There is no excusing Armstrong’s behaviour. He shouldn’t have taken the drugs and he shouldn’t have compelled others to do the same. But the latest revelations do show how a beautiful sport had been corrupted and how anyone seeking to succeed could have been drawn into such behaviour.
But there are still reasons to admire this obviously deeply flawed man. Armstrong has done wonderful things – on and off the bike – and given me memories that I still savour.
On drugs or not, he was capable of magnificent and daring feats. On stage nine of the 2003 Tour de France, Armstrong swerved to avoid a fellow rider, Joseba Beloki, who had crashed badly on a descent. The American was forced to ride across a steep paddock, jump a drainage ditch and rejoin the race on the road below. It was dramatic, bold and impressive.
[blockquote] We know now that he had unfair assistance, but there was more to it than drug use. There was genuine courage, skill and determination. [/blockquote]
Lance Armstrong is no special “product of his times.” Unless by that the author means that we live in times where athletes are gods. But, as far as I can tell, those times have existed in many places in many eras.
Of course it took “genuine courage, skill, and determination” for him to win at the highest level. There is no drug that can replace that. But this guy writes like someone who has never competed at the highest level in anything. My sister was a champion Irish dancer. I race whippets (just like greyhound racing, but for glory, not money — in fact greyhound racing developed from whippet racing) and I currently have a nationally ranked dog. My kids are champion springboard divers. My niece is a nationally ranked gymmast. I know what it means to compete at the highest level.
In whippet racing, we have a saying (expressed occasionally on T-shirts) — “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t trying.” Now — it’s a joke. We don’t expect or want people to cheat. But it means “if you aren’t making a 250% effort, if you aren’t exploiting every possible advantage and loophole, you aren’t making enough of an effort to win against the top competitors.” And this is true in every sport, at the highest level. You just can’t win at that level if you don’t take that attitude. So taking a drug, or some other form of real cheating is really just a tiny little step farther than most people are already going. And I understand completely how you end up taking that step. But you cannot do it, force others to do it, lie endlessly about it, and expect to end up with people saying they respect you, despite your “deep flaws.” The one thing you forfeit when you cheat is respect. Unless, apparently, you’re Lance Armstrong.
It is an easy cheap shot to judge others’ past actions by our contemporary standards. Armstrong seems to be a current victim.
RE: “But you cannot do it, force others to do it, lie endlessly about it, and expect to end up with people saying they respect you, despite your “deep flaws.†The one thing you forfeit when you cheat is respect. Unless, apparently, you’re Lance Armstrong.”
I agree with most of Catholic Mom’s post — so I’m just picking out the bit that I didn’t agree with.
The area where I agree is that I do see how — in the environment in which Armstrong operated — that he cheated, and is now *never* going to admit that he did. I think he’s angry. I think he’s thinking “why should I suffer for what everybody was involved with and some did so poorly that they got caught, and others did well, but *still* didn’t work as hard or as well as I did and thus didn’t have the success.”
I read somewhere that something like 21 out of 22 podium winners over the past decade in the Tour were either associated with or caught for cheating with drugs.
So in his own mind I’m sure that he’s comfortable with his choice to “even the playing field” by cheating like everybody else did and doing it particularly well and with fabulous results.
I’d like to *think* that I wouldn’t have done that — that I would simply have withdrawn from the sport, since I couldn’t have succeeded without drugs.
The only situation I can think of when I did do something like that was when I realized that in order to succeed in a particular workplace I’d have to act like one of my peers, and I didn’t want to become like her. So I resigned, and noted precisely that in my letter of resignation, which I also copied to HR.
But in a world where you can make fabulous sums of money and be raised to adulation? I don’t know that I would have made that decision to quit.
The place where I disagree with #1 is that I do respect Armstrong — and I respect a lot of other drug cheaters too, so it’s not merely Armstrong whom I respect. I respect their hard work and their willingness to suffer to achieve excellence very much.
It’s not just Lance that I respect — I respect others too, largely for that quality — that drive for excellence and willingness to suffer.
I wish they wouldn’t cheat. I wish they hadn’t cheated. But of course, if they hadn’t, I’d never have known their names either, because they would have simply needed to retire from the sport.
