From the Archives - If I Had Defended Floyd Landis

Introduction

Almost eleven years ago, the American professional cyclist Floyd Landis won the Tour de France, or seemed to until a few days later when it was reported he’d tested positive for testosterone. I immediately wrote a fake newspaper article advancing an alternative explanation for the high levels of testosterone in the rider’s blood. I considered submitting this story to the Daily Peloton, which has published a dozen or so of my articles. But I decided instead just to e-mail the story to my bike pals. My rationale was that until Landis’ guilt was firmly established, I didn’t want to make light of his situation in a public forum.

Two years later, when the last of Landis’ appeals was finally crushed out and it was pretty obvious he’d truly doped, I submitted my story to Daily Peloton with a timely new spin: “If I Had Defended Landis.” They ran the story (with a couple extra caveats). Years later I discovered that many of my articles are no longer available on Daily Peloton’s website due to some server problems. So, in advance of this year’s Tour de France, I have decided to give the story a new home on albertnet.

(Interesting side note: I discovered recently that most of my article, along with a PDF download, are available on the Kool ‘N Fit website. Kool ‘N Fit is an aerosol analgesic designed for athletes, and I’d mentioned it in my story. The Kool ‘N Fit marketing team posted my story here under the headline “Floyd Landis pouring KNF on his privates?” and commented, “LOL we did not see this coming.” I see on their website that their reprint has been viewed over 65,000 times, which is way more pageviews than any of my albertnet posts has received.)

If I Had Defended Landis – July 11, 2008

Now that CAS has dismissed Floyd Landis’s final appeal, it may seem as though his sad fate—to be the first cyclist ever stripped of a Tour de France title for a doping offense—was inevitable. But the law is complicated enough, and public opinion fickle enough, to have brought about a completely different outcome. If Floyd Landis had hired me to defend him, and had gone along with my unique defense strategy, things could have turned out much better for the hapless cyclist. Rather than lay out my approach in its entirety, I offer you here a snapshot, in the form of a hypothetical news story, of how I could have already begun to iron out his case, mere days after his positive test.

Landis’ Latest Shocker

Scandalized cycling star blames failed drug test on night of debauchery

July 29, 2006

The story of Tour winner Floyd Landis took yet another turn today when the cycling star gave a bizarre explanation for his failed drug test. “There’s no need to wait for the B sample,” Landis said at an impromptu press conference. “I can explain everything.”

Shyly admitting that he was just too embarrassed to come clean before, Landis read a brief statement declaring that his above-limit testosterone:epitestosterone ratio was the result of a night of debauchery with Phonak teammate Axel Merckx and two other Tour riders. “My religious upbringing resulted in increased physical response to unclean images. A night of shameful behavior pushed my naturally high testosterone levels past the legal limit. I did not behave in a manner befitting a professional athlete, but I did nothing illegal.”

While Landis elaborated as little as possible during the press conference, Merckx seemed to bask in the limelight, providing a flurry of lurid details. “It all started the night after his disastrous ride on Stage 16,” he explained. “My dad [cycling legend Eddy Merckx] called me and said, “‘Axel, you gotta do whatever it takes to wake that guy up.’

“First we had a couple of beers. One thing led to another and next thing you know we’re looking at Internet porn. Like most of the guys, I’ve got hotbabes.com bookmarked, but Floyd had never even seen it. I guess with his [Mennonite] upbringing he got into computers a little late. Anyway, he got more excited than I’ve ever seen him in a bike race. He got so embarrassed he went into the bathroom and poured a bunch of Kool ‘N Fit on his privates.”

Kool ‘N Fit, an obscure sports product developed in the early nineties comprised of equal parts alcohol and marketing hype, is not on any banned list. “It wouldn’t have given Floyd any performance advantage, but it did keep him awake after his second fifth of Jack [Daniels],” Merckx laughed. Too worked up to sleep, Merckx and Landis and two other Tour riders, José Rujano (Quick-Step-Innergetic) and Juan Miguel Mercado (Agritubel), drove two hours to 17 Etapes, a strip club in Grenoble. “I told Floyd, ‘Before you come out swinging tomorrow in Stage 17, you’re gonna go out swinging at 17 Stages,’” Merckx quipped. “It was quite a scene there. At the door they asked Floyd for ID and he couldn’t understand why. Dude’s been asked to piss in a cup hundreds of times but he’d never been carded in his life.”

Merckx was quick to point out that while they saw some graphic acts at the club, Landis managed to behave himself. “He broke some new ground for himself, sure, but he steered clear of the Champagne Room,” Merckx said. “As always, he was the consummate professional cyclist and obeyed the age-old rule of no sex during a grand tour.”

Merckx explained that the four stayed until the club closed and returned to their hotel mere hours before the start of Stage 17. Rujano passed out on the floor of his room and missed the race entirely. Mercado, reeling from a terrible hangover, dropped out 30 kilometers into the stage. “It was a rough morning, that’s for sure,” Merckx said. “Poor Floyd was still sporting a Woodrow at the start line. I was really worried until he spotted Pereiro in the yellow jersey. Then, man—I could hear the blood rushing out of his member.”

Asked how it was possible for him to channel his pent-up sexual tension into improved athletic performance, Landis replied, “Aw, hell, I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager. Don’t forget, I went to a public high school.”

To investigate whether or not suggestive images could really account for such a swing in testosterone:epitestosterone levels, the Daily Peloton contacted Professor Guido Norbiato of the Faculty Of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Luigi Sacco University Hospital, Milan. Norbiato explained, “I’ve been looking through the medical literature on this, and there have been a few studies. A 1998 study found that static pornographic images drove the T:E level up anywhere from 1.14 +/- 0.07 to 1.52 +/- 0.09 in normal ‘red-blooded’ males. The increase ranged from 30% to 90% in the different subjects studied with an average of 43%. Live sex shows drove it up further, anywhere from 1.21 +/- 0.08 to 1.68 +/-0.10, or 40 to 93% with an average of 55%. This still wouldn’t be quite enough to explain Landis’ increase, but then, the study didn’t include any Mennonites.”

The question is, will Landis’ defense put the issue to rest? Reached for comment, WADA president Dick Pound, whose name takes on new significance in light of current events, was unsure. “It comes down to the definition of ‘natural,’” he stated. “We’ve confiscated Merckx’s laptop and will investigate every cached URL to see what websites these guys visited. I’ve seen stuff out there that’s clearly unnatural.” Pound then flushed bright red and refused to take any more questions.

UCI President Pat McQuaid expressed grave concern about the impact Landis’ revelation will have on cycling. “We’re having to scramble now to develop an Internet ‘acceptable use’ policy before the sport’s reputation is tarnished further,” he lamented. But the ultimate impact of this development has other media entities increasingly optimistic about the sport’s future. “Already the doping story was increasing interest in cycling,” said Outdoor Life Network producer Ralph Edwards. “Drugs represent about the only nexus between cycling and more mainstream sports like baseball. Linking a Tour champion with booze and women may be our best way to reach other OLN viewers, like those who tune in for our Bull & Rodeo shows. Landis may have just blazed a trail between cycling aficionados and the NASCAR set.”

While Landis’ account of his positive A sample has met with widespread skepticism, it has helped to explain circumstances following his incredible comeback victory in Stage 17 from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Morzine. “His post-race behavior did reflect something closer to, well, outright horniness than the effect of a doping product,” said Phonak team physician Dr. Denise Demir. “Just talk to the podium girls.” Sure enough, when the Daily Peloton contacted Stage 17 podium girl Evette Bellefemme, she told us, “You know, it really was weird. The podium routine is always the same—the winner gets three kisses on the cheek from each of us. I’ve never had somebody kiss me back before. And then he asked for my phone number! Mon Dieu!”

The next step in clearing his name will be for Landis to submit to a battery of tests designed to establish the effect of lurid images on his natural testosterone levels. Dozens of fellow Tour riders, in an act of apparent solidarity with Landis, have signed up to participate in the study as a control group. “It’s a completely new test, of course,” said Pound, “but the medical community has been very responsive and our panel is already complete. We should have an answer within a few weeks. Landis may yet be innocent, regardless of the results of the B sample.”

Whatever the outcome of Landis’ doping investigation, chances are good that he will be fighting a difficult public relations battle, and has more than a little explaining to do at home.

