Armstrong’s survival is a miracle, delivered by the best drugs modern science has to offer. But the French press, simply without substantiation, prefers to focus on a different kind of regimen, performance-enhancing drugs. No matter how many times Armstrong tests clean–and there have been a lot of clean tests–there remains a reticence to fully credit him for what is one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in sport’s history: going from death’s door to total domination of one of cycling’s premier events.
Rumors about drug corruption in cycling, track and field, swimming and other strength and endurance sports are rampant, of course. The finger-pointing is so widespread as to include, at one time or another, virtually every athlete who has excelled in these sports. It is not just dirt-mongering reporters who spread these unsavory tales. I once asked one of America’s finest swimmers, an Olympic champion, who in the sport was cheating with drugs. “Everybody but me,” the swimmer replied. One of the finest Olympic reporters I know ultimately one-upped that conclusion. “Everybody,” he had reluctantly come to believe, thus ruining the Games for him. “Absolutely everybody is dirty.”
That is not an easy conclusion to swallow and an impossible one to prove. The money and sophistication is massively on the side of cheating, not in detection. The conventional wisdom is that you have to be very stupid or very unlucky to get caught. Still, a good number of athletes are caught every year. But no one ever simply fesses up, “OK, you got me. I cheated. I’m sorry. Do what you will with me.” It’s either a diet supplement run amok, a cold medicine taken innocently, a sabotaging of their nutrient drink by a jealous competitor or a faulty lab procedure. (And all those probably have occurred.) Far too often, the governing sports officials in the offender’s country, no matter how sanctimonious they’ve been about alleged wrongdoing in other nations, buy the excuse and rush to their athlete’s defense.
By any standard, cycling is a particularly messy endeavor. A few years ago, the Tour de France seemed to have more in common with your neighborhood crack house than with elite sporting events. There were police raids, cyclists were questioned about illegal drug use and the detritus of the competition seemed as likely to be syringes as water bottles. I repeat–because it is important to give him every benefit of the doubt–that Armstrong has never failed a drug test. He has repeatedly denied having taken any illegal substances. Yet he has admitted a close affiliation with an Italian coach who is being investigated by Italian authorities for allegedly providing and recommending performance-enhancing drugs to cyclists. And a recent issue of the Italian version of GQ quotes a cyclist detailing a host of illegal substances–the blood-booster EPO, testosterone, human growth hormone and a masking agent to foil drug tests–all administered to him by the very same coach whom Armstrong calls “an honest man … an innocent man.”
But just when I’m tempted to join the throngs saying, J’accuse, there is this French factor driving me to Armstrong’s defense. French anti-Americanism has been more subdued in recent years, at least to the point where you can take a taxi to Euro Disney or eat a Big Mac along the Champs-Elysees. But the French truly don’t believe that Americans can do any of those things–cook, make wine, make love–that the French consider themselves unrivaled at. A particularly virulent form of that proprietary conceit exists in the cycling world. Even before he was a winner, Armstrong was unpopular within the European cycling community. He is remote and prickly, a Texan without any international flavor or European-style sophistication. He lacks the joie de vivre and bonhomie that are valued abroad. The Tour photographers bestowed their annual “Lemon” award on him, a measure of their distaste for him as well as of his unwillingness to extend himself to court popularity with the European press. He’s not their kind of guy, so how could he be winning their kind of sport without a vast cheating conspiracy?
You see how confusing it truly is, with tugs and powerful pulls in all different directions. But in the end, until proven otherwise, I come down with both feet on Lance’s pedal. Indeed, I’m all for giving him a superhero’s welcome. Lance stands as a symbol of something far more important than anyone’s or everyone’s suspicions. Not as a sports giant who won the Tour de France three times. But as a fellow human being who beat cancer once and came back to kick butt. And it’s as a survivor that he’s a hero to me–and to my brother, to his PMC riders, now 3,200 strong, who will bike 192 miles this weekend and to their crusade, which is everybody’s crusade against cancer.
