The Lance Armstrong Affair
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My wife took this shot on the Tourmlet in July 2004
I cannot help but put my two cents about the slow moving implosion that is destroying the credibility of Lance Armstrong, since this blog is concerned with all things bike related and not just the world of the courier. I am a long time follower of road racing and in fact have just returned from seeing a stage of the Giro d’Italia. I also spent two weeks driving around France in 2004 positioning myself on various Pyrenean and Alpine slopes to watch Armstrong roll by, a trip I consider one of the highlights of my life. So I feel I have earned my opinion but it is complicated since I am of two minds and I hold two contrarian statements in my head.
1) Armstrong is lying and is guilty of doping.
2) He is the victim of a witch-hunt.
Concerning statement 1:
I was never under any illusion concerning doping in the world of professional cycling or professional sports in general. I wish this was not the case but anyone with open eyes over the last 20 years has seen the performance enhancement in the pro peloton, on the baseball diamond, on the track, or, most obviously, in the grotesque combat that is professional football. Cycling is no more or less corrupt then these other sports. Did everyone stop watching or attending baseball or football games? Did I still put a lot of time and effort into going to France to see it live regardless?….I did. I told myself that since the entire peloton was doped Armstrong was winning on a level playing field so it did not detract from his achievement or the beauty of the competition. I admired him anyway.
The big lie
Sometimes a lie grows so big that to admit that it is a lie would seemingly destroy the universe. As Armstrong’s legend and winnings grew the consequences of his being found out grew exponentially. He became the face of cycling, and the brand name of a large philanthropic effort that helped and continues to help thousands of people. And because of the more individualistic nature of the sport compared to the large team organization of baseball, football, and soccer….cycling has smaller team organizations that are more tied to sponsors than other sports….the displacement of this legend could be seen as a fatal blow to the sport. As the pressure builds the need to maintain the lie becomes the paramount concern and anyone who challenges the official version needs to be discredited at all cost.
This is the moment where Armstrong lost my support. As the small, clubby, easy to control world of cycling morphed into the worldwide celebrity of one man the people who helped him reach those lofty heights have become expendable. The list of key domestiques who helped Armstrong win the Tour de France 7 times and who later ran afoul of drug testers is telling: Roberto Heras, Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis. The last two names have implicated Armstrong to a grand jury under threat of perjury along with another teammate George Hincapie who has never tested positive for banned substances. These cyclists knew and obviously accepted the risk associated with the choices they made to reach the highest level of the sport. I like to think I would not have made their choice but I cannot know how I would react under that pressure. Once confessed, I cannot judge them too harshly for playing by the rules as they saw them.
Who I will judge harshly is a person who would put the entire power of his name and fortune towards undermining and destroying his former friends who helped him acquire his position in the world. The only excuse for this would be if all these people are lying and Lance Armstrong never doped. This is a very unlikely possibility.
Concerning statement 2:
Jeff Novitzky is conducting a witch hunt against Lance Armstrong and it is unlikely that Armstrong will spend any time in jail or be convicted of a crime despite the serious nature of the allegations. The most serious possible charges (conspiracy to defraud the government) hinge on proving that Armstrong knowingly lied to the government as represented by the USPS in order to secure sponsorship. This will be a very hard case to make and I feel it is a separate issue from other serious allegations that Landis and Hamilton are making concerning the complicity of the UCI in squashing possible positive drug test of Armstrong’s. These should be pursued all the way to the top.
The question now becomes “why is Novitzky pursuing this hard to make case with such intensity?” His conduct in the BALCO case that resulted in a jail sentence for Marian Jones might be instructive. It is not to the point of this post to examine the Inspector Javert like perseverance of Novitzky in that case but I imply the allusion to ask the simple question, “what is justice?” Was justice done when Marian Jones, a person at the long end of a chain of events and people all of whom deserved much more censure than her, was humiliated and made to serve 6 months of hard time? In the broadest sense, yes, but that justice was morally unjustified.
Lance Armstrong will most likely end up humiliated and proved a liar but in a world where wars can be waged for fictitious reasons and Wall Street bankers who came close to bringing down the worlds economy not only walk free but are bailed out for their losses, their criminality caused by the government, makes the millions of dollars and thousands of hours the Justice Department is spending on this case morally unjustified.