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For a spoof on how I’d have defended Lance Armstrong, click here.

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Book Review - "The Secret Race"

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

In this post I review The Secret Race —  Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France:  Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle.  I describe why I didn’t like the idea of buying this book; why this book is important and admirable; a general assessment of its readability and what it has to offer besides sordid doping tales; and the importance of the footnotes Coyle provides.  At the end I’ll address the obvious question of whether or not you should read this book.

Why I didn’t buy this book

I got this book at the library.  Of course I’ll pay good money for good writing, but I didn’t want to further enrich somebody who has made enough money already by cheating at sport.  If Tyler hadn’t doped, his career would have likely been short and/or mediocre and he’d have made tens of thousands instead of many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and wouldn’t have a book to his credit.  (As Coyle described in his forward, Tyler had approached him in 2004 about writing a book, similar to Lance Armstrong’s War, but about Tyler.  Coyle wasn’t interested:  “I liked Hamilton, and his feats on the bike were amazing and inspiring, but when it came to being the subject of a book, he was fatally flawed:  he was simply too boring.”)

If Tyler had pledged to donate all the profits from this book to, say, a junior development program for cyclists, I’d have bought a dozen copies and given them as gifts.  (I have no problem with a solid co-author like Coyle keeping his profits; after all, he never cheated.)  By donating his profits Tyler could have given back to sport he stole from, while also defusing the predictable argument that Lance’s legal team made—that Tyler was making up all kinds of lies just to make money selling books.

Why this book is important and admirable

We shouldn’t be too hard on Tyler for doping—obviously he wasn’t alone.  Indeed, one of the main points of the book is that practically nobody in that era could have made good money riding clean.  Whether or not that position is entirely true, it must be said that prior to this book, only one of the positive tests and rider suspensions of the last dozen years had yet led to a satisfying confession (and if Floyd Landis wrote a book, I might check it out too).  This sport has long lacked a complete picture not only of the shame and repercussions of getting caught doping, but of the trials and terrors of doping successfully.  Because of this lack, a rider of Tyler’s era could be forgiven for having taken the wrong message from rider suspensions—that you just better not get caught.

As mentioned a couple years ago in a blog post comparing Lance Armstrong to Eminem, I’ve long wished a rider found guilty of doping would come all the way clean, as Eminem has about his own drug problems.  Where are the tales, I wondered, of how scary it is getting a blood transfusion in a motel room; where’s the lurid life story, equivalent to Eminem’s, to scare our junior cyclists away from doping?  Where Eminem is brutally honest, doping cyclists—even convicted ones—have so often continued being as secretive as possible.

Well, I got my wish—this book gives plenty of gory details.  For example, Tyler describes a routine visit he made to Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes to have blood taken out of his body, to be transfused later:  “When the bag was full, I hopped to my feet.  I usually held my arm over my head for a few minutes, applying pressure with a cotton ball—but I had no time for protocol.  I taped on a cotton ball … and headed for the exit.  Then I was outside, on the streets of Madrid, racing down the street toward a cab, dragging my roller bag across the cobblestones, hoping I wouldn’t be late [for my flight home].  I was maybe two blocks from his office when I felt a strange wetness in my hand.  I looked down.  My hand was dripping with blood.  My sleeve was soaked.  I looked like I’d just murdered someone.”

Even more disturbingly, Tyler describes a botched transfusion of previously frozen blood he received in a hotel room during the 2004 Tour:  “[Fuentes] wasn’t there, so the Phonak doctors handled the transfusion; it went smoothly.  I went back to my hotel room to wait for Haven and Tugs to show up.  But a few minutes after I got there, I started feeling bad.  I got a headache, and felt my forehead:  I was burning up.  I had to piss, badly.  I looked down, expecting to see the usual slight discoloration from the [blood bag].  But when I looked down, I was pissing blood.  Dark, dark red, almost black.  It kept coming and coming, filling the toilet like a horror movie….  My fever kept rising.  My headache got worse.  Then I got up to piss again.  I didn’t want to look down.  Then I did.  Pure red.  Then I knew I was in trouble.  The bag was bad….  My body felt toxic.”

Beyond the service he performs in scaring the crap out of anybody who might think about blood doping, I admire Tyler for having the cojones to be so frank about Lance.  Obviously a vast amount has been written about Lance’s doping, but not as much about him being a bully, being insecure, and being a leader—probably the leader—in the doping culture of the last decade.  There is some very damning stuff in this book about Lance’s character, including something truly illuminating:  the notion that Lance was actually proud of his doping—of how clever he was at it.  For example, he came up with a plan to have EPO brought to his Postal team by motorcycle during the ’99 Tour de France.  One of his assistants, whom they called Motoman, would carry the EPO in a thermos and use his motorcycle to zip through the traffic and crowds.  Tyler writes, “Lance practically glowed when he told me about the plan—he loved this kind of MacGyver secret-agent stuff.”

Sure, the USADA testimonies of many other riders also portray Lance as a bully, but not in such detail, and it must be remembered that this book came before there was so much momentum to the story.  And of all the people in this world whom Lance hates—there must be many hundreds by this point—I can’t imagine a greater target for his wrath than Tyler has made himself by writing such a detailed account.

(It’s hard to imagine being literally afraid of any bike racer, but Lance is different.  He is the only athlete I’ve personally ever felt scared of.  I encountered him at the 2003 T-Mobile Classic in San Francisco, after he’d dropped out of the race, changed into street clothes, and given an interview.  He walked right by me, and I noticed his expensive leather jacket had a big pile of bird shit on it.  I almost tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Lance, man, some bird crapped on your jacket!”  But suddenly I had this feeling that if I laid a finger on him I’d be clobbered by his bodyguards.  (What kind of bike racer has bodyguards?)  Years later, because of Lance’s legendary vindictiveness, I was almost afraid to post, to this blog, an unkind spoof I wrote about his defense team.  Instead, I sent it as an e-mail to friends, claiming I came across the story in “Ladies’ Home Journal.”  A friend convinced me that a garage door wouldn’t fall on my head if I put it on albertnet, and so far he’s been right.  In contrast, I wrote a similarly brazen humor piece for dailypeloton about Floyd Landis, without ever worrying that he’d sic anybody on me.  I think if Floyd read that he’d probably just shrug, or maybe even laugh.)

Above all, Tyler’s book has helped the public understand how widespread doping was in that era, and he has brought to light the corruption above the riders’ heads that allowed doping to go on for so long.  I’m tired of reading about younger riders complaining that they’re bearing the brunt of all these confessions by the previous generation.  That’s a really narrow view.  All the Lance-era Americans who have recently confessed are helping to create a sport in which the younger dudes can be competitive without doping.  That’s a lot better career prospect than the “dope or quit” choice Tyler’s cohort was faced with.  Sure, many of the USADA witnesses have gotten a pretty sweet deal—only a six-month suspension, and they get to keep the big money they made during their dark past—but we can’t hold that good deal against them.  (What are they going to do—ask for a longer suspension?)  And in coming clean they still have to suffer the shame of confessing, and the hit to their reputation.  If the sport is actually cleaning up, the next generation will never have to go through all that.

How’s the read?

The Secret Race is a good read—depressing, but certainly engaging and well-written.  In this review I won’t dwell on the combination of fascination and depression I felt when reading about the doping itself.  Anybody who has read the rider affidavits on the USADA website already knows what I’m talking about.  Suffice to say, these guys did a tremendous amount of doping—more than I ever would have expected.

The prose in this book isn’t as razor-sharp as Coyle’s in Lance Armstrong’s War.  In a sense, I think that’s a testament to how well Coyle has allowed Tyler’s own voice to come through.  I get the sense that these really are Tyler’s words, and that Coyle’s main contributions are asking the right questions, drawing Tyler out effectively, and organizing vast amounts of anecdotes into a coherent narrative.  The book rings a lot more true than Lance’s autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, which had a strong whiff of ghost-writer embellishment about it.  (Not that I didn’t enjoy that book, in my naïve rubber-bracelet days.)

