I don’t know if Lance Armstrong doped.
And neither do you, unless you are an ex-teammate or confidant who actually witnessed it. And that can only prove his guilt, not his innocence, because it is impossible to prove the negative. But the events of the last few weeks have taken the whole Armstrong doping conversation, which has been going on for a decade now, to a whole new state, one in which it is now almost universally assumed that there was indeed systematic doping on the USPS team. And as the leader of that team through multiple cycling seasons and Tour de France victories, Lance would certainly seem to have almost certainly have had knowledge of such a program, even if he was somehow not personally involved.
Tyler Hamilton’s pained admissions under the bright lights of 60 Minutes last week seemed to be the tipping point. Watching his hesitations, his downcast and darting gaze focused anywhere but on the camera or the interview, and his frequent qualifications that “everybody did it” were enough to convince most observers that this was a guy who was telling the truth, and that it was torture for him to do it. At the same time, the ever smaller group of Armstrong defenders point to each of those things as evidence that Hamilton has made a Faustian deal to lie about the whole thing, cloaking his unquestioned guilt of doping and undeniable previous lies in a story that is at once full of specific details and lacking dates, times, and particularly corroboration.
Following are my own personal observations. They are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but hopefully will represent a slightly different perspective for those of you who haven’t followed this story in all its arcane detail, as I have.
I first met Lance Armstrong on May 7th, 1995, in Winston-Salem, NC. The occasion was the penultimate stage of the Tour du Pont, a long road stage won by the sprinters. My son and I were staying at the same hotel as the Motorola team, courtesy of an old boss of mine that was at that time a senior executive with Motorola. We had watched Lance finish in the pack from the VIP tent at the finish line. He was heading into the next day’s final stage, an individual time trial, holding a four minute and five second lead over the second place rider, a virtually insurmountable lead. We met him accidentally in the lobby after the race, and he could not have been nicer to my young son or me. This was a very pleasant surprise, as his public image at the time was one of an arrogant, brash jerk.
As cycling fans, we met Lance a few more times at the annual US Pro Championship, which was held in Philadelphia, including the year he returned to cycling following his cancer. He was always friendly, and especially nice to our kids. We became aware of the Lance Armstrong Foundation from a close friend who had worked as a volunteer at the annual Ride for the Roses in Austin Texas, a party and mass ride for the “Peloton Project,” a loose association of folks who worked as fundraisers for the Foundation. Following a good friend’s wife’s losing battle with breast cancer, and my wife’s cancer, I joined the Peloton Project and wound up riding in the Ride For the Roses for many years, four times as a “Yellow Jersey Team” member. This was a status conferred on only the highest level fundraisers world wide, and came with lots of perks, the most desirable being a short private ride with Lance out on one of his training courses in the Texas hill country. As a regional mentor for the Foundation and a Yellow Jersey guy, I had numerous occasions to talk with Lance over these years, which was at the same time he was winning the Tour every year, and of course exactly when all the USPS doping was supposedly going on. I personally asked Lance about the never-ending drug stories before the Yellow Jersey ride in October, 2008. It was then that I received the famous piercing blue-eyed stare, and his forceful personal denial of having ever used a performance-enhancing drug. “Never have, and never will,” is the quote I recall, and his delivery was indeed a bit scary in its intensity.
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When you look at the arguments that have been made about Lance and doping for at least the last ten years, there are two that are made over and over again: that his physiological performance numbers are flat out impossible without doping; the old “everybody was doing it” argument (pretty compelling when you look at the number of podium finishers in the Lance era of the Tour de France who have been implicated in doping.) And then of course there is the riveting testimony of Tyler Hamilton on 60 Minutes, with all of the attendant details like his assertion that the USPS team delivered drugs to riders in white lunch bags and the truly pitiful relation of his happiness at being selected to receive the drugs: “I mean, it's sad to say it, I was kinda willing and accepting of the lunch bag, but you know, in a way it was also an honor that, 'Wow, like, they think I'm good enough to be with the 'A' team guys.” There was also his corroboration of Floyd Landis’ previous claim that a positive test for the red-cell booster EPO had been suppressed by the testing lab at the request of international cycling officials.
So, the evidence is in, and there can be only one conclusion, right? Lance Armstrong used EPO to win his seven Tours de France. Nothing else makes sense, right?
