See Me Squeegee

Author’s note: I’m a Lance Armstrong supporter.  Have been since I first read his book, “It’s Not About the Bike”.  It inspired me while training for my first marathon; the next summer, while watching the Tour de France, I bought a racing bike.  I’ve since done something like fifteen marathons and become a fairly legit triathlete.  Lance wasn’t the only reason and maybe I would have ended up here anyway, but he – or, rather, the world he turned me on to – was a big inspiration.   I watched the Oprah interviews this week as a fan, someone looking not for an admission (you had to know…) or even really an apology, but for the story.  And what we got seemed a little too scripted by a PR firm (“I’m not here to talk about anyone else” seven or eight times) and a little too “for the masses” for my tastes (I *get* the Tour de France and the cycling culture; I want to know more about why/how he did what he did than just what he did).

Most importantly, I know that the guy I rooted for and used as inspiration as an endurance athlete was more myth than man, and I’m okay with that.  But I did want to connect the two – I wanted the man to live a little closer to the myth, to give us more of a reason to still believe.  And I think the story is there, but got lost in the PR posturing and all that.  Here’s what I wish he would have said, and what I believe is pretty close to the truth:

LANCE:  Oprah, thanks for having me and giving me an opportunity to get some important things off my chest to the public.  As many have probably predicted – some for years, I’m here to do a few things.  I’m here to confess to using performance-enhancing drugs.  I’m here to confess to lying about for years and in some pretty awful ways.  I’m here to apologize to the many I’ve hurt – those who accused me, those who supported me, and those who believed in me.  And I’m here not to make any excuses or to try to spin the story, but to give an explanation.  I know that many will judge me for my actions and probably even more for the actions I didn’t take over those years, and I’ll fully admit that that judgment shouldn’t be altogether kind.  But as people judge the story and especially as those who supported and believed in me try to rationalize it, I want to at least explain what I did and why I did it.

I used performance enhancing drugs – EPO, testosterone, and blood transfusions.  I used them in every Tour de France I won, all seven of them.  And I lied about it.  I lied about almost every day for more than ten years now.  In doing so, I initiated lawsuits against those who accused me of what I actually did.  I went on the attack and said some nasty  things about those people and because of the pulpit I had acquired over time those nasty things hurt some people profoundly.  

So I confess to quite a big of what I’ve been accused of.  And although it’s hopelessly late and can’t begin to make it up to some of the people I’ve hurt, I apologize.  Deeply.  But, Oprah, I want to be specific about what I apologize for.  My PR folks have coached me on this interview and they’ve been adamant that my role here tonight is to be contrite and apologetic, to not point fingers or act defensive, and to look as sympathetic as I can.  And maybe this is the same kind of defiance that got me in all this trouble, but I’ve thought about it and I want to do it my way.  I want to apologize, but I don’t want to just look in a camera and say I’m sorry.  I want to truly be sorry, and there are some definite things that I’m truly, deeply sorry for:

I’m sorry for lying.  I’m sorry for what I did to the Andreus, to Floyd  Landis, to Tyler Hamilton, to Emma O’Reilly, responding to their true accusations with venomous falsehoods of my own.  I’m sorry for letting down the millions who believed in me – my fans, my teammates, and particularly the cancer survivors who have held me up as an inspiration.  They deserved a better hero, someone worthy of that adulation, and I’m certainly not him.

But if I’m being honest – and that’s one of the reasons I want to do this interview, Oprah, to finally be completely honest – I can’t completely say that I’m sorry for doping.  And I guess that’s where I want to start my story, an explanation that may be better for clearing my conscience than for clearing my name.  But to those who I apologies, I also owe the truth.

I did use performance enhancing drugs.  In 1999, as a recent cancer survivor given a new lease on life and a chance to return to elite professional cycling, I got together with my coaches and doctors and we determined that with my new body type – cancer and chemo had destroyed a lot of my muscle mass that had made me a pretty good sprinter in the early 90s – ironically was that much better suited to compete as a leading rider on a Tour team.  We decided that I should train to be a Tour champion – my measurables were in line with what the greats of the sport, the Miguel Indurains and Jan Ullrichs and eventually the Alberto Contadors, could post, so I had a chance to join them.

And here’s where being honest might hurt me a little, Oprah – I’m not here to talk about anyone else or point any fingers, but the culture of cycling at the time was such that…if I wanted to compete for championships, doping was going to have to be part of it.  If you look at the record book, the couple Tour champions before me and several immediately after me, well, they’ve all been convicted of doping.  If you look at the guys who finished second, third, and beyond behind me, if you wanted to take my championships and pass them down to them – you can’t.  They’ve been convicted of doping, too. And my mother taught me well – “everyone’s doing it” isn’t a valid excuse and I made my decisions alone and need to face the consequences.  But when I decided to use PEDs, I did so because I firmly believed I had to in order to compete, let alone win.

Now, let me explain myself a little.  Remember, I was less than two years from literally being left for dead by the cycling community.  My team – Cofidis – it used a “fitness” clause in my contract to drop me, to void the contract, while I was lying in a hospital bed not knowing whether I’d ever leave it.  I was an angry young man – angry that I had lost a few years of the prime of my career, angry that teams didn’t believe I had what it took to make it back as a professional.  So I had a lot to prove and a lot of motivation.  So, with a chance to prove everyone wrong and get back immediately not to just where I had left off but to a higher spot, I doped.