Beyond the doping, there’s a lot of interesting day-in-the-life bike racer stuff in this book.  For example, there are anecdotes about diet.  Tyler describes having a meal in the presence of Doctor Ferrari, who was obsessed with the weight and body fat of the riders he coached.  “Eating meals with Ferrari was a nightmare,” Tyler writes.  “He’d eagle-eye each bite that went into your mouth; a cookie or piece of cake would bring a raise of the eyebrow, and a disappointed look.”  He also describes how Lance’s own discipline once let him down and he ate three pieces of cake:  “The other Postal riders watched him eat with a sinking feeling:  they know what was going to happen.  The next day in training was supposed to be an easy day.  But the cake changed that.  Instead, Lance had the team do a brutal five-hour ride, to burn off the cake only he had eaten.”  After Tyler left Postal, he continued to run up against the weight/diet obsession; his team manager Bjarne Riis advised him to “come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills.  By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast.”

There are also some funny tales in the book.  Tyler describes the boredom of being at a training camp in Tenerife with new teammates who didn’t speak much English.  “We stayed in a big empty hotel on the top of a volcano; I roomed with Roberto Heras, and for almost two weeks we did nothing but ride, sleep, and eat….  We ate in the empty dining room.  We wandered the halls.  Roberto would try to say, ‘I am so fucking bored’ but since his English wasn’t great, he would say, ‘I am so fucking boring.’  That became our motto for the trip.  I am so fucking boring.”  

Another funny anecdote concerns the crappy camper that Postal had during the ’99 Tour, before they made it big.  It belonged to the team’s head mechanic, Julien deVriese.  “We called it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because everything shook when you drove; the cabinet doors tended to fly open on the gentlest curve; every hinge squeaked frantically; it was so loud that, when under way, you could barely talk over the din.  Julien had one rule:  No shitting in the camper.  He was very clear on this rule.  We could tell because every time we saw him, he would point his big finger at us and say, ‘No shitting in the campa!’ in a husky voice.  We informed Julien that shitting in the camper was likely to improve it.”

Of course Lance looms large throughout the book.  Tyler describes how, during the 2000 Dauphiné Libéré, Lance had an off-day on Mount Ventoux, and Tyler—with Johan Bruyneel’s blessing—soloed to victory.  After the race, Bruyneel went straight to the team bus, thinking only of Lance.  “’This was no big deal, man,’ Johan told Lance.  ‘It was probably the altitude.  Perhaps you have been training too hard, no?  We will talk to Michele [Ferrari]….’  After a few minutes of this, Johan asked, ‘Who won?’  Without looking up, Lance pointed at me…  That night at dinner, when everybody was toasting my victory, [Lance] would barely make eye contact.  It was like he was having an uncontrollable reaction, like an allergy:  my success in the race—which was good for Postal and therefore good for him—drove him bananas.”

Tyler describes how his ongoing improvement, and particularly a stress test he did with Ferrari in which he beat Lance’s record for a certain climb, began to make Lance feel threatened.  As a result, in the 2001 Tour, Tyler wasn’t given any EPO or blood transfusions, and thus struggled just to keep up, eventually finishing 94th.  In one stage, he struggled to make pace on the front:  “I felt a hand grab my jersey by the neck and pull me back, hard.  Lance’s voice, yelling in my ear at the top of my lungs.  ‘What the FUCK are you doing, Tyler?’ …  After that stage, Johan asked me to apologize to the entire team for my poor performance.”

Perhaps most illuminating of all is the very clear depiction of how the doping culture at Postal worked.  Nobody pushed the drugs on the riders.  Quite the opposite:  a rider wasn’t even offered them unless he made it into Lance’s inner circle.  Tyler describes the white lunch bags that these riders were given by soigneurs after a race:  “They were given only to the stronger riders on the team—Hincapie, Ekimov, Baffi, Robin.  The guys I thought of as the A team.  That’s when I felt a sinking realization:  I was on the B team.”

So when Pedro, the team doctor, finally offered Tyler a capsule of synthetic testosterone—a “red egg”—Tyler didn’t hesitate to accept it, and (at the time) felt no shame.  Quite the opposite, actually:   “The red egg was a badge of honor, a sign that Pedro and the team saw my potential.  I felt like this was a small step toward making the A team.”

Coyle’s footnotes

The Secret Race is a memoir, not an exhaustive journalistic exposé, but Coyle provides copious footnotes in which he elaborates on certain points, often citing other sources to validate Tyler’s claims. A good example is how Coyle describes the Catenay-Malabry doping-detection lab study that found EPO in six of Lance’s fifteen urine samples from the ’99 Tour.  The study itself isn’t news, but Coyle lines it up with Hamilton’s claim that that Motoman, the guy who delivered EPO to the Postal team, became exhausted and went home after stage 14.  “All samples taken after stage 14 tested negative,”  Coyle points out. 

While he’s at it, Coyle completely torpedoes the tired old “level playing field” argument that enables many diehard Lance supporters to ignore the importance of his doping:  “Perhaps more interestingly, it looks as though Lance was in the minority [of Tour de France EPO users] in 1999.  Of the eighty-one urine samples taken during the 1999 Tour that were not Armstrong’s, only seven tested positive for EPO, or 8.6 percent.”  Probably at least one or two of those positives were from Lance’s teammates.  In other words, Postal won the ’99 Tour largely because they were using EPO and most of the others weren’t.  Perhaps the others had been scared straight by the Festina scandal in 1998.  After the ’99 edition, noting what EPO could do for a former Tour also-ran (Lance had one 36th-place plus three DNFs), the other riders may well have decided it was “game on,” and went right back to doping.

(The notion that Postal’s EPO use in ’99 was the exception rather than the rule, and the notion that Lance pressured his teammates by claiming everybody else was doing it, is corroborated outside of this book by an instant-messaging transcript cited by cyclingnews between Jonathan Vaughters and Frankie Andreu.  The transcript—available on USADA’s website—was evidence in the SCA lawsuit of that year.  In the chat, Vaughters tells Andreu that Credit Agricole, the team he rode for after Postal, didn’t dope:  “So that’s when I realized Lance was full of shit when he’d say everyone was doing it.  As crazy as it sounds - [team leader] Moreau was on nothing.  His Hct [hematocrit] was 39.”)

Coyle’s notes are helpful when it comes to the matter of Tyler’s own impression of the risks he took, which may not be the same as Coyle’s impression.  To my mind, Tyler doesn’t always seem to grasp just how dangerous his doping truly was.  He lists cycling injuries he’s had—“elbow, shoulder, collarbone (twice), back, hip, fingers (multiple), ribs, wrist, nose”—and concludes, “When it comes to the risks of EPO, they tend to feel pretty small.”  He doesn’t seem to acknowledge the categorical difference between a relatively simple bone injury and the very complicated matter of blood chemistry.  I find it odd that he would compare the risk of crashing to the risk of doping even after the botched blood transfusion he describes, where he was pissing blood and running a high fever and had nobody to turn to for medical help. 

Coyle writes more frankly about the danger of blood doping than Tyler does when it comes to Tyler’s positive test.  Tyler doesn’t seem to have thought too hard about how he managed to have somebody else’s blood in his body.  He describes his defense, which was based on the test equipment or protocol being faulty, and seems to still doubt the veracity of the test. 

While Tyler doesn’t dwell on the question, Coyle does, in an extensive footnote:  “Presuming the blood test was accurate, how did someone else’s blood get inside Hamilton’s body?”  He cites Dr. Michael Ashenden’s analysis of the situation:  “Freezing blood is a multi-step procedure that includes several transfers and mixings with progressively stronger concentrations of glycol…  Because the cells are alive, you have to babysit this machine for hours at a time, and keep everything straight.  In a situation where Fuentes and his assistant, Jose Maria Batres (aka Nick), were handling the blood of dozens of riders, it would be possible to envision a scenario where Hamilton’s and another racer’s blood were accidentally mislabeled and/or mixed.  In addition, according to Spanish newspaper reports in 2010, Batres was suffering from dementia.”  I am struck by how lucky Tyler really was:  if the foreign blood he got hadn’t happened to be compatible with his, he’d be dead.

Should you read this book?

If you haven’t been glutted by all the rider testimonies against Lance; if you have been glutted but just can’t get enough of this guilty pleasure; if you’d like to get the perspective of a doping cyclist and an answer to the question “Why would you ever do that in the first place?”; if you’re looking for a way to find compassion for an entire generation of doping cyclists; if you’d like to get a feel for what it’s like, day-to-day, to be a world class pro rider; if you don’t mind reading something as depressing as it is gripping—then I think you should read this book.  But I’m not saying you should buy it.