I hope that cycling and baseball in particular clean up their sport, since I’d like to see everybody on a drug-free level playing field.
We’ll see.
Here’s the problem with cheating.
[blockquote] Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. [/blockquote]
Once you go down the cheating road, it ends up in a very very ugly place. Which is exactly the place Lance Armstrong ended up when he started pressuring people to cheat and terrorizing and suing them when they told the truth.
A whippet-racing example. In order to prevent the continuation of genetic defects in the gene pool, race organizations will not allow dogs with certain genetic defects to compete. And each dog has to be inspected for each defect before the start of each race. (In England they have “passports” in which the dog is only inspected once in its life.) One of the defects is unilateral cryptorchidism (commonly but incorrectly known as monorchidism) in which one testicle is not descended. This is rampant in whippets. The heartbreaking part is that you get a very promising dog from a race litter (like both parents are top national champions), and he has two testicles, and someone with tremendous hopes buys him and he hits 16 weeks and one testicle goes up through the inguinal ring and never comes down again and that’s the end of his career. Except that, if you act quickly, a veterinarian can bring down the testicle and “anchor” it so it doesn’t go up again. Now all vets know that there is no purpose to this procedure except to cheat (show dogs do this too — you can’t show a dog with one undescended testicle) but some will do it, just like some doctors will give drugs to athletes.
So I had a dog like this 20 years ago. And this was the ONLY dog I was going to be able to have for the next 10 years. And his testicle went up. And I got a vet to bring it down. And I trained him and actually raced him about three times. But I found myself *hoping* he would lose, because I couldn’t look somebody who I *knew* should have gotten the points in the eye when I beat them with a dog who shouldn’t even be competing. So I stopped. And I didn’t race for the next 13 years. Only it doesn’t always end so benignly.
The exact same kind of cheating has torn organizations and families apart and there are people today who are still not speaking to each other because of it. For example, 10 years ago, a well known racer showed up at a meet with a new dog. The race committee (which consists of members of the club putting on the race) inspected the dog and said that they felt that the dog had been surgically altered and they wouldn’t let the dog race. The woman who owned the dog protested the decision to the national race organization. There was a big investigation. She had friends (and enemies) in the club. The club was eventually fined and sanctioned and lost a lot of money and the actual race meet was disallowed, meaning the winners lost all credit for winning. Different members of the club took different sides. The club split. Two people who were founding members, and god-parents to each other’s children, ended up never speaking again. One moved out of the state. Both of them died prematurely of cancer a few years ago, still unreconciled.
In another incident, an entire race organization at the national level was split. Someone brought a dog from England that was beating national records by two seconds or more, which is simply an unheard of improvement. It was charged that this dog was of impure breeding and was actually sired by a famous greyhound. Since this is a registry issue, the American Whippet Club and the American Kennel Club and the Kennel Club of England were involved. The case dragged on so long that DNA methods became better and cheaper and the AKC demanded a DNA test. When the dog was supposed to show up for the test, the owner said that it had died the day before and the dog was never seen again. The AKC, in the absence of any firm evidence to the contrary, dropped the investigation. By this time, the dog had many many puppies. My own dog and virtually all top racing dogs in the U.S. now are descended from this dog. However, the people who were convinced that this man had cheated, broke off and formed their own organization in which any dog related to this dog was banned.
Almost everyone now believes that the guy WAS guilty, but everyone (me too) wants to win. And we want to win against the fastest dogs, or it doesn’t feel as good. Race dogs are seeded A, B, C, or D for purposes of grouping them in races, based on past performance. Generally, if you do not have an A dog, you are not going to win titles or national points. (My dog is an A dog.) But a lot of people still enjoy racing B, C, or even D dogs because they can get various lesser titles associated with that and still have fun. I’ve seen bumper stickers saying “Racing B with the best beats A with the rest.” (That is, it is more satisfying to be a B dog racing in an organization that has the fastest dogs, than to be an A dog in an organization of slow dogs.) I simply cannot tell you the level of animosity between these two groups of people. (The “fast dog” and the “slow dog” organizations.) I have a friend that claims that three people cornered her at a meet and terrorized her and she literallty needed psychotherapy to get over the post-traumatic stress she experienced.
