Is having testicular cancer really fortuitous? If so, you have to be really desparate for a break
Armstrong got a lucky roll of the genetic dice when he contracted the testicular cancer in 1996 that nearly killed him. His luck wasn’t merely in surviving (and Armstrong, in his own tell-nothing memoir, It’s Not About the Bike, accepts it was luck: ‘The cancer does not care if you are a good or bad person’).
Cancer also changed his body shape, making him much thinner and leaner. Before he got sick Armstrong was a top rider but few people’s idea of a future Tour de France winner: he was far too bulky, good for speed and for barrelling his way through one-off road races, but unlikely to survive the rigours of a three-week grind through the French countryside.
Armstrong’s pre-cancer physique probably had something to do with steroids Armstrong’s pre-cancer physique probably had something to do with steroids, and the steroids may or may not have contributed to his getting cancer: we can’t know.
In a conversation with his doctors during his cancer treatment that Armstrong now denies ever took place, but which two friends who were in the room at the time have testified under oath to hearing, he admitted that he had been taking EPO, cortisone, testosterone, growth hormone and steroids.
When he emerged from his truly gruelling chemotherapy regime, he seems to have realised that it made no sense to carry on as before. He was not going to dope indiscriminately. He was going to tailor his drug-taking to go for endurance rather than brute strength.
Blood-doping was what gave Armstrong a shot at becoming one of the legends of the sport. But it is clear that in his own mind what made the difference was how he doped: he simply did it better than anyone else, more creatively, more ruthlessly, more fearlessly. He exploited the same opportunities that were available to everyone. For Armstrong, drugs added an extra element of competition to the sport: the competition to be the person who made best use of the drugs.
Armstrongs justifciation "‘Whatever you do, you can bet those other fuckers are doing more.
Armstrong never doubted that everyone was at it. His mantra, according to Hamilton, was: ‘Whatever you do, those other fuckers are doing more.’ So there was nothing to be gained by being squeamish. The challenge was to be ahead of the curve. Armstrong hired the ‘best’ doctors (meaning both the most imaginative and the most unscrupulous), monitored the latest developments in testing and research, kept a fearsomely beady eye on his own teammates as well as on the performance of rival teams, and paid out of his own pocket to secure his supply. He was all over it, and that’s what made him a winner.
Before the Olympics began in Londin in 2012, there were fears that the event would be overshadowed by a drugs scandal or by the steady drip-drip of multiple failed drugs tests. In the end, although a few athletes were caught (including the winner of the gold in the women’s shot put and an American judo competitor who blamed his positive marijuana test on eating the wrong cakes!!!).
When it comes to drugs in sport, what matters is how the incentives are aligned: the incentives of the people who might take them and the incentives of the people who might stop them. In some sports the temptations for the athletes are relatively slight
Premier League footballers might mess around more than they should with recreational drugs; but the use of performance-enhancing drugs is unlikely to be commonplace, since the skills required at the highest level in football are so various. The clearest evidence for this is the wide variety of body shapes you see in the top leagues. The world’s best player, Lionel Messi, did take growth hormones as a child to compensate for a height deficiency. Without them he would not have grown much above 4'7"; even now he is only a dumpy 5'7". He is also amazingly durable (he has played the full ninety minutes in his last hundred appearances for Barcelona), which can be an effect of steroid use. But you don’t get to be like Messi by taking steroids: no one sets out to be a dumpy 5'7". In American football, by contrast, steroid abuse is almost certainly widespread. Here, being the right shape – big and strong – and having the ability to recover quickly from injuries are the primary requirements in many positions. NFL players do not often fail drugs tests, but that does not mean the sport is clean. It means the people who run the sport are not overconcerned about the players’ underlying health: it would be bad for business,
The clearest evidence for this is the brain damage we know is caused to American footballers by the repeated head trauma they undergo, which the helmets they wear do little to protect them from. The people who run the sport have done next to nothing about that either.
However, there has never been a sport where the incentives of the drug-takers and the drug-testers have been so out of kilter as in professional cycling during the Lance Armstrong era, which ran from the mid-1990s until a few weeks ago. The temptation for the cyclists to cheat was almost irresistible, once it became clear that ‘blood-doping’ – the use of erythropoietin (EPO) and blood transfusions to increase the levels of oxygen-carrying red cells in the bloodstream – could give them a clear advantage in the big races, including the three-week-long Tour de France, the sport’s premier event. How large an advantage is open to dispute: one study puts the increase in ‘peak power output’ for recreational cyclists taking EPO at 12-15 per cent, which translates into an 80 per cent increase in endurance (time riding at 80 per cent of maximum capacity). Professional cyclists are already operating at much closer to maximum capacity than recreational riders, but even if EPO gave the top riders only a 5 per cent boost, that could be the difference, as Tyler Hamilton puts it, ‘between first place in the Tour de France and the middle of the pack’.