Doping Journalists, and "Un-Boosting"

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language and mature themes.

Introduction

This month’s “Outside” magazine has an article written by a guy named Andrew Tillin who decided to cheat at bike races—by taking synthetic testosterone—so he could write about the experience. (Kind of like a stand-up comic going to a strip club “ironically” to “gather material.”) What perfect timing: in this post, I document my own cycling performance experiment, which is similar and yet opposite. Over the last two weeks I’ve tried a more novel approach: un-cheating.

I could call my process un-doping, but that term has been taken already, by me. What I mean by un-cheating is doing the opposite of blood-boosting. Blood-boosting is among the most popular methods by which pro bike racers cheat. It consists of taking blood out of your body during the early cycling season, letting your body replace that blood over the months, and then putting back in the original blood right before an important bike race. This gives you extra red blood cells, which means an enhanced ability to carry oxygen to the muscles. The methodology—which is both illegal and highly dangerous—is known to be highly effective.

What I have done, in contrast, is to have blood—specifically, two units of red cells—taken out of my body so that it can be given to somebody who really needs it: not a pro athlete, but an accident victim. (For details about my recent blood donation, click here.) While my body is gradually replacing the red cells, I experience a loss of strength that is the mirror opposite of what an athlete gains from blood-boosting or using EPO. Instead of measuring the performance increase of doping, I measure the performance decrease of its polar opposite. I’m really out to show the same thing as the “Outside” writer: that is, the delta between supercharged and worn-down, between doped and clean. I’m just coming at the matter from the other direction.

In this post I shall examine the existing literature on journalists doping to get their stories; describe my methodology for measuring my performance before and after giving blood; describe subjectively the experience of hard riding with two units of red cells missing; and document my performance during the two weeks prior to donating blood vs. the two weeks afterward. There are charts and graphs. Finally, I will describe the epiphany I’ve had in the process of this rather odd experiment. Surprisingly, the experience has given me hope for the sport.

A flawed journalistic approach

There is so much wrong with Andrew Tillin’s “Outside” article. The very first sentence shows how out-of-touch the guy is: “Now I know how Floyd Landis feels.” Like hell he does! Floyd Landis has lost everything. Landis dedicated his life to cycling; won (or appeared to win) the Tour de France, the greatest bike race on the planet; was the first rider in history to have his Tour title stripped for doping; went broke and suffered worldwide infamy by trying to defend himself; was humiliated all over again when he finally admitted his defense was a lie; was abandoned by his wife; has no obvious career prospects; and is being sued for defamation by the international governing body of cycling. Tillin, through cheating, has gotten himself a book deal, while only suffering the wrath of a few blogger-types, along with a slap on the wrist from USA Cycling. (They’ve banned him from competition for two years, but he was only a casual weekend racer anyway.) For Tillin to compare himself to Landis almost smacks of narcissism.

Tillin decided to dope with synthetic testosterone “in part because it was the same stuff Landis apparently used to win the 2006 Tour de France.” Tillin selected it, he says, despite the opinion he cites of some scientists who deny that synthetic testosterone would be particularly useful during a stage race. He snorts, “Could’ve fooled Landis.” What Tillin is not realizing or acknowledging is that Landis wasn’t just taking testosterone; by his own admission, he was also blood-boosting and taking EPO. The other reason Tillin chose testosterone, he says, is for “the general health effects it might bestow.” As I read, I began to think this was a guy who just liked the idea of jacking up his manliness, and used the journalistic project as an excuse.

This impression was only reinforced when I got to the part where Tillin drops a bunch of (local 45+ year old) guys in a race and thinks to himself, “Take that, you motherfuckers. There’s more.” That Tillin would even have such a thought is bad enough; to freely admit to having thought this is just bizarre. On what grounds does he deserve to call his non-doping rivals “motherfuckers”? He blames the testosterone for his outburst. Yeah, right. I highly suspect he’s just a jerk.

Then, Tillin ended up only getting seventeenth place in the race because, he says, he was “strong enough but not smart enough.” Well, isn’t smart riding the whole point of bicycle racing? In describing his motivation to do the doping experiment, Tillin cited his suspicion that many in the peloton were doping, complaining, “Scumbags. Who can hold down a job and ride like these jerks?” The answer is, people who have been racing for two or three decades and actually know what they’re doing. Ultimately, Tillin is just a wanker. He has no expert insight into the physiology of the sport and how much of his improvement was from the drugs. Perhaps his book gives a lot more detail than the handful of anecdotes in his “Outside” article, but based on what I’ve seen of this guy I’m not inclined to read it.

The other problem

The other problem with this article is that it’s not much different from another doping-journalist article that “Outside” already ran, back in 2003. Did the “Outside” editors forget about that article, or were they just counting on their readers forgetting it (like how “Cosmopolitan” runs the same “ten secret sex tips” article every other month)? In “Outside” magazine’s original doping-journalist article, a guy named Stuart Stevens spent eight months taking synthetic testosterone, synthetic human growth hormone, anabolic steroids, and EPO. His article provides a lot more detail than Tillin’s, giving us a few numbers (e.g., his hematocrit—a measure of the oxygen-carrying red cell concentration in his blood—went from a decent 43.8% to a stellar 48.3%). He also gives some nice history and background about doping.

But Stevens’ article ends up with the same problem as Tillin’s: Stevens doesn’t really quantify the benefit of all those drugs. Okay, he got all huge. He gained weight while his body fat percentage dropped. He felt fine, for once, following a double-century (i.e., 200-mile) ride. But the big race Stevens was working toward with all these drugs was a tandem race. He was sharing a bike with another guy who wasn’t doping! It’s almost like he went out of his way to make sure there could be no objective measurement of the benefit he got from the drugs. What a waste!

My approach

There are many differences between my approach and that of the “Outside” writers:

• I did not do anything illegal;
• I did not do anything unsafe;
• My level of performance is not subject to the natural improvement that relative beginners can make so easily—after thirty years of competitive cycling I’m about as good as I’m going to get;
• For many years I have been carefully documenting specific performance measurements, taken over fixed routes up some favorite climbs, and have a very solid benchmark of pre-blood-donation performance;
• I have analyzed the two weeks before and after the blood donation very carefully;
• I present hard data that makes the effect of my experiment very easy to quantify.

There are several facets of performance that I measured before and after giving blood. They include the following:

• Immediate impact on power output after donating blood;
• Impact on heart rate of having donating blood;
• Endurance over a difficult course (i.e., power output, heart rate changes over several hours) pre- and post-donation;
• Day-to-day recovery, pre- and post-donation (i.e., power output on second consecutive day of riding);
• Rudimentary measurement of athletic efficiency (ratio of heart rate to power output);
• Recovery over time from having given blood.

I should note that my power measurements are taken from a fairly rudimentary device. Rather than measuring the actual force put into my drivetrain, my bike computer measures rate of vertical gain (based on changes in barometric pressure) and calculates power using the equation f=mgh, where m is my mass (a constant I programmed into the device), g is the force of gravity, and h is the elevation gain. As a power meter it’s pretty useless on the flats, but fairly useful when comparing relative output on climbs, especially the consistently steep ones I favor. My two favorite climbs are South Park Road (just under a mile at an average grade of 11.1%) and Lomas Cantadas (just over two miles at 10.6%). (Vanity compels me to tell you that the power numbers calculated by this device are a lot lower than a real strain-gauge power meter would give).

The origin of my study

It is not the case that I gave blood in order to conduct this experiment. Rather, it was the other way around. I was giving blood simply because it’s a good thing to do, and when the technician measured my hemoglobin—which the clinic must do to make sure I’m healthy enough to give blood—my idea was born. My hemoglobin came out at 14 grams per deciliter (gm/dl), which roughly equates to a hematocrit of 42%, the low end of normal but high enough for donating double red cells. What got me thinking was that the last time I’d given blood, about six months before, my hemoglobin was only 13 gm/dl (a hematocrit of about 39%, which no athlete would want).

