See Me Squeegee

Alright…now that I have confirmation that I have at least one reader for these weekly TdF recaps, let’s do it!  Everyone else, you’re welcome to join Katie and me in this pen-pal-peloton.  Thoughts on week one:

The Course

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…  The Tour organizers put together an unbelievable course this year – even in just the first week we had great attacks in the Pyrenees, a really cool tour of Corsica with some hills, a Team Time Trial to shake up GC…  And that’s well, well before the Individual Time Trial at Mont Ste. Michel, the double-loop of l’Alp d’Huez, the ride up Ventoux, and the longer-than-usual flat stages between the ITT and the Alps to get from Brittany to the Alps in a few days.  Should be amazing.

But then again…that team bus getting stuck under the finish banner was stolen straight out of George Michael Bluth’s playbook from the new season of Arrested Development.  While none of the major competitors abandoned due to the crashes that ensued, several big names were affected – Contador had to hit the hospital (and hasn’t seemed himself in the mountains), Cavendish was dinged up (and other than his one stage win he’s been noticeably absent on several sprint finishes).  Tricky beginning for sure, and hopefully today’s rest day clears guys up for a great week two and an epic week three.

Jan Bakelants in Yellow

That goofy Belgian was a beneficiary of the scattered finish to stage one, the everyone-gets-the-same-GC-time aftermath, and all that, and spent a couple glorious days in yellow.  The jersey really does give you wings, too – so fun to watch that guy, I think in his first Tour, at the top of the world.  The first week of the Tour is always fun because of the unusual suspects in yellow.  This year’s didn’t disappoint at all.

Tommy Voeckler at it Again

This guy – every damn year he attacks with that same open-mouthed smile and open-jersey pedal dance.  If it’s a mountain stage on Bastille Day he’s attacking, and even if not, he just goes for it.  He’ll never win the polka dot jersey and he can’t time trial to save his life for GC, but he’s one of those fun traditions…he’ll happily attack, happily get caught, earn some respect for France and just add color to the Tour.  Love that guy.

Team Sky at it Again…

Here’s where I may get controversial. How is it that last year Team Sky not only wins yellow but has its top domestique (Chris Froome) look like the best guy in the race *even* while doing so much pacemaking; and then does it again this year only with Froome in yellow and Richie Porte playing the Froome role on the first Pyreneean stage?  More on the post-doping Tour era in a second, but doesn’t this give us a little pause?  What’s Sky doing that the others aren’t?  How can a guy do a ton of uphill pacemaking – at a heavy enough pace that the entire peloton drops off – and then keep up almost that same exact pace, faster than the rest of the field that’s been in his slipstream, to comfortably get second on the day?  It’s insane.  And I’m not even accusing Sky of anything…it’s just one of those lag effects from all the doping lately. You just have to question stuff now, which I think is sad. I hope they’re clean – I like Froome a lot – but with all the emphasis on doping and so many of the old guard guys out there (Schleck, Evans, Contador, Zubeldia) in somewhat of contention but with so much more to lose in terms of lifetime bans and legacy, can these upstarts just afford to risk a little more?  What’s going on?

…But then again maybe not

But then Sky gets outclassed yesterday, leaving Froome to admirably fend for himself against a few attacks while he was isolated.  So what do I know?  Maybe Sky just left it all out there on Pyrenees #1 and didn’t have anything left in this post-dope world.  What remains to be seen, though, is:

Is it World v. Froome?

I mean…the media have already crowned Froome the heir apparent to Wiggins (who…let’s just be honest, was just a far less than charismatic champion, making this Tour much more engaging than last year’s), and now Froome has a comfortable GC lead and pretty clearly the strongest team.  He got attacked a little yesterday but why doesn’t the entire peloton just go after him to shake things up?  Quintana obviously has strong legs based on his attacks Saturday; Contador has to have some kick in him; Schleck should have something; Valverde has a lot to lose right now in second but then again the status quo leaves him still in second; and Evans, Rogers, Kloden, Cunego, Hesjedal…these are all legit names with legit ability and absolutely nothing to lose right now.  Stage wins, fellas.  Polka dot points.  Interest levels.  Let’s go!