But it would be a mistake to assume that most cyclists doped in order to give themselves a shot at ultimate glory. In many ways the biggest difference is not between coming first and being in the pack, but between being in the pack and not being in the race at all. Professional cycling is a team sport, and most members of the team are there to support the team’s star riders, who might have a chance to win. Their job is to do the donkey work, protect their leader, chase down rivals and sacrifice themselves for the common good. It is often soul-destroying work; it can also be very well paid. Tyler Hamilton started taking drugs, as he reveals in this gripping tell-all memoir, to give himself a shot at being part of a successful team. It meant the difference between scraping a living on the fringes of the circuit and becoming rich. Not Lance Armstrong rich; but non-sportsman rich. When Hamilton got onto Armstrong’s US Postal team he went from living on scraps to earning a six-figure salary. When Armstrong won the Tour de France with Hamilton’s help, that salary went up from $150,000 to $450,000. Hamilton’s fear when he was starting out was that he would not make the cut to be a Tour rider: blood-doping gave him the boost he needed to get in the game. This is consistent with the evidence from other sports. In baseball, for instance, studies suggest that the highest prevalence of steroid abuse is among players on the fringes of the major leagues. These are the guys with the most to lose by not taking drugs. It makes sense: the difference between the salaries of the top players can be measured in millions, but that’s because they are all being paid millions; the difference between being an obscure major league player and a permanent minor league player can be the difference between earning $500,000 a year and earning $50,000 – all the difference in the world.
Taking EPO was not without risks: the medical consequences were often unpredictable. It makes your blood ‘healthier’ in the sense that it makes it thicker, which can cause your arteries to clog up entirely if you are not careful. It is not clear how many cyclists died of heart attacks in the experimental phase of the EPO era, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the athletes were less adept at monitoring their reaction to the drug. They didn’t die on their bikes; they died in their sleep when the blood stopped moving (‘stories from that era tell of riders who set alarm clocks for the middle of the night so they could wake up and do some pulse-increasing callisthenics’). Why would super-fit athletes take such insane risks with their health? Part of the answer, as Hamilton explains, is that professional cycling is an inherently unhealthy sport.
It is, to start with, extremely dangerous: cyclists crash all the time, breaking bones and risking permanent injury. Then there is the need to eat the bare minimum consistent with surviving the demands of a long race. Along with having thick blood, the other crucial requirement for a Tour de France rider is to be extremely thin. Hamilton says that during his doping years he also had a borderline eating disorder, which meant he spent far more time thinking about the food he was keeping out of his body than he did about the drugs he was putting in. The truth is that long-distance road racers only feel healthy when they are on their bikes: the rest of the time they feel horribly out of shape. They are achy, wheezy, bent up; they walk like old men; they sit when other people are standing, and they lie down when other people are sitting. When Hamilton was at the height of his cycling powers, he infuriated his wife by being unable even to take a short walk with her to the shops: he never felt fit enough.
The other thing cyclists need is an extraordinary tolerance for pain. That, in many ways, is what the competition is about: who can hurt the most, for the longest, without cracking or doing something stupid. Hamilton’s calling card was his superhuman pain threshold: he became a legend of the sport in 2003 when he continued in the Tour de France despite having fractured his collarbone in a crash. The pain was so bad that he ended up grinding his teeth down to stumps. But he got to the finish, eventually placing fourth overall, and he even managed to win one of the most arduous mountain stages. It hurts just reading about it. Blood-doping does nothing to take the pain away; if anything, it makes the sport hurt more, because riders can push their bodies harder and for longer. For Hamilton, as for many of the other leading cyclists, doping did not constitute an unfair advantage. Instead, it was a way of sorting out who was really the toughest. In an extraordinary passage, Hamilton writes that EPO made the sport fairer, because it ‘granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both racing and training’. Races ‘weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on who you were. They depended on what you did – how hard you worked, how attentive and professional you were in your preparation.’ One of the frustrations for a rider like Hamilton had been the moments when he was willing to take the pain, but his body packed up anyway: cyclists call this ‘bonking’, the point where the metabolism shuts down regardless of the rider’s will to keep going. Blood-doping meant that if you could take the pain, your body would keep up. Now success would simply go to the person who wanted it more.
Hamilton’s memoir establishes beyond doubt that Armstrong is not a nice person to be around. His take-no-prisoners approach to all aspects of competition made him devious, insensitive and cruel. He bullied his teammates and then, when they showed signs of resistance, replaced them with someone more pliant. Hamilton was forced out after the 2001 Tour, which Armstrong won (the third of his seven consecutive victories), because his heroic performance made him suspect in Armstrong’s eyes: could he still be trusted to know his place? Armstrong even suspected that Hamilton might have been taking something ‘extra’, a new drug that he was keeping all to himself. As Hamilton points out, none of the cyclists taking EPO considered it cheating, because they all recognised that doping was what it took to compete (‘You could have hooked us up to the best lie detector on the planet and asked us if we were cheating, and we’d have passed’). But in this, as in everything else, Armstrong had to go further. He wasn’t just a cheat who thought he was doing nothing wrong; he managed to cast himself as a whistleblower. When he thought other athletes were taking drugs not available to him (his term for this was that their performance was ‘not normal’), he informed the authorities and asked that they be checked out. After a successful race in 2004 Hamilton found himself, to his alarm and astonishment, summoned to the headquarters of the sport’s governing body, the UCI, in Switzerland for a thinly veiled warning and dressing down about his ‘health’. Only later did he discover that it was Armstrong who had ratted him out.