Not so fast.
Even the most virulent Lance-haters will admit that virtually all of the “evidence” is circumstantial. There has been no “smoking gun” thus far. So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the evidence against the “Lance is a doper” argument, while admitting that it too is just as circumstantial.
To understand any of this, you don’t have to be a doctor, but you do have to understand the primary reason for doping and the primary drugs used. Sure, there are allegations of the use of testosterone, HGH, and others, but the primary allegation comes down to the use of EPO. EPO, short for Erythropoietin, is a hormone, created naturally in the kidneys and liver, which regulates the body’s production of red blood cells. Red blood cells carry oxygen to the muscles, and more red blood cells means more oxygen and, in high-intensity athletic endeavors, that means a huge aid in stamina, endurance and recovery. In a three-week, three thousand mile plus bike race that includes tens of thousands of feet of vertical climbing through some of France’s longest and steepest mountain passes, the difference between high and low red blood cell production can result in time differences measured in hours. Who wouldn’t be interested in a cheap pill that boosts red blood cell production? It should be no surprise that in the mid-90’s many, many professional bike racers were using this inexpensive drug, especially because EPO is a natural substance that is already present in the body. Even after cycling’s drug police knew about synthetic EPO and placed it on the long list of banned substances, it took several years to produce a reliable test for the synthetic form of the hormone. From the earliest tests to the much more sophisticated ones now available, the test indicates only a level of likelihood that an athlete is using, not a certainty. For this reason, athletes from the late 90’s on were tested not only for EPO (a urine test), but also for hematocrit, which is the percentage of blood volume occupied by red blood cells. By setting an arbitrary maximum percentage allowed for professional competition, authorities sought a secondary way to at least slow the use of blood-boosters like EPO.
Enough science. So, with most of the competitive riders during the time of Lance’s seven straight Tour victories presumably using EPO undetected, Lance could not possibly put up the numbers he did, right?
Well, let’s first remember that Lance didn’t win every stage of every Tour. He didn’t even win a majority of the tough climbing stages that require the most stamina and endurance and also the most effective recovery for the next day’s stage. Also, the effect of EPO is pretty straightforward, boosting red blood cell production. Could there possibly be another, drug-free, legal way to accomplish the exact same thing?
Why, yes, actually there is, and Lance pioneered its use.
It’s called hypoxic training, or altitude training, and the theory is very simple. If an athlete trains for a period of time at high altitude, the body reacts by increasing its production of natural EPO, in order to provide more red blood cells to take an adequate amount of oxygen out of the thinner air to drive the muscles. When an athlete who has trained in this manner returns to a lower altitude, he has an advantage over those who have trained at lower altitudes: he has more red blood cells, or a higher hematocrit. This is nothing new; cyclists have known the value of altitude training for years, and many professional teams routinely hold altitude training camps prior to major multi-day stage races. It is undeniable, however, that Lance and his coach, Chris Carmichael, took this approach to levels of scientific scrutiny and training intensity that were previously unheard of.
Lance is well known to be maniacally detail-oriented in every aspect of his training and racing. Every part on every bike he rides is measured, re-measured, tested, re-set, and re-measured and re-set ad infinitum. It should come as no surprise that he strove to maximize the positive effects of altitude training, and in the late 90’s he was the first athlete to travel with a new invention, the portable hypoxic sleeping chamber, or “oxygen tent.” It’s actually a negative oxygen tent, since instead of adding oxygen to the enclosed sleeping changer it uses a pump to reduce the amount of oxygen in the air, thus simulating high altitude. What this did for Lance was enable him to maintain his higher hematocrit (achieved pre-race through altitude training) for the long stretches that the Tour passes through at lower altitudes between the toughest mountain stages. If you look at Lance’s seven wins, many of his most dominant mountain rides have come toward the end of the Tour, where he had a clear advantage over lower-hematocrit riders. Today there is a whole industry around hypoxic training.