And what about this – doesn’t Contador owe Schleck something after 2010?  Remember – Schleck is listed as the TdF champion that year only because Contador was stripped for  doping, but Schleck may have actually beaten Contador had Alberto not attacked when Andy’s chain popped on his attack and Alberto countered.  So he may owe him twice.  Now…Andy doesn’t seem to have GC form thus far, but if he picks it up doesn’t AC owe him some effort?  Or a chance to shake up the GC race and get Sky out of control at least?

I like Froome…but I want some drama here.  Fortunately the final week’s course all but ensures we’ll get it.

 Apres-Dope

So Contador was the last of the stripped titles; 2011 Cadel Evans got his and 2012 Bradley Wiggins won.  And both were pretty boring champions – partially because some of the top would-be contenders were suspended for drugs, partially because they were both style-less guys (Contador has swagger on the pedals; Armstrong had swagger on the pedals; they stood up, rocked the bike, danced a little, attacked ferociously.  Wiggins and Evans just sit and grind…not nearly as stylish).  And partially because we had been spoiled by the doped-up attacks and solos.  Floyd Landis might as well have been Amy Winehouse he was so drugged up, but that one epic day he had was so much fun to watch.  Contador and Armstrong were Motley Crue in their “we’re on the same team but we’re juiced up on so much natural and synthetic testosterone that we’ll duke it out” Astana phase.  And it was fun.  But now?

Evans is a shade of himself only two years after winning it all.  Wiggins is gone.  Schleck is, at least in name (he doesn’t even consider himself the ’10 champ since he didn’t wear yellow into Paris), a defending champ but even at a still-young age he doesn’t seem to have the kick anymore. Clean-tador is a lot less dynamic than Contador.  It may just be that the Tour needs another couple years to fully erase the names and shadows of the dope era, but at least right now the lack of consistent contenders is a little disappointing.  At least for week one – but let’s see if Contador summons the magic, if Quintana and Movistar get organized, if the field attacks.  This Tour has a ton of potential and maybe this rush to all new blood – both literally and figuratively – happens quickly enough to make the last week one of the all-time greats.

In the meantime, this week I’m keeping my eye on:

• How much pacemaking does Sky have to do in the middle stages, and how well do they respond to the task?
• Does Cavendish live up to his comments today and make the green jersey a real competition?
• Does Voeckler go crazy on Ventoux on Bastille Day this coming Sunday (I may wake up at 3:30am to watch live, I’m that psyched…that’s the stage I attended in 2009 when Armstrong, Contador, and the Schleck brothers ascended in the lead together)
• Does Wednesday’s Time Trial shake up GC?  Do any of the mountain contenders – the Movistar guys, Quintana and Valverde, perhaps – surprise us with a TT that keeps the pressure on Sky and Froome?
• How much of a toll do the long Thursday-Sunday stages that lead to Ventoux take?  The Ventoux stage itself is almost 150 miles with that insane climb at the end.  Should be a punishing week with plenty of opportunities for things to get interesting…and that’s even before we see our first Alp!

 

Vive le Tour…

 

At first it seemed strange to write my thoughts on Week One of the Tour de France, because how many readers will care? But then again…how many readers do I really have? And of that group…Katie, Chad, Markus, Aunt Mary Anne…you guys care.  And Mom will forward it to Dad who cares but he probably won’t read.  So there you go.  This month’s feature: TdF commentary.  You’re welcome, both-or-all of you who read this!

So before I even start with my thoughts on Week One, let me do an intro.  Why should you care about the Tour?  Why now, even after 8 years of American back-to-backishness has been erased, Armstrong-to-Landis, for doping?  Why now, when the GC (general classification, the individual championship) is either a foregone conclusion for Chris Froome or a battle among lesser-knowns?  Why when the only two “name” Americans have all but been eliminated – Christian Vandevelde on a flight back to the States after a crash; Tejay Vangarderen following up a white jersey (“best young rider”) championship last year with some big-time struggles on the first Pyrenean stage?