One’s hemoglobin/hematocrit levels are generally assumed to be God-given—a measure of talent—though they can be affected by external factors. Why the difference in my last two readings? Probably because the last time I gave blood was about two weeks after a grueling two-day stage race. It’s well established that intense endurance events can erode even a very fit cyclist’s hematocrit, which is precisely why the cheaters micro-dose themselves with EPO during a three week stage race. They don’t use enough EPO to measurably increase their hematocrit, which could get them busted, but just enough to keep it from declining as it otherwise would. Blood-boosting achieves the same effect.

After learning of my hemoglobin number, I was immediately curious what giving up two units of red cells would do to it. But it would have seemed strange to ask the lab to measure me again right after my donation, or the next day; after all, these are professionals with real work to do, and anyway they wouldn’t have understood the nature of my request. But I could always study the effect empirically. For no real reason, I am very meticulous about recording all kinds of cycling performance data anyway, so it wouldn’t be much extra work to study the performance implications of being down a few trillion red cells. It’s a great simulation, I think, of having raced a week or two in a Grand Tour.

(How long does it take to get back to normal after donating double red cells? Depends on what you mean by “normal.” The folks at the blood bank said I’d feel fine the next day. When I asked specifically about hard exercise, they shrugged, and said “Maybe a few days or a week; get plenty of food and drink, you’ll be fine.” They’re coming it at from the perspective of normal good health, not of obsessive athletic performance. How long until every last red cell has been replaced? Sixteen weeks. That’s right, 112 days; that’s when they tell me I’m eligible to donate blood again.)

First ride after donating blood

I was told to avoid strenuous exercise for twenty-four hours after giving blood. After doing a little Internet research to make sure that hard-core cycling truly was safe at this point, I mounted my bike: twenty-four hours almost to the minute after giving blood. I didn’t expect to feel good, and I didn’t. But what surprised me was my heart rate. It was a lot higher than usual, and yet I was going slower. On South Park, my main climb, my heart rate averaged 161 bpm, which is 7 bpm higher than the 154 bpm I’d averaged on the same climb two days before. That may not seem like much, but it really is—on that same climb, over the 24 trips up the hill I did between Jan 1 through April 26 of this year (that is, up until giving blood), I averaged 155 bpm. Last year, across the 86 times I did that climb, I averaged 156 bpm. You can see how consistent my heart rate normally is; to be at 161, at this lowly pace, was really weird.

I’ve studied my heart rate for years, and find that when my legs are tired, my heart rate doesn’t go as high. It’s as though my heart is stronger than my legs, so when they’re tired, the heart gets to loaf. As a rule of thumb, when I feel great one day, and my heart rate is really high, I’ll feel pretty blown the next day and the heart rate will be a lot lower. I was curious to see how my legs would feel, and how fast my heart would go, the second day after giving blood. On the one hand, I’d have generated about 200 billion more red blood cells by the next day; on the other hand, I’d probably be tired from this strange ride.

Second ride after giving blood

I took a rest day after that first post-donation ride: not because it had been a particularly hard ride (it was in fact a bit shorter than my normal loop) but because I was tired and I’m a busy person. So the following day, I figured I’d be that much more rested, and have that many more blood cells. This time, it being a weekend, I rode with my buddy Craig. We’re normally fairly evenly matched—he’s a bit better so far this season—so I figured riding with him would motivate me to dig deep.

Not that I had any choice. We decided to do the Hill Climb Extravagaaanza (HCE), a route we’ve been tinkering with over the years that tackles the toughest climbs in the area. Over about 50 miles we racked up over 7,000 feet of vertical gain. Here is the route:

My heart rate was back to normal for the first few climbs: I averaged 153 bpm on both South Park and Lomas Cantadas. I was certainly slower than usual—almost a minute slower than average on South Park, and 2-3 minutes slower on Lomas—but I was getting’ ‘er done. Then, as the ride wore on, I just started to peter out. My heart rate began to slide, along with my power output, until I was wallowing in the mid 140s heart range, putting out power in the low 200s. (You can see all this in the graph above.) Pretty pathetic. I felt bad for Craig, who after all was looking for a workout and was occasionally dropping me by accident because he forgot to hold back. Fortunately, he’s a good guy to chat with. We joked around about how I should see a doctor: “I don’t know why, I just feel kind of tired lately!”

We met up with our bike club and did one more climb, Tunnel Road. This is everybody else’s warm-up climb, so the pace normally seems tediously slow to me (since I tend to do a few climbs before meeting the group). This time, I was on the ropes, having trouble just hanging on.

You could blame my fatigue on the brutal route, but actually I often seem to get stronger as a ride goes on. (My best time of the year up Lomas, a 17:07, was when I’d already ridden than eighty miles.) Clearly, the lower red cell concentration hugely affects endurance. From now on, when I see a clean Tour rider cracking in the last week, I’ll have that much more empathy.

Day-to-day recovery after giving blood

I really didn’t feel much like riding the next day, but I was committed to my research project, and besides, it was a glorious sunny day. Wow, what a travesty. I managed to make it up South Park, but just barely. My power output for this climb, a mere 240 watts, was a whopping 20% below my pre-blood-donation average for this climb for 2011. My heart rate was also down, 9 bpm below my average. Further study was impossible: at the top of the climb I was a broken man, and just coasted on home like a dog who is ashamed of making a mess on the carpet and slinks miserably out of the room.

Again, it’s not the case that this fatigue was solely due to the brutal ride I’d done the day before. I refer you again to my best Lomas time of the year: it was on a Sunday following a Saturday HCE with Craig. Continuing to train, post-donation, felt like digging myself into a deep hole.

Measurement of efficiency

Surely you could speculate about the extent to which morale and other psychological factors might play into this. You could say I expected to go slower, so I did—a reverse-placebo effect. Could it be that I’ve just been loafing, using my blood donation as an excuse to become my laziest self?

I have three reasons to believe that my fatigue is real, not psychosomatic. First, I’ve been riding long enough (thirty years) that I don’t think my psyche is as malleable as that of a newcomer. For a veteran cyclist, suffering on the bike is just an instinct—it’s not something that only happens when the conditions are just right. (Describing a cyclist as a “robot” can be taken as praise: despite the rigor of the sport, you keep climbing on the bike, day after day, and go put in your suffering like turning on a faucet.) Second, a couple of these post-donation rides were with my pals, which pits my vanity against my laziness—who can bear to get dropped without giving it his best? Third, I’ve been tinkering, over the last five years, with an objective measurement of efficiency.

My efficiency measurement is pretty simple: over a known climb, I’ll simply compare my heart rate to my average power output and express this as a ratio. For example, if I averaged 160 bpm on a climb while putting out an average of 320 watts, my ratio would be 2.0. This number will of course vary from person to person, and all kinds of things can affect heart rate, but as a relative measurement I’ve found it’s pretty consistent. If I’m doing anything close to 2, I’ve got good form and was having a good day. If I’m out of shape, the number is closer to 1.7. For the purposes of my current study, this ratio is useful because if I were simply loafing, both my heart rate and my power would go down together and the ratio wouldn’t be hugely affected.

In this case, my power/HR ratio went from 1.88 pre-donation down to 1.71 post-donation: a drop of 9.8%. My heart rate on these climbs did drop, but not much: on South Park, for which I have the most data points, the difference was only 2 bpm average, pre- vs. post-donation. And yet the power output delta is 29 watts, or 11.2%, for this climb—a major difference. I wasn’t loafing: my body just wasn’t as efficient during the two weeks following my blood donation. Which I’d expected: more red cell means better transport of oxygen to the muscles; fewer red cells means less efficient transport of oxygen.

Data crunching

The closest thing all the data come to producing a punch line is this: my lowered hematocrit dropped my power between 9.6 and 9.8% (9.6% across all measured climbs, 9.8% across South Park rides). Imagine if instead of taking two units of red cells out of my body, I’d added two units. I’m not sure if the effect would be equivalent in either direction, but assuming it were, I could put out 9.6% more power if I blood-boosted.

Applying this power increase factor to my best time on, say, the ten-mile climb up Mount Diablo (i.e., multiplying my best time by 0.904), I could theoretically go five minutes faster and be in range of a top-ten finish in the big race they have up there. Not bad for a big heavy guy whose specialty is much longer events. Of course, this is only a hypothetical result, not nearly as convincing as empirical results gained through doping—but isn’t it better to make an educated guess, based on the blood-donating data I can gather honorably, then to cheat at sport while needlessly endangering my body?