And all of this is *whippet racing*!! With no money or TV appearances or pictures on a Wheaties box at all. What would people do to win the Olympics? Would they smash a competitor on the knee with a hammer like Tonya Harding’s husband?
Desire brings forth courage and effort and all manner of beautiful things that we admire when we watch great athletes, both human and animal. But it also brings forth sin. And sin brings forth anger and lying and death and every other kind of evil.
Lance Armonstrong screwed over a lot of people in a big way. He wouldn’t let “clean” people race on his team. (Yes, there were some.) He tried to destroy the careers of people who told the truth. He sued an organization that tried to get its $5 million bonus back, then made them pay an extra 2.5 million in legal fees and penalties when he won. These things are not accidental to cheating. They are the inevitable fruit of cheating. No, I do not admire Lance Armstrong. I understand him all right. But I don’t admire him.
RE: “No, I do not admire Lance Armstrong.”
Understood.
And a lot of other people respect Armstrong and a bunch of other people who did ped’s, and they do so because of other aspects of their character.
That’s why I only disagreed with the assertion that cheating with PEDs means one forfeits respect, and that Armstrong seems to get a special pass over others who have cheated with PEDs. He isn’t the only one who gets respect despite PED use. I don’t respect his use of PEDs, but I respect a lot about him.
Of course, I don’t respect Vick’s repulsive dogfighting either — but there’s a lot about Vick I do respect.
Cheating is the same as lying. In fact it is lying. I have no respect for Mr. Armstrong. “Did God really say…..”
I think I will reserve judgment about whether he lied, cheated, or anything else until the facts are all public and vetted. Some cyclists were given six months after the season was completed for their willingness to come forth when the usual ban is 2 years? That smells wrong. And I get that he could have cheated on the hundreds of tests (cheaters are always ahead of the testers), but how was his system unique? How could USPS/Discovery cheat and not get caught while everyone else got caught (even those who left, cheated, and got caught seem unable to answer that question)? Then, what needed to be prepared by USADA for WADA and UCI? Shouldn’t the case have been ready when USADA made its claim in the press and the clock started ticking on Armstrong’s decision to fight / not fight the charges? Something, and maybe it’s the sport, just doesn’t seem out in the open on all this . . .
#7, that’s what I want to know, and haven’t seen the answer to. Assuming the cheating charges are true, how did he pass all those drug tests? Does the testimony cover that? Especially since many other racers took the same types of tests and got caught. I’m not trying to justify Armstrong if these allegations are true. I just want to know how he did it, if he did.
[blockquote] And a lot of other people respect Armstrong and a bunch of other people who did ped’s, and they do so because of other aspects of their character. [/blockquote]
I would be curious to know what aspects that would be. The man is a serial adulterer. He has most recently had two children with a woman he refuses to marry because he’s afraid to commit “again” at this point in his life (not that he actually ever did before). People who have had interactions with him describe him as a bully. He is a cheater and a liar. He pressured others into endangering their lives with dangerous drugs. We’ll actually never even know precisely how good an athlete he was or could have been because he never won big until he started doping. I would be interested in an elaboration on the admirable aspects of his character.
RE: “I would be curious to know what aspects that would be. . . . I would be interested in an elaboration on the admirable aspects of his character.”
Well, if people traverse blogland they’ll see a number of things people respect in Armstrong. I’m sure people can find plenty of characteristics that others will list. I’ve already listed a few on my part, but I assume folks would want a more exhaustive list.
Mind you, such a list won’t make *Catholic Mom* respect character traits of Lance. But I was merely responding to assertions that 1) cheaters forfeit respect and that 2) Lance is unusually special and thus only he, as a cheater, gets respect.
As to whether Armstrong is particularly special in the respect that many give him, I’m fairly confident, for instance, that much of the mid to late 80s and early 90s of international track and field was riddled with steroid and hgh use, including Carl Lewis, some of whose compadres believe that he did as well. Nevertheless, he gets voted Sportsman of the Century and people still respect him. Likewise with baseball. A whole lot of people respect a whole lot of ped users from that tin age of ped use. And then, bunches of us respect the much older baseball players who were stoking up on amphetamines and various forms of testosterone. And then there were the early Olympic marathon runners of the 20th century who were injesting unholy concoctions into their bodies.