Well, how about the word Pyrenean, for starters?  Here’s why the Tour matters, now more than ever and, in this humble blogger’s opinion, right up there with March Madness and college football and the NFL.

It’s a tour of France

And that’s more than just a first-semester translation…it really is an epic tour.  This year’s installment – the 100th – started on Corsica, progressed along the Riviera, headed into the Pyrenees, will head through Brittany past some amazing landmarks that include Mont Ste. Michel (which incidentally I know nothing about but I’ve seen photos and I’m thrilled to see it on TV), through the Loire Valley into Provence, into the Alps, and back through Paris.  Forget the Travel Channel, the History Channel, the Food Network, or any combination thereof…the Tour de France combines all of it along with sporting drama and adventure inspiration.  It’s amazing the things you learn – about the history of Corsica as a possession of multiple empires, the Roman ruins that extend well into Central France, the areas that the Allies managed to secure during WWII, the cuisine in Basque country vs. that of the Alps vs. that of the famous wine regions.

Not impressed?  I wouldn’t have been, but even a dude living here in the shadow of the Hollywood sign has to be amazed by the cinematography. This is a global event, covered by NBC in the States, Sky in Britain, Eurosport in much of Europe, etc.  They spare no expense with aerial footage of mountains, Rick Steeves quality travelogues of the small towns the Tour rolls through, adventure camera work down daring descents of steep, dramatic Alps.  The Tour is a triumph of photojournalism, and it gives you incredible access to one of the most beautiful and historic regions of the world.  For that alone it’s probably worth having on the in background while you Tweet or Instagram on your phone.  But wait, there’s more…

It’s an International Delight for the Senses

I’m biased; I’ve been there.  But you should love the Tour for the same reasons you love the Olympics or the World Cup.  People from around the world gather, waving colorful flags from their countries and states, and even cooler they do it from nationalities and districts you didn’t even know existed.  Catalonian Spain, the city of Luxembourg, the island of Corsica, the Island of Man…there are flags and chants and customs that show up all over the place to match the pageantry of the classics – your French flags, your Union Jacks, your Stars and Stripes, your off-kilter-lower-case-Ts from Scandinavia…  The Tour is one of the few free events of its level – to watch the Tour you just have to show up…although for the best stages you should show up days in advance to stake out a spot for your camper (or in my case, your rented Opal furnished with four boxes of granola bars and two cases of Vittel).  At every mountain stage there’s an unofficial area called “Dutch Corner” which typically sets up a week before the stage and which serves until the day after the race as the party zone – just show up, look friendly, and someone with consecutive matching vowels somewhere in their name (Koenraad von Oosterbaan, perhaps) will hand you a Heineken, raise his along while his mates do the same, and warn you that you’d better drink it fast.

For the TV viewer it’s a look at what’s great about humanity – people from around the world (yeah, mostly Europe but don’t forget your Aussies, your Kazakhs, the fact that a Columbian guy almost won yesterday, and the presence of quite a few North Americans) gathering in support somewhat of their home country but mostly of dedication, achievement, and camaraderie.  When cyclists get within 2-3 kilometers (mile, mile and a half) of the summit of a climb, the wall of humanity they pass through is incredible – costumes, flags, shirtlessness (and these are mainly Euros…it’s attractive shirtlessness, not NASCAR shirtlessness!).  The Tour is the Olympics without the overpriced corporate sponsor seats; it’s open to the public for anyone who cares enough to go and packs enough to drink.  And for those of us who don’t pack enough to drink, there’s Dutch Corner and some friendly British neighbors.