For the real nerds out there, here are all the data I’ve crunched about my rides, presented in handy tables and charts. (Not all the pre-blood-donation rides are shown; I left out a couple of flat and indoor ones because they don't yield any power data.) Needless to say, you’ll want to click on these charts to zoom in. If you’re not into data mining, scroll past them because there’s more to my story below.

Gradual recovery

It’s not obvious from the data, but I am gradually recovering, performance-wise, from my blood donation as my red cells gradually get replaced by my bone marrow. (From a non-cycling standpoint I feel completely normal, as I had within a day or two of donating.) Last Saturday, I got up before dawn and rode up Mount Diablo. It’s about an 83-mile ride door-to-door, with 7,500 feet of cumulative gain. This ride is never easy, especially solo, and especially on a windy day, which Saturday certainly was.

What I found was that, unlike my first post-donation HCE with Craig, I felt increasingly better as the ride went on, which trend I associate with solid fitness. I didn’t feel very good on Mount Diablo itself, but that’s partly because it was so cold. Later in the ride, I (needlessly) tackled a monstrous grade on Reliez Road, and on the steepest section was putting out 286 watts at only 150 bpm, for a very solid power/HR ratio of 1.91. Not bad for 65 miles into the ride. I felt even better on the next climb, halfway up Happy Valley Road (or “Half-Happy” as we call it); on the steepest section I put out 290 watts at 152 bpm for the same power/HR ratio. Here’s the graph of my ride:

It was really heartening to feel better as I went. This was completely the opposite of what had happened on my first really hard ride after donating blood. My recovery has been gradual, but unmistakable.

On the last climb of the day, Wildcat Canyon, I went easy because I was no longer worried about getting home in time to take my daughter to her soccer game. Moreover, I was tired and wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t suddenly blow up. (You can only know your body so well.) But at the top, I ended up hammering. Let’s look at my training diary entry for details:

Toward the top of Wildcat I passed some novice-type and said hi. He returned the greeting but then tried to drop me! I mean, what kind of desperate ego did this guy have that he could delude himself into thinking he could best me somehow by getting to the top first, after I’d already passed him? But I wasn’t really irked or anything. Normally I wouldn’t respond at all to such a thing, maybe I’d just shake my head. But I was feeling ornery, and my legs felt good, so I figured I’d just accelerate slightly and put the guy in his place, like a powerful government quietly squashes a tiny rebellion without firing a single shot. But to my great surprise, the guy surged again, this time getting out of the saddle and trying to sprint, with this ineffectual, mincing little pedaling motion that gravely insulted my male ego. I mean, just with whom the hell did this dude think he was dealing? Without giving him the satisfaction of getting out of the saddle myself, I upshifted two gears, increased my cadence, and just obliterated him. I Cancellara’d that little poser so bad that not only did he cease to exist, but his entire ancestral line was expunged from history. I guess I was a bit grumpy from all the wind.

I include this bit because long after the ride was over I kept marveling at how inordinately ticked I’d been at this guy’s antics. They were certainly nothing new; guys do this kind of thing all the time. But then it dawned on me that the problem with this guy’s attitude is exactly the same as with the doping journalists and dopers in general. He had indulged an ugly willingness to believe a lie, in the service of his ego. He could ignore the fact that I’d passed him, just as dopers ignore the fact that they’re cheating; both manage to get an ego boost from an achievement that is an illusion. This willful delusion is, to quote Poe, the “lie thy soul hath spoken!”

Obviously the guy I dropped on Wildcat had committed only the slightest misdemeanor—a victimless crime. At the other end of the spectrum are the pro cyclists who cheat, who are essentially robbing the clean cyclists of their full earning potential, not to mention of glory. How can these cheaters actually pump their fists after winning a race? Have they managed to blot out the giant asterisk that accompanies every instance of their success?

Between these extremes fall our doping journalists. They’re making money off doping, just like the cheating cyclists. They’re also enjoying a level of strength they didn’t earn, just like the cheaters. Ultimately, they’re giving in to the temptation to know what it’s like to have an unfair advantage. Particularly in the case of Tillin, it’s an enjoyable game; he had, after all, complained about being beaten in Masters races, and in the heat of competition—“Take that, you motherfuckers, there’s more!”—savored the illusion of being better than his rivals.

Journalistic ambitions aside, these two are bullies whose meager analysis isn’t worth the risks they took with their health.

Conclusion – the upside

I had a small epiphany toward the end of my experiment. Whereas the journalists only ask “what can be achieved through doping?” my experience led me to ponder what can be achieved by not doping, or in my case putting myself at a disadvantage by hobbling my blood while my cycling pals are at full strength. As much extra suffering as I did in the two weeks following my blood donation, I couldn’t help but appreciate that I was still doing some pretty gnarly rides, and with passable grace. Whereas cheating cyclists and doping journalists are cowards, I have felt courageous. It’s not easy facing the HCE or a solo Mount Diablo when my hematocrit may well be brushing up against actual anemia, but I’ve been doing it, and enjoying it.

Perhaps this satisfaction, in the face of terrible odds, is what keeps the clean bike racers going. It cannot be easy lining up at the start of a brutal road rice alongside riders you know are doping, but the honorable riders keep on showing up. In the process, they are literally keeping their sport alive—rescuing it from the bullies. Next time I watch my heroes lose, rolling over the finish line well behind the winner, perhaps I’ll feel that I’m just a little bit closer to knowing what they’re feeling.

dana albert blog

Lance & Eminem

NOTE: This post is rated R for prevalent drug references and pervasive strong language.

Introduction

The latest doping accusations against Lance Armstrong are obviously big news. If you google “lance armstrong doping” you get 440,000 hits (as of today), but googling “Arnold Schwarzenegger steroids” gets you only 118,000 hits. Odd, isn’t it? Lance hasn’t been convicted of anything, and yet Arnold has confessed to past steroid use as a bodybuilder. As governor of California, Schwarzenegger is in charge of the eighth largest economy in the world, so his moral character ought to be front and center. Why the disparity in public interest?

Of course, Lance’s case is huge because of the seriousness of the allegations, their timeliness, and Lance’s profile as one of the greatest cyclists in the world. If he were found guilty, this would be one of the greatest scandals in the history of sports. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, used steroids decades ago—in a time, and a sport, where steroids were practically a given for all serious competitors.

But couldn’t the same thing practically be said of modern cycling? Let’s look at the doping record of the riders Lance beat during his seven-year Tour de France winning spree. Here is a list, by year, of every top-five contender who “tested positive or was sanctioned or sacked at some point in their career, either prior or subsequently.” (Source: Cycling Weekly.)

Dopers among Lance’s Tour de France competitors:

1999 – The second, fourth, and fifth placed riders (Zulle, Dufaux, and Casero respectively)

2000 – Second through fifth (Ullrich, Beloki, Moreau, Heras)

2001 – Second, third, and fifth (Ullrich, Beloki, Gonzalez)

2002 – Second through fifth (Beloki, Rumsas, Botero, Gonzalez)

2003 – Second through fourth (Ullrich, Vinokourov, Hamilton)

2004 – Third and fourth (Basso and Ullrich)*

2005 – Second through fifth (Basso, Ullrich, Mancebo, Vinokourov)

(The asterisk for 2004 is for Andreas Klöden, who has never been sanctioned but paid a €25,000 fine to a German district court in return for dropping their investigation into eyewitness accounts of him blood doping in the 2006 Tour de France. Such a payment is not considered an admission of guilt under German law, but I think it deserves an asterisk.)

Given all this, it’s tempting to ask, “So what if Lance doped?” What are sports for, after all, but entertainment? If Lance was cleaner, or at least no dirtier, than the racers he was up against, and he put on a great show, isn’t that enough?

Of course not. Sports heroes are, well, heroes. Their fans—especially kids—look up to them as role models. How can we keep our kids flying straight when their favorite sports celebrities are setting such a bad example?

Ah, but the thoughtful albertnet reader has now latched onto something else: what about other celebrities that set a terrible example and go scot-free? Do a Google search on “Eminem drugs” and you get 2.38 million hits. And yet he’s never been arrested for drugs, nor has his drug use ever mired him in a public scandal. Meanwhile, he raps not only about personal drug abuse but about all kinds of violent acts, and consistently uses the most profane language he can think of. Why is it okay for this celebrity entertainer to do all this? Shouldn’t we hold him up to the same standard as Lance Armstrong?

