant. No better than watching gladiators fight to the death.
I agree with you. There would be some positives, too. We would get proper scientific studies on how steroids and all the other performance drugs work, their benefits, risks etc. I'm sure it would push medicine forward, long term. Banning doesn't work, people do doping anyway, but it's all underground
It also makes cycling a competition of who has the best genes and training plan. Which is kinda gross honestly. Open up the drugs and then there are whole other aspects to the competition than being born with good blood (literally).
Better that than a competition of who is most willing to destroy their health. Open doping would become extreme quickly.
edit: and it seems pointless to "solve" the problem of different genetics, because genetics would also influence how you reacted to PEDs. It's just adding a thing.
> Open up the drugs and then there are whole other aspects to the competition than being born with good blood (literally).
Cycling is about endurance and power output. If you remove 'genes and training plan' you are left with dice roll. If anything I would remove team radios [0].
Damn. I guess there’s no point in trying it because that guy wrote a fiction novel portraying it as bad.
OTOH bodybuilding (the part people care about) and some strength sports allow PEDs. Some people do die young from steroid abuse, but not a lot of top dogs.
Body building is an interesting example to choose here. The top dogs often do die young. It seems like it's just kind of accepted as the cost of the sport.
If you are competitive with a naturally low hematocrit level you have more “headroom” for doping to unnaturally boost your performance, and vice-versa.
Lance had a naturally low hematocrit for a road cyclist, which made him respond disproportionately strongly to EPO. He’d have been mediocre off the sauce in a clean field. The end.
Here some easier, older chart discussing the issues as understood at the time, though you have to check which riders got busted (all of them except Lemond and Indurain, and Lemond at least won the TdF pre-EPO, Indurain being faster than doped Armstrong is pretty suspicious and there was no testing for EPO at that point IIRC), on the other hand there's also the point that the climb may have come at a different point in the race.
Note that Riis's results were before the 50% hematocrit limit (he was nicknamed "Mr 60%'). Hematocrit is a measure of the hemoglobin content, or oxygen carrying capacity, of the blood. So, even though later cyclists were also blood doping or using EPO, they have been limited to a 50% hematocrit, and that may explain why Riis's power output has not been matched.
Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts. I recently bought an old high-end Look racing bike after taking up cycling for fitness, and I went down the Look, La Vie Claire, Bernard Tapie, Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong rabbit hole. Doping is just the surface of what must have been a money laundering cocaine fueled sex crazed decades long party.
>Cycling is such a strange sport. It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts.
There's a really interesting cultural divide in that respect. In the heartlands of road cycling it was long viewed as a sport like boxing, a way for tough kids from bad neighbourhoods to make something of themselves. Like boxing, many of the sponsors and promoters were from the same sort of background - businessmen with opaque arrangements and friends in low places. The revenues brought in by the new global audience of middle-class, middle-aged men in lycra has professionalised and legitimised the sport to a significant extent, but there's still a strong undercurrent of the old days and the old ways.
Standing outside of that cultural context, the glamour is much more apparent than the grit. Roubaix looks quite scenic from a helicopter, but it's one of the poorest towns in France.
> It's like Formula 1 for rich fitness enthusiasts.
You can't buy the engine for professional cyclists. Even though they were doping, people like Armstong are still individuals with insanely high VO2max levels, beyond anything you could achieve through training alone (i.e. you need genetic good luck too).
So I am not sure where you see the similarities with F1 ...
You also need some inherent talent to be competitive in F1. Yes, you can buy yourself in, and you can be taught how to drive the car safely and fast, but that's not enough to win.
See lance stroll (not saying he has no talent, but the gap between someone in the top 10% and top 1% of aptitude is large)
VO2 Max isn't a particularly good predictor of road cycling race results. Athletes can only sustain their VO2 Max output for about 7 minutes (plus or minus). But stage winners tend to be either sprinters with high anaerobic power output, or climbers who can sustain a high aerobic power-to-weight ratio for much longer than 7 minutes. All pro cyclists have relatively high VO2 Max metrics but this is more incidental rather than something that they specifically train much.
What exactly is the purpose of sports, beyond mere spectacle? Is it right to commend someone merely because they possess the ideal genetics? These genetics might make them naturally responsive to training or, controversially, to performance-enhancing drugs. But does it really matter? It's noticeable that sports are often pursued disproportionately by those from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds. Yet, paradoxically, these individuals can end up being treated as mere entertainers or subjected to doping. Additionally, the prevalence of sexual abuse in certain sports is alarmingly high.
While I am a firm advocate for sports and physical activity at a personal level, my perspective shifts when it comes to high-level sports competitions. They often leave me feeling perplexed and disheartened, making me question whether I'm missing something that others see in them. More often than not, instead of inspiration or entertainment, I perceive underlying horror and abuse.
> It's noticeable that sports are often pursued disproportionately by those from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds
Are you sure about that? That goes completely against everything I've seen, and I come from an area known for high performance athletes. So much so that I used to eat lunch in highschool with someone who would go on to compete in the Olympics.
I associate sports, and especially their pursuit at a high level, with a high socio-economic background. Only the rich can afford the gym memberships, travel, gear(heh), time and energy to pursue sports. Every single Millennial I know who is serious about sports came from an upper-middle class or better background. 0 exceptions. I laugh hard about sports scholarships being really just a kickback for the rich. Every person who got one in my highschool class came from a family rich enough to put them through multiple camps a year, private trainers, fancy equipment. They were going to college either way.