This gets us to a question of the nature of cheating and what forms people accept as “cheating” and what forms people don’t.
There are plenty of folks who believe that those in professional sports should be allowed to use peds and the strictures against them are only so much clucking and hand-waving, not to mention the discovery of said peds is extremely challenging, not to mention that we simply don’t know who’s “the best” when everybody’s not on a level playing field, all stoking up on peds.
Of course, were professional athletes to be allowed to use peds, the clucking that would ensue over who had the best “mixes” and the most advanced medical technology would *still* prevent us all from knowing “who’s the best athlete on a totally flat playing field.” So I’m not too sure that would end the debate.
But the point is, athletes have been attempting to gain the edge in competition since the first Olympics — and some of those edges have been chemical too.
Catholic Mom’s stories on the whippet racing world were fascinating, in part because of the interesting definitions of cheating, and as individuals in those groups disagree with the adjudications on cheating, they depart and found new groups.
I do wonder if someday we’ll have “no drug testing” groups associated with different sports. We’re seeing that with some of the groups in the US at least who are accepting athletes who have been banned from other organizations.
There is a huge problem with allowing athletes to take drugs, which I’m sure you know very well. Once you allow it, it is then necessary for everyone to do it. These are dangerous, life-threatening drugs. A medical group just said the other day that EPO is dangerous for ANYONE to take — including the people it was developed for, and should only be used in low doses with extreme caution under a doctor’s supervision and only when absolutely medically necessary. So they’re going to tell bike riders they can take EPO? Who then will be able NOT to take it?? If you look at the records they keep about the ascent rates going up the steepest climbs in the Tour de France, you will see that they jumped about 20% for ten years, then they started to fall back down to “normal.” Those years are exactly the top doping years. This is just too great an advantage to be overcome by a non-doper. They are saying now that NO rider will be awarded the Tour de France for the seven years that Armstrong won it because the next six finishers are all KNOWN dopers (the rest probably were too, they just don’t have the goods on them.) If one person dopes, everyone HAS to dope. It’s that simple.
What goes on in horse racing right now is a horror show, and that’s when the drugs are *illegal* with fairly strict enforcement. It is simply immoral to require a person to take a potentially lethal drug in order to compete in a sport, and that’s what you do as soon as you allow anyone to take the drug.
BTW, re: “what is cheating?” I should point out there are all manner of dog racing organizations in the world with all manner of different rules. WRA (Whippet Racing Association) has a height restriction, NOTRA (North American Oval Track Racing Association) does not. There are “non-ped” (pedigree) organizations in England that let you race anything you can drag onto the track that doesn’t have hooves. The point is, you AGREE TO ABIDE BY the rules of the organization you race under. You don’t *say* you’re abiding by them, and then cheat. Because cheating, by definition, means “I’m gaining an unfair advantage by doing what rule-abiding people are restrained from doing.”
So, the answer to my question (“How did he pass all those drug tests?”) appears to be only that they did what the doctors said exactly when they said and managed to skate through without ever getting caught. To my untutored ear this sounds like a remarkably ineffective drug-testing regimen. I thought the tests were random and fairly frequent. Not so, according to this. It would lead me to wonder, sheerly as speculation, whether the authorities knew something was up with these various substances and didn’t find results because the sport was flying high and everybody was making money.
RE: “Once you allow it, it is then necessary for everyone to do it. These are dangerous, life-threatening drugs.”
Agreed.
RE: “They are saying now that NO rider will be awarded the Tour de France for the seven years that Armstrong won it because the next six finishers are all KNOWN dopers (the rest probably were too, they just don’t have the goods on them.) If one person dopes, everyone HAS to dope.”
Yes, as I mentioned in my first comment, almost all of the *podium* placers in the Tour [not simply the winners] over the past decade were either caught or strongly suspected on PEDs.
And the only real option in and among such corruption and rampant drug use is to simply resign the sport if one is not going to use PEDs — as I said above: [blockquote]”So in his own mind I’m sure that he’s comfortable with his choice to “even the playing field†by cheating like everybody else did and doing it particularly well and with fabulous results. I’d like to *think* that I wouldn’t have done that—that I would simply have withdrawn from the sport, since I couldn’t have succeeded without drugs.”[/blockquote]
Of course, that was also true for track and field and, to a lesser extent, baseball. [People could still play on winning teams in baseball without themselves personally doping, even if their star teammates did.]