In this post I examine these questions using Lance and Eminem as my case studies. Of course I’ll end up with a number of parts left over on the garage floor, but I hope to provide a useful perspective on the matter. (I hope I do better with this essay than with the pictures at the top. That’s the best photo I’ve personally taken of Lance, and with no pictures at all of Eminem I had to draw one.)

Why these two guys?

Certainly I could tackle this topic using different celebrities for my case studies. Why not choose a cycling icon like Jan Ullrich who was actually found guilty? And how about an entertainer like Lenny Bruce, who did get in legal trouble for his foul mouth, and died of a drug overdose? I chose Lance and Eminem because for many years they’ve almost blurred together in my mind. Both have achieved incredible success at the highest level as relative interlopers in their fields. Lance, as an American in a largely European sport, has won more Tours de France than any other rider in history. Eminem, a white musician in a black-dominated rap music scene, has had six consecutive number one albums, and has sold more than 80 million albums worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musical artists in the world. Lance and Eminem also had similarities in their upbringings: neither of them knew his father, and each had a stepfather with whom he didn’t get along. Moreover, they are both very bold, brash characters, perfectly willing to rail against the status quo. Heck, they even look similar. I have often thought that if Lance rapped instead of rode, he’d be Eminem, and if Eminem had athletic instead of musical talent, he’d be Lance. It just seems like a natural pairing for this essay.

Caveat

I will make no attempt in this post to establish whether or not Lance ever doped. I don’t know the man, and I don’t know any of the riders who raced the Tour de France as his teammate. I have no special insight into the question of his guilt vs. innocence, and would be an idiot if I thought mere intuition mattered one iota here. I will stick with only know is widely known: 1) Lance has been repeatedly accused of doping; and 2) Lance has never tested positive, nor has he been convicted of sporting fraud of any kind. I will not confuse allegations with established fact. The point here is to explore the issue of drug use by celebrities and why it matters.

Role model

The accusations against Lance Armstrong have a special sting for the public specifically because his story is so heroic. He didn’t just win the Tour de France—he did it after almost dying of cancer. To look at a photo of him bald and sick, and then consider that he fought back and went on to win the greatest race on earth: of course it’s inspirational. And to believe won clean, against opponents who weren’t, is like a triumph of good over evil. It tells us that doping is just a shortcut to success for the lazy, and that real determination, careful planning, and perfect training (when combined with huge talent) really can carry the day. It’s the greatest evidence possible for the notion that you don’t have to cheat to win.

Lance’s case, then, becomes a battle between idealism and cynicism. Consider the following quotes:

Lance (in Nike commercial): “Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, bustin’ my ass, six hours a day. What are you on?”

Wall Street Journal interview: “[Landis had] heard that the elite cyclists at the most grueling races used exotic and prohibited blood additives and synthetic drugs. Far from being repelled by this, he said, he had come to assume doping was part of the sport and, if he joined a top team, would be part of his job.”

Cynicism

For aspiring bike racers, the question of whether you can win without doping is obviously hugely important: the conclusion a young racer comes to on this may decide whether he continues riding clean, decides to dope, or quits the sport entirely. But the matter extends well beyond bike racing, since sport is so often used as a metaphor for all human endeavor.

In 2006, not long after Landis had appeared to win the Tour de France (but before his positive drug test), my daughter Alexa was upset over her team’s loss in a soccer game, and I had a talk with her. My thesis: most people, even champions, lose much of the time. I used cycling as my example. “Who won the Tour this year?” I asked Alexa. She replied, “Floyd Landis.” (We’d watched the race together on TV.) I said, “Good. But did he win on Alpe d’Huez?” She said, “Um, no.” Right, I told her: he had a terrible day there, lost the yellow jersey, and seemed to be totally out of the running—but he never lost hope, and went on to win the general classification. Inspirational! (In case you think kids don’t listen to such lectures, consider that when I followed up by asking who did win the Alpe d’Huez stage, Lindsay—three years old at the time—piped up, “Fränk Schleck!”)

Of course, my Landis lecture only made its point because we thought he was clean. It wouldn’t do to say to my daughter, “Did Floyd give up after Alpe d’Huez? No! He lubed himself up with a transfusion of EPO-enriched blood, slapped some testosterone patches on his balls, and crushed everybody in the next stage. Then, in the final time trial, still coked to the gills, he bested Pereiro to take the GC victory!”

It’s not hard for people, especially young and idealistic ones, to extrapolate from sports to the rest of life. A scene in “Breaking Away” depicts this wonderfully. The young hero, Dave, has argued with his father Ray, who refused to honor a verbal guarantee he’d given to a customer of his used car lot. Ray has suffered a heart attack from the altercation. Subsequently, Dave has been deliberately crashed in a bike race by one of his heroes, an Italian on the Cinzano team. Now, welcoming his father home from the hospital, Dave embraces him and apologizes, sobbing, “Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know.” His prickly father awkwardly pats his son’s back and says, “Well … now you know.” Ray looks over to his wife, her eyes shiny with tears, and says, “Well? Talk to him, Evelyn!” It is the most touching moment in all of cinema. Fortunately for the viewers, Dave doesn’t take the cynical lesson to heart, and goes on to win the Little Indy 500 bike race. The joy in his victory salute signals redemption. Thus, the movie is inspirational instead of nihilistic, a triumph of idealism over cynicism.

Obviously Lance is only one racer, and cycling is only one sport, so this doesn’t all rest on his shoulders. But given the transgressions of other sports figures, we’re starting to run out of heroes. With the most recent Tour de France winner, Alberto Contador, now mired in a doping scandal, the matter of Lance’s innocence may represent the difference between a slightly vs. wholly corrupted sport. Were eight of the last twelve Tours won clean, or only one?

The entertainer

Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, doesn’t have a cancer research foundation; isn’t a magnet for product endorsements; isn’t anybody we talk to our grade-school kids about. Nobody expects Eminem to follow any rules or be a good role model for anybody. Nobody wakes him up in the morning to give him a drug test. He raps about whatever he feels like: sex, drugs, violence, whatever strikes his fancy. His net worth, a quick Google search tells me, is about $115 million, somewhat similar to Lance Armstrong’s. So: where does Eminem get off? Should we be outraged with this guy, who raps about all kinds of antisocial acts while acknowledging that his music “is for the kids’ amusement”?

I would argue, actually, that Eminem and other entertainers should be held to an entirely different standard from that of pro athletes. With any artist—musical, painting, literary—there is a divide between life and art. We appreciate the work (or not), whether or not we approve of the artist’s conduct in the rest of his life. How an athlete treats his body has everything to do with his performance, whereas for the artist an unhealthy lifestyle might simply be an unfortunate distraction.

Good art can be about anything and doesn’t have to be wholesome; after all, Shakespeare wrote plays about murder, suicide, war, and promiscuity. William Blake’s paintings were dark and often unnerving but no art critic would say Thomas Kincade’s Disney-esque works are in any way superior. You might well look at a painting, or hear a song on the radio, and have no idea—nor any interest—in who created it.

In the case of Marshall Mathers, the creator is even further removed. He has an alter ego—Slim Shady—nested inside another alter ego, Eminem. The narrative voice in his music is like a set of Russian dolls. We can ignore the true identity of the musician, while appreciating the music on its own merit. With an athlete, on the other hand, he and his work are one and the same.

No role model

As a young cyclist, I dreamed of following in the footsteps of cycling heroes like Greg LeMond and Andy Hampsten. Creating for myself a simulacrum of their gaunt physique, even down to the shaved legs, was a given. Watching Andy eat a big bowl of granola, fruit, and plain yogurt for dinner made me wonder if I could stand to do that myself.

I don’t think it’s the same with the fans of other entertainers and artists. The budding painter might well admire the works of Van Gogh, but he wouldn’t want to be Van Gogh; Van Gogh was depressed for years and eventually killed himself. Unlike with sport, it’s not even tempting to believe that emulating an artist’s behavior will help the struggling newcomer to achieve the master’s success. Nobody ever cut his ear off in hopes of painting like Van Gogh.