Meanwhile, I like running and lifting weights and almost every older person in my blue collar network thinks it's stupid and I should work outside if I want to get exercise.
So I think there are many layers and levels to sport engagement, and also there are clear studies that wealthier societies pump more into sport.
Studies do show that more well off societies get more super athletes etc. However there is also other data: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2020/02/24/sur...
Yes their parents do need to be well off enough to support them, but these are people that still struggle and I certainly think there is a lot of data of poor people trying to get out of poverty via sport, and those will also be the most vulnerable to be pushed into destroying their bodies for it too.
TLDR I don’t think you will find many tech CEO sons doping to be the next Armstrong.
> I don’t think you will find many tech CEO sons doping to be the next Armstrong.
Counterpoint: Rich people still end up with Heroin addictions.
From what I've seen, doping is almost irresistible if you start down the path of high performance and have the cash to support it. People who are doping don't think they are destroying their body, they think they are unlocking their true potential. This is doubly true if you have enough money to hire a professional team to monitor/regulate your PEDs.
Fair but under that worldview which I admit is likely in athletes, one is more likely to have sound advice and a medical team trying to do their best for them, the other less so. I’d speculate a US medical team keen on a gold metal is less likely to have the same morals as a privately paid one.
However one caveat, at this point I am far outside what I can substantiate via direct experience or data.
I don’t buy his theory that Lance was clean early in his career because he only won one day races up to that point. Exogenous EPO was available for the first time by the time Indurain began his run on the Tour de France several years earlier- this was quite startling because he was huge weight wise by grand tour standards up to that time. Armstrong might just have not dialed in the doping just right in those early years, the system exposed in the USPS fraud trial was very extensive. For a similar surprising result for a relatively heavy one day specialist I remember one of Armstrong’s teammates Hincapie winning a stage with a mountaintop finish and thinking they’re really just shoving it in our faces now.
I don't think anyone should buy any story that any cyclist was clean anywhere near a professional circuit.
My uncle was president of a national road cycling federation. He had been involved with cycling teams, professional and amateur, since the 50s. He never raced himself, but many people wanted to be his friends: My grandmother owned a pharmacy, and he had access to get anything he wanted out of said pharmacy. So I'd hear the stories over dinner, or as we were following the peloton on stages that were nearby. He'd provide "pharmacological support" not just to racers alone, but team managers. He was more important in the 60s and 70s, when testing was really bad, and the substances racers would need were almost entirely things you'd get at the pharmacy counter. As doping became more professionalized, there was more use for specialized doctors, and things you couldn't just get straight from the pharmacy supplies, but contact higher up in the drug supply chain would still be helpful getting more exotic things.
Eventually he got caught: He was in the news as the police detained him and a few lower-tier racers. But since this wasn't, say, Movistar or Visma-Lease getting caught, it wasn't in every news feed, but it's someone that had been helping doping for decades.
It might be too much to say that everyone riding the Vuelta or the Tour for the last 50 years was definitely doping, but I'd expect that it's far more than 50-50. People don't keep up with top talent that is doing EPO and blood transfusions by just eating a lot of pasta for breakfast.
(I am the author of the article) You are correct that he wasn't clean early in his career. He admitted to first using a banned substance in 1993, which was the year he won the World Championship, and I recall the 2012 investigation had testimony of his using drugs on Motorola in 1994. I also don't think there's any convincing evidence he actually lost much weight in 98 when he had his first high GT finish at the Vuelta. There are probably many possible reasons for how he transformed into a grand tour contender in 1998 -- from "dialing it in" to completely changing the strategy, but I haven't seen any agreed upon theory.
And yet, all the major sports get a pass on doping.
There is still no real testing in US sports, nor any soccer/football league. They all have their programs, but they are all urine tests. Remember that cycling in the 90's couldn't catch people using a blood test and had to eventually rely on a series of blood tests and variances in levels. These urine tests (which are practically announced to the players) are laughable.
These leagues should be paying cycling for the cover it has given them over the years.
What an extremely wordy and repetitive article mostly to say the author doesn't believe anyone can prove that Lance would have won in a clean field. Obviously, it never happened, so no one can know what would have happened. No one can prove a counterfactual. But I don't think the rest of the words adds to the discourse any more than the single sentence:
> I do not think it follows from Mr. Armstrong having been stronger than other cheaters while he himself was cheating that he would have been the strongest clean cyclist if everyone was clean.
I find it odd that you pour scorn on an article that, in the end, agrees with you:
> Despite having seen many arguments that one can extrapolate clean dominance from doped dominance, I will make the case that when a critical mass of the dramatic personae are doping, it is impossible to say what would have happened in a world where everyone was clean.
> To be sure, Mr. Armstrong brought much of his disparate treatment on himself.
Perhaps history, but I think modernity has been far too kind to Mr. Armstrong. I'm floored that Lance Armstrong is still given a degree of celebrity and room as a public figure, and still more that he can make money off of that. That his celebrity and accolades were obtained fraudulently and all the while he openly and literally tried to destroy the lives and reputations of those who said as much stand in stark contrast to the space he is given today.