Re: the definition of cheating: I mentioned that that issue comes up for “what forms people accept as “cheating†and what forms people don’t.”
I suspect that a lot of the admirers of Armstrong simply recognize that — short of leaving the sport of cycling — people “leveled the playing field” by resigning themselves to using peds. I think a lot of people simply do not acknowledge that doping in cycling was cheating. Now *I* think it was — but I think a lot of people don’t believe that it was cheating.
It was so rampant that the only way you could be successful was to use — and “level the playing field.” The other option was to resign the sport.
It’s hard for me to know what choices I’d have made were I a gifted cyclist and in that environment. I’d like to think I would behave in one manner, but one never knows. Fortunately I’ll never have that particular temptation of being an incredibly gifted athlete in a very corrupt sport! ; > )
It’s also hard for me to know what I’d do if I had to *police* such a sport.
I think one thing I’d commit to is either “all-in” on drug elimination or “all-out.” And the fact is, cycling testing was, for a long time [and there’s still a lot of laxness now] half-hearted.
If you commit to “drug elimination” then you have to essentially act as a fascist state. You need to track the athlete, he needs to report in on his whereabouts, there have to be multiple out-of-competition random drug tests, you have to ban for life when there’s an infraction, and there can be no exceptions based on accidental cold remedies and all the other stuff that athletes have as reasons their blood levels were hinky one day. It has to be brutally draconian and the money spent on advancing tests to keep up with the advances in cheating has to be ginormous. Plus you have to recognize that due to the vagaries of the human body there are times when blood chemistry is “naturally hinky” — those guys will have to be banned for life too, even if God knows they are innocent of unnaturally doping, since all you can really go on are the results of given blood tests at given times.
IF all of that were done — and it would be a whole lot more than is presently done in most sports — then I’d commit to asserting that we would not do “back-testing.”
If an athlete is not caught — with all that the Sarah Regime of Drug Elimination is doing to catch athletes during their career — then all results would stand after the athlete retired.
Cycling was half-assed and lax — and now, due to various forms of pressure, they’re trying to “make up for lost time” by looking to the past.
But they’ll never get those years back and they’ll never be able to strip everybody of the medals and records they won while doping.
Just as they’ll never be able to go back and test Babe Ruth’s blood for greenies and testosterone while he was hitting his home runs and then retroactively strip him of his records.
They were lax and now their sport suffers as a result. I expect that’s one reason why there’s so much tension between and among the various testing and certification agencies — because if one “discovers” half-baked, uncommitted efforts, then the other agencies are tarnished for their complacency and lack of commitment to drug elimination.
RE: “To my untutored ear this sounds like a remarkably ineffective drug-testing regimen.”
Great comment, Katherine — yes, it was very lax and ineffective, and I’m not convinced that they’re doing enough now either.
But they are embarrassed.
Tennis is going to go through the same thing in the coming years. They’re just not fascist enough and draconian enough. It will come back to bite them too.
And yes, now that a lot of the “high-flying” is over for now, there’s some retroactive “cleaning up” that various chastened authorities are trying to do.
I’m not sure how lax they were. Maybe. But you had doctors being paid enormous sums of money to figure out how to use *naturally* occuring substances (such as growth hormone and testosterone) to enhance performance and get away with it. It was a rabbit/hound thing. The testers would develop better methods and the doctors would up the ante. Blood doping was great because they used your own blood.
I disagree that it’s either kindergarten or Nazi regime. The fact is, they’ve gotten most of the cheaters out of the sport now which you can tell just by looking at the times and records. And they can do this without unfairly banning people who once had some minor blood issue. The fact is, people in top sports with minor “blood problems” get passes all the time (or six month suspensions, or what have you). Life time bans are virtually always only handed out for being caught red handed.