But in the case of Eminem, might not our impressionable teens be tempted to emulate his bad living, just because he’s so cool? Well, Eminem himself mocks any fan who would try to mimic his misbehaviors; an entire song, “Role Model,” is devoted to this mockery: “I got genital warts and it burns when I pee/ Don’t you wanna grow up to be just like me? I tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree/ You probably wanna grow up to be just like me!” Another song, “Stan,” paints a picture of an obsessed fan who carries out numerous self-destructive acts that Eminem has rapped about. Eminem responds to Stan, “And what’s this shit about/ You like to cut your wrist too?/ I say that shit just clownin’ dawg/ C’mon, how fucked up is you?”

Of course, a dumb teen could ignore all the lyrics and see Eminem as an example of how you can use drugs and still be successful. A high-achieving drug abuser certainly does set a bad example; a high school friend of mine greatly admired a stoner named Paul who—though perpetually high—still got straight As. Paul was an unfortunate influence on my friend’s behavior; my friend got the drug part down without managing the good grades. (A couple of years after college, I ran into Paul in a Kinko’s, where he was working. He will be a cautionary tale for my daughters when the time comes.) Should we be down on Eminem for conveying the idea that some winners do use drugs?

No, because—predictably enough—Eminem got his comeuppance for his substance-abuse recklessness. In an early song he suggested, with little apparent concern, that drugs would one day get the better of him: “But in the long run/ These drugs are probably going to catch up sooner or later/ But fuck it, I’m on one/ So let’s enjoy/ Let the X destroy your spinal cord/ So it’s not a straight line no more.” This song, of course, would rightfully have teens’ parents fuming.

Sure enough, the drugs do catch up with Eminem in the long run, which he candidly admits in a song. This time he isn’t so breezy: “So I take a Vicodin, splash, it hits my stomach and ah/ A couple weeks go by it ain’t even like I'm getting high/ Now I need it just not to feel sick, like I’m getting by … Just to be able to function throughout the day. Let’s see/ That's an Ambien each nap, how many Valium, three?/ And that will average out to about one good hour’s sleep/ OK, so now you see the reason how come he/ Has taken four years just too put out an album beat/ See you and me, we almost had the same outcome, Heath.” The song starts out with a creepy skit of an EMT radioing ahead to the ER: “We have a mid-30s male found down, unresponsive, possible overdose, substance unknown ... he’s intubated and we’re bagging him now .. we’ll update en route, ETA 10 minutes.”

(Aside from his slippery, flippant Slim Shady and Eminem personas, Mathers the man corroborates his drug problems, candidly telling a reporter, “I overdosed and almost died.”)

I bother with all this detail to make a point: plenty of cyclists have been suspended for doping, but how many of them have spoken candidly about the real dangers involved? We’ve heard some remorse, sure, and some predictable fluff about turning over a new leaf, etc., but where are the tales of how scary it is getting a blood transfusion in a motel room, or injecting something you bought from a stranger on the Internet? Where’s the lurid tale, equivalent to Eminem’s, to scare our junior cyclists away from doping? Eminem’s carte blanche to rap about whatever he feels like gives him, in this case, the opportunity to give us a visceral sense of the danger of illicit drugs. Where Eminem is brutally honest, doping cyclists—even convicted ones—often continue being as secretive as possible.

The key difference

Doping bike racers may also get their comeuppance, as Landis has shown. The key difference is that when the missteps of an entertainer are made public (either voluntarily or not), a happy ending is possible. After his four unproductive years of drug addiction, Eminem got clean, and subsequently came out with two albums less than a year apart, each of them better than the one before it. His fans can take some heart in the whole sordid affair—on his new album, he often sounds jubilant. Far from being made more cynical by his story, we may develop more empathy for people with substance abuse problems, and Eminem’s recovery is a message of hope. At a minimum, his fans can go on enjoying his music—everything he ever recorded, no asterisks required.

The story of an athlete caught doping, on the other hand, cannot have a happy ending. Our past admiration for the athlete is shattered, and even after he returns from suspension his future exploits cannot be thoroughly enjoyed. Either he goes on to race poorly, highlighting the extent to which his prior success was dope-fueled, or he races well, raising our suspicions that he’s back on the lube. Above all, when a doping athlete is exposed, his fans feel like they’ve been duped, like he’s insulted their intelligence, played them and everybody else for suckers.

An artist (whatever type) who behaves irresponsibly doesn’t do it in the service of his art, and his work can be judged separately from his deeds. His output isn’t improved by the bad behavior; you can’t say, “Sure, that was a good album, but it doesn’t count—he was on drugs!” (The exception would be plagiarism, yellow journalism or deliberate falsification of one’s past in a supposedly straightforward autobiography. At this point, Lance’s autobiography looks like a larger target for accusations of falsehood than Eminem’s, whether such accusations are valid or not.)

With sport, the star who takes dope isn’t really a star. His success is false; his entire oeuvre as stamped out by his lie. I can’t imagine going back and re-watching Landis “winning” Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France; the spectacle would just make me angry.

It’s especially awful when the doper denies wrongdoing and drags the public through a long legal process; Floyd Landis—before finally admitting guilt—even created a legal defense fund that raised about a million dollars from well-meaning fans sending in contributions. Everyone who believed in him is a victim of his deceit: fans, teammates, managers, sponsors, companies he endorsed ... the list goes on and on.

Also victimized are all the clean racers deprived of glory by dopers stealing it. Cadel Evans, who lost the 2007 Tour de France to Contador by a mere 23 seconds, must be particularly interested in, and infuriated by, Contador’s recent positive drug test. He may assume, as I do, that a rider is either fundamentally clean or fundamentally not; I’d say if Contador cheated in this year’s Tour, he likely cheated the other times he “won” it as well.

The collateral damage with Eminem’s drug addiction was, I would guess, largely limited to his close friends and family.

The Lance Factor

In the long history of the Tour de France, only one rider—Landis—has been stripped of his victory due to a failed doping test. For Contador, a three-time winner, to be convicted would be a much bigger deal. But Lance? Seven victories, eight podium finishes! His legacy casts a long shadow over everyone else’s in the modern sport. His autobiography was a #1 New York Times bestseller. His foundation has sold over 70 million Livestrong bracelets. Livestrong Day, last Saturday, comprised more than 1,100 events in 64 different countries. Lance offers a message of hope to 28 million cancer survivors. Surely his bravery in the face of cancer, and his dedication to his sport, would be impressive whether he’s clean or not. But so much hinges on his innocence.

A bike riding friend of mine told me, “I was talking to a colleague, who’s not a cyclist, and when the subject of Lance came up she said, ‘Don’t you dare say anything to me about Lance and doping. I don’t want to hear it. I couldn’t take it if he were a cheater.’” Far beyond the reaches of sport—and how many Americans follow cycling, anyway?—there is a societal need for Lance to be innocent, for him to have been telling the truth all along.

As for Eminem, he has nothing to lie about: his entire approach to his music is to share absolutely everything about himself, the more wretched the better. About the worst scandal I can imagine for him would be if it turned out he came from a comfortable middle-class home and was raised by two loving parents. Outside of this Beaver Cleaver scenario, he’s safe: his legend can handle any amount of debauchery.

That, I think, is why sports heroes must hold to a higher standard than other entertainers. With widespread idealism vs. cynicism at stake, we have to hope that sports heroes like Lance are racing clean.

Final note

I’ve struggled with this post. It’s a complicated subject matter and my own opinion has morphed repeatedly over the years, months, and weeks. I’ve tried to do the topic justice, but am well aware I’ve left the door wide open to disagreement and criticism; I hope at least that I’ve avoided offending anybody. (In 2004 I wrote an article about doping for the Daily Peloton that really offended some guy. He posted numerous diatribes against my story on the dp bulletin board, even asking the editor to yank the story. She eventually had to tell him to stop. I suppose I wouldn't mind offending a guy like that, actually.)

Back in college a teacher gave me a bad grade on a paper and summoned me to her office to discuss it. After pointing out the paper's many flaws, she concluded, “I’m glad you wrote this paper. I like to see you getting outside your comfort zone.” In that spirit, I’m going to post this Lance/Eminem essay now, though my temptation is to tinker with it some more, sleep on it, and forever postpone deciding it’s really done.

I welcome your feedback. Post your comments below, and/or click here to e-mail me.

dana albert blog