It is commonplace in accounts of the Armstrong years to remark on his brash and abrasive Texan personality, which is what made him so unusual in the world of European cycling. No one had ever encountered someone quite so crude and so open in his desire to dominate: the Europeans were used to putting up at least a veneer of civility (which helps to explain cycling’s popularity among the intelligentsia). But Armstrong’s cowboy persona, though untypical of European sportsmen, perfectly suited his chosen sport, given the way it was regulated. One of the ironies of the sporting world is that Americans run their sports as though they were Europeans, and Europeans run theirs as though they were Americans. The NFL, for instance, is practically a socialist organisation, with its strict rules about redistribution between the richest and poorest teams and its tight regulation of unfair competitive advantage. The Tour de France, by contrast, is the Wild West. Teams get to take part on the basis of their ability to attract sponsorship, which often depends on the whims of some very unsavoury people. Money swirls around the sport, but little of it is being monitored. There is no job security and plenty of scope for bribery and coercion. The riders, Hamilton included, like to talk about the teams as though they were ‘families’. But these are more like the families that rule the five boroughs of New York than the ones where mum and dad keep an eye out for the kids.
Armstrong’s recovery from cancer and return to bike racing in 1998 coincided with the biggest scandal to hit the Tour de France in its history to that point. It broke when a Belgian physiotherapist working for the Festina team was stopped at the Belgian-French border with a car stuffed full of anabolic steroids, EPO, syringes and other doping products. The French police searched Festina’s headquarters and arrested the team’s chief, who eventually confessed to a widespread programme of blood-doping. Even the UCI, usually reluctant to act, had no choice but to expel Festina from the Tour. This event had two consequences, both of them highly favourable to Armstrong. First, the other riders, almost all of whom were also doping, had a choice to make: did they stop for fear of getting caught, or did they take matters into their own hands and start managing their own supplies of EPO? No one could trust their own team doctors, who were now under the suspicion of the French police. So they had to be creative. It became a world of smuggling and subterfuge: ‘Quick drop-offs in hotel parking lots from girlfriends, mechanics, cousins, a bartender friend of the coach. That’s how it works. The authorities shut one door, riders open two windows.’
If this was a ballsiness competition, then Armstrong, back from his near-death encounter with testicular cancer, was going to be the winner. No one was more fearless. This was the other thing that worked in his favour: the people in charge of the sport, having survived their own near-death experience in 1998, were desperate for a good news story to change the image of the Tour. Armstrong fitted the bill perfectly. His miraculous recovery was ideal cover. Accusing Armstrong of doping always seemed in desperately poor taste.
‘Racers used to say you could tape EPO syringes to your forehead and you wouldn’t get busted in Spain.
rest that has lots of good places to hide, and lots of rules that favour the hiders.’
Sometimes, the hiding was done in plain sight. During the 2002 Tour not a single rider failed a drugs test. This included Raimondas Rumsas, who finished third overall, and whose wife was caught with a cache of EPO, corticoids, testosterone, anabolics and HGH in the trunk of her car. She gamely claimed they were for her mother (who, as Hamilton writes, ‘must’ve been quite a racer’), and Rumsas got to keep his place on the podium.
He had also fallen foul of Armstrong’s unspoken rule for the sport, which was that you have to be better at breaking the rules than anyone else. If your doctors screwed up, you were at fault for having hired the wrong doctors. Armstrong knew that the medics who ended up servicing cyclists were there for two reasons: first, to make money (some were charging hundreds of thousands for their services); second, because a career in conventional medicine had somehow passed them by. These people were not to be trusted: had they been, they would have become regular doctors
If he hasn’t seen it, I recommend he takes a look at Ralph Fiennes’s recent film version of Coriolanus, for the magnificent scene in which the Roman responds to the news of his impending banishment from the city with the spit-flecked shriek: ‘I banish you.’ The real Alastair Campbell has always been one of Armstrong’s staunchest supporters. In an interview with Campbell in 2004, Armstrong told him: ‘Losing and dying: it’s the same thing.’ Campbell has described this as his favourite quote from his favourite interviewee.
Wiggins would have finished in the middle of the pack a decade ago. For many fans that is proof enough that the sport is now dope-free. Someone who knows far more about cycling than I do assured me that Wiggins’s Sky team, and the other British cyclists who won gold at the London Olympics, don’t do drugs. He says that if it turns out otherwise, he will never believe anything anyone says about anything ever again. Fingers crossed then.
Source David Runciman
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