There is no question that Lane Armstrong is a uniquely gifted athlete. Ed Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, studied and tested Lance for 13 years, right up until his first retirement in 2006. Read the National Geographic article for the details. This brings up the frequent apologetic response I hear all the time: if no one had been doped, Lance would have won because he was the strongest; everybody was doped, including Lance, and he was the strongest, so what’s the big deal? Well, what if Lance had the identical advantage that was gained by popping a cheap EPO tablet, but achieved it by harder, more scientific training prior to Tours, and maintained it artificially (but legally, without drugs) with a portable hypoxic sleeping chamber during the Tours, putting him on an equal competitive footing with his chemically enhanced rivals. I remain amazed that you almost never hear about this.
But Lance has always been public about his use of altitude training and hypoxic chambers, and has discussed their use on the record many times. He has even spoken publicly of the team being so concerned when he started using the portable tent during the Tour that they were constantly testing his hematocrit, worried that he would go over the limit and be forced from the Tour on suspicion of EPO use. As a matter of fact, he stopped using the chambers during the Tour around 2004, and when I asked him why he told me that number one, he hated it because it was uncomfortable, making it hard to get adequate sleep, and number two, he felt that he and Chris Carmichael’s natural hypoxic training (living and training at altitude for carefully timed periods year-round) was having the same effect. My bet is he couldn’t get Sheryl Crow to sleep in a plastic tent.
Then there are the tests. Lance claims to be the most tested athlete in history, and even according to the French drug labs has never tested positive for any performance-enhancing drug. Of course, this proves nothing (can’t prove the negative) and I am well familiar with the comeback: the tests are easy to beat; just look at Marion Jones, the famous sprinter who famously never failed a drug test and eventually confessed to career-long doping, returned all her Olympic medals in disgrace, and went to jail. Apples to apples, right?
It is a documented fact that Lance has been tested over 500 times, far more than any cyclist in history, including every rider who has tested positive for anything illegal. Never positive. Marion Jones, you say? According to USADA documents, the official US anti-doping body that controls testing of Olympic athletes, Marion Jones was tested a total of 24 times between 2000 and 2008, roughly the same period as the Lance era. She was also almost always tested post-race, which veteran convicted dopers will tell you is the easiest to pass, as most doping takes place prior to competition so the advantages of the drugs like EPO are still in effect even though the drug is gone from the body. Lance, on the other hand, has been surprise-tested, the so called “out of competition” tests, over 150 times, at his home, on vacation, at training camps, pretty much anywhere at any time. Never positive.
So what about the second big argument, the eyewitness accounts? First, neither Floyd Landis’ nor Tyler Hamilton’s claims have a corroborating witness. No one has come forward and said: yes; I was there when Lance boasted of a “fixed” failed test for EPO. Or transfused. Or injected EPO. The fact is, there are more than 650 people who were in direct daily contact with Lance Armstrong for over a decade of professional racing, including team members, coaches, team directors, trainers, and team doctors, and the only two of those 650 who claim direct personal knowledge of Lance’s doping are two proven, documented, self-admitted cheaters and liars who have both had mental health issues. Doesn’t that strain credibility at least as much as the possibility that Landis and Hamilton are lying for personal gain (both are pursuing book deals) sour grapes over their career self-destruction, or both?
Then there’s the press and the investigations. Is it really credible that the entire French sports press was in full Lance-hunting mode for almost ten years, examining the teams garbage, bribing hotel maids, attempting to plant staff on the support teams, and more, and yet not one piece of solid physical evidence was ever found? Not one piece of rubber tubing, not a syringe, a blood bag, not even a driver or hotel maid willing to come forward and tell what they saw? In almost ten years? Plus there were two full-blown investigations involving the police, both of which ended, after years of probing, in dismissal of all allegations and admission that there was in fact no evidence. Even French cycling officials and the testing labs have issued strong statements denying the 60 Minutes allegations emphatically.
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As I have said repeatedly, none of this is proof of Lance’s innocence. I strongly suspect that we will never see proof of his doping or an admission of guilt. What I do expect to learn from the grand jury proceedings and any subsequent trial is whether on not there is evidence of a systematic doping program at the USPS team. Jeff Novitsky and his team of federal investigators will follow the money, just as they did on the Balco and Marion Jones cases, and they are very good at what they do. Whether they should be spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on stuff like this I will leave for another day.
I still don’t know if Lance doped.
But neither do you.
So, I’ve got the pot stirred up a bit. Here, you take the spoon….
(Comments welcome.)
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