What they DO need to do is up the ante as far as what you risk by cheating. If all you risk is a loss of what you never would have gotten without cheating in the first place, statistically speaking, you should cheat. You have to lose more than this. You need to lose enough that you’re peeing in your pants when you think about being caught. That means criminal proceedings against the doctors and in certain cases, the athletes. That means staggering fines that you are not ever going to get out from underneath. Not for having a “hinky” blood sample. For evidence of the kind that would pass in a criminal trial that you repeatedly and knowingly engaged in a long-term pattern of illegal drug use.
When I was a kid, a kids life could be ruined for getting caught with a joint. Did we have a Nazi state then?
RE: “When I was a kid, a kids life could be ruined for getting caught with a joint. Did we have a Nazi state then?”
Nope — but then the kid wasn’t paying 300,000 a year to doctors for masking agents and the latest technology in hiding the joint either.
Which is the point.
Once you’ve got the money and technology on the cheating side of drugs, then you’ve got to have the brutal, draconian, fascist control on the other side. And with the Tour you’ve got the whole history and culture of doping to fight as well — more so even than baseball. The 60s and 70s were simply dreadful. The main difference between the late 80s and 90s is the sophistication of the avoidance of the rudimentary drug testing — and the fact that doping became “safer” in a bizarre way. But all the “great names” in cycling doped — it was the accepted thing to do if you were serious about and committed to the sport.
RE: “The fact is, they’ve gotten most of the cheaters out of the sport now which you can tell just by looking at the times and records.”
I disagree. Not even close to doing so, either. The 2010 Tour test, for instance, was laughably set up. No — now it’s just even better hidden — but at least now there’s a lot more hand-waving and appearance of effort and “strict processes.”
As to previous laxity — heck there was almost no out-of-competition testing in cycling [i]until 2004[/i]. And out of competition testing doesn’t even have to do with advanced technology in testing — it’s just basic common sense, as any athlete worth his salt would know to stop doping before in-competition testing! HGH *finally* gets good testing in 2012. Epo is still notoriously difficult to catch.
No, the drug elimination efforts in cycling were notoriously poor — a baby would know to do rigorous and constant random out of competition testing and they didn’t act. And the massive amounts of money and research needed to come up with the tests to keep up with the cheaters latest technology — well, they didn’t spend enough.
So here we are — needing to pursue any “big names” from the past decade in order to attempt to make up for the previous laxity.
I *am* glad that nobody will be awarded Tour wins for that period.
Probably they shouldn’t be awarding Tour wins for this coming decade either.
Or in track and field either.
There’s a lot of discussion in tennis and elsewhere about the lengths necessary to conducting good drug elimination programs — here’s a typical article on the WADA whereabouts rule:
http://www.harbottle.com/hnl/pages/article_view_hnl/4787.php
And the really amazing thing is going to be all the money spent by athletes to submit false or modified “biological passport” information for the future of drug testing.
Good times.
I agree that testing out of competition is something a baby could have thought about. It’s not just that they stop doping before a competition — it’s that they can claim “my gh (testosterone, whatever) levels are naturally sky high, I’ve always have 20 times the number of red blood cells everybody else does due to my exercise regimen on the top of Mt. Everest.”
So I’m not sure where you get from “a baby could have thought of that” to “it will never work without “draconian” and “fascist” methods. “Rigor” is not the same as “draconian.” “Vigorous enforcement” is not the same as “fascist.” Not by a long shot.
And as far as the money goes — this is a microscopic drop in the bucket compared to what we pay to keep illegal drugs out of the hands of the general population. Now I am not a person who advocates the de-criminalization of dangerous illegal drugs. But I can’t get it in my mind why some black kid from the ghetto goes to jail for smoking crack (assuming he’s not selling it to anybody else, which undoubtedly he is, but that’s not what he’s charged with) but some “hero” like Lance Armstrong is complicit in a decades-long pattern of behavior which directly and indirectly forced *others* to take dangerous drugs (it has been testified that he wouldn’t let clean riders on his team and obviously nobody could compete against him successfully if they were clean) and when he gets caught he continues to be “admired” and “respected” and he keeps the $5 million bonus he got and all the other millions he made.
Cheaters will cheat, liars will lie, people will do all manner of awful things, in sports, in business, in life. We are not going to give up trying to catch them at it because “everybodys doing it” and we’re not going to institute a fascist state either. We going to be “vigorous” and “rigorous” consistent with fairness and openness.