But why do the sports matter?  Why watch someone ride a bike when your kid can  ride a bike?  Well, there’s…

Many Events Among One

Here’s what ESPN-based America doesn’t get, what I didn’t get until fairly recently.  The Tour de France is about much more than the winner – or what we call “the winner”, the winner of GC.  Yes, it’s a three-week race in which the winner sometimes wins by only a minute.  And many days the standings don’t change at all.  And much of the time it doesn’t look like the potential winner isn’t really trying to win.  But there are reasons. So many wonderful reasons.  Here’s how it goes:

• Riders are exponentially more efficient when they’re riding behind – “in the slipstream of” – another rider.  It’s physics – when the guy in front of you clears the static air in front of you, you’re riding in essentially a vacuum, using significantly less energy.  It’s been said that it’s 30% less, 40% less energy.  Whatever it is, it’s noticeable.  I ride – when I’m behind someone after I’ve been pushing air for miles, there are times when I’m going 2-3 miles an hour faster and it doesn’t feel like I’m pedaling at all.  Aerodynamics are huge, which leads to:
• It’s a team game.  Because of the above, if you have a guy who’s one of the 5-6 guys who really *should* contend for the TdF title, you save his energy.  Someone has to cut through the wind – the aerodynamics only work when someone is doing that up front physics work.  And so every team has most its riders designated as “domestiques”, riders whose job it is to take the wind for the team leaders.  Which may seem like you’re letting the leaders coast, but it makes the strategy fascinating. Because domestiques get tired too, and they’re by nature not the best riders so their usefulness is limited.  and these races are always 100+ miles each day with wind, hills, and elements to contend with.  And what gets really interesting with this strategy is:
• GC (General Classification) riders tend to only attack when there’s a chance to get away from other GC contenders.  On flat stages with no major change in difficulty – either from a turn into devastating headwind or from an uphill tick that makes the ride that much tougher – there’s not much chance to get away, so the GC contenders and their domestiques are content to roll the status quo.  But…guys who won’t necessarily win the *race* might want to win the *stage*, and they have a lot to go for.  So they attack.  And when they take off, sprinting from the front of the group, someone has to chase.  But no team wants to waste its domestiques’ energy on a fool’s errand while the other teams rest for a big mountain day.  So the breakaways tend to get away until the main contenders calculate that they need to get serious.  It’s economics – I don’t care if Jibronie X is 3 minutes ahead…but I care if he’s 10 minutes away…that’s my breaking point and as soon as he hits that I have to take the lead to chase him down.  Which makes *every* stage interesting because *every* team is doing that calculus.  Including…
• The points competitions.  We all know the GC championship, the famous one won by Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong (but maybe not Lance Armstrong if you’re reading a recently-published World Almanac if they still sell those) (but, seriously, Lance Armstrong…we all saw it and everyone else in contention in those races has already been excommunicated for doping, too, but whatever).  But the Tour is more the Olympics, entire, than the Olympic 100 meters.  There are several champions, it’s just that one championship tends to reign a little more supreme.  But there are several other winners, including:
• The Green Jersey, given to the winner in “sprint points”.  Every flat stage has at least one “intermediate” sprint along the route, at which point the first 10*  riders to cross a certain line win points, and has about twice as many points given to the first 10* riders (in descending order – 1st gets 30, 2nd gets 27, etc.) to finish. (*and let’s just say 10…it could be something different but for the sake of explanation…let’s say 10).  Sprinters tend not to be great GC riders – their legs are too bulky, their bodies too heavy to get over the mountains as quickly.  But they’re amazing at diving away from the pack in the last 200-400 meters.  So their teams often take up chase in flat stages to get them to the front to have a great chance at winning the stage.
• The Poka-Dot Jersey, given to the “King of the Mountains”.  Like the sprint competition, on mountain stages there are points awarded to the first 10* riders to summit each “categorized” climb.  Mountains are put in the categories based on how steep/important they are, and points are awarded proportionally.  So while the GC contenders need to climb well, particularly on climbs before the end of a stage, KOM riders have more incentive to attack and burn energy – they can rack up points early