And here’s where it gets strange, Oprah – I doped to win a bike race.  I doped to win a three-week, two thousand mile bike race that received 30 minutes of TV coverage here in the States.  And when I won – even before that, when I started to watch my body get to that zone where it could win, and then when I won – I doped again so I could do it again.  I doped for myself and my teammates, maybe my sponsors.  

And then a funny thing happened, and I can’t claim in any way that I’m an innocent victim.  But one Tour win led to two, and during that the media picked up on my story, a cancer survivor who crawled off his deathbed and hopped on a bike and became the second American to ever win the world’s most famous bike race.  And I went from being a bike geek who nobody knew and now I’m doing shows like yours and they ask me to write a book and it becomes a bestseller.  And all the while, Oprah, I’m doping for me and I’m doping because that’s what I firmly believe – what I believe, what my trainers and coaches believe and what a lot of the cycling community might not have admitted publicly but what we all believed – a champion cyclist had to do.

But here’s the difference – now I have to make a decision.  In cycling all I ever had to do was pass the drug tests, and that was easy to do.  That’s why we all did it – it was easy to beat the test and so you knew that the winners of the races were going to be dirty and if you wanted to be among them you had to be dirty and beat the tests too.  But now I’m on your show and I’m doing interviews with Bob Costas and Dan Patrick and even Barbara Walters and Katie Couric.  And the President of the United States not only knows my name but wants me to participate in cancer research efforts in Washington.  And now when someone floats the idea that “maybe Lance is using drugs”, now I have reporters asking me that question directly.  And so now I’m not just beating drug tests, I’m lying, directly.

And this is the part that I don’t expect everyone – or maybe anyone – to understand.  But it’s a part of my story.  Once you start lying to claim that you’re innocent, you have to make a pretty conscious decision.  If you’re going to adamantly claim that you’re innocent you have to act like an innocent man would act.  So I can’t duck the question anymore by telling a French reporter that I don’t understand the language enough to answer it, and as one of the faces of the cancer survivor movement and someone on the front lines raising money for research and helping survivors believe in themselves to beat the disease, I  can’t turn down invitations to do your show or Larry King or Katie Couric even when I know they’re going to ask me directly about drugs.  An innocent man would do the show, raise the money and the profile of the cancer cause, and deny the allegations.

And in acting like an innocent man would act – when people came out and wrote articles or did interviews claiming, or I guess just stating the fact, that they knew I was a doper and lying about it, I had to deny it and when it kept coming I had to think like an innocent man.  An innocent man would lash back at them, might sue them for defamation or at least send out the message that these accusations wouldn’t be tolerated.

And, Oprah, I can’t claim that I did everything I did for cancer or for the survivors who believed in me.  I lived the high life and won the championships.  I enjoyed the heck out of winning and everything that came with it.  But did I ever want it to stop?  Did I regret that it had grown so big?  Yeah, at times.  All I really wanted to do when I got out of that hospital was to be a great cyclist again, to win major races and prove to myself that I could.  But then five, six years later I look up and every day I’m getting a hundred letters from cancer survivors thanking me for helping them beat the disease.  I’m in charge of one of the largest cancer fundraising organizations in the world and presidents and Oscar winners and athletes all over the world are wearing the Livestrong bracelets and I’m the guy who knows this dirty little secret that a good part of that empire is built on a lie.

So what can I do?  I’ve beaten the tests and no one has successfully pinned doping on me.  If I stay the course – and honestly I felt pretty committed to it whether I wanted to stop it or not – I might be able to avoid letting everyone down.  And I can certainly avoid having to pull the rug out from under the foundation and the cancer community and, yeah, this incredible life of wealth and success that I enjoyed.  

So here I am.  I’ve been caught and I guess if I can liken it to my cycling career, we always said that the hardest thing in the world was defending the yellow jersey.  You wanted that jersey on the last day of the Tour but you really didn’t want it at the beginning because honor and pride requires you to defend it and it’s just too taxing to take on that responsibility.  I’ve been defending my own yellow jersey for years now – this myth about me that I’m complicit in creating but that I never imagined would take on the life that it did. And in a way it feels pretty good to give it up, because like the yellow jersey it feels great at times to wear the badge of “hero” and “icon” and all of those things, but particularly when you achieve it how I did, it’s a heavy burden to have to defend every day.

I apologize to all I’ve hurt and to everyone I’ve lied to.  I know in the hearts of most I’ll be remembered more as a cheater than as a champion and more as a liar than as an inspiration.  And that’s fair.  But I hope I’m also remembered for the good I tried to do with the opportunity I was given, and that cancer survivors keep that spirit that survival and beyond, anything is possible.  Maybe its narcissistic or arrogant but I’m still proud of what I accomplished – what we accomplished, with my teammates and coaches – in cycling and I know that the overall perception will be that this admission changes everything, but for those stricken with cancer who want to believe I hope they can believe in achieving greatness because it is possible and maybe they can just be better people than me and do it totally clean, too.  I know that I have a lot of apologies to give and that they’ll probably never all be accepted, but I hope that many can accept me for what I am – a human being who made mistakes but who hopes to still make the best of opportunities.  I accept that I’ll be judged and that the judgment won’t be flattering, but I’m going to keep fighting the good fight against cancer and I hope to make it up to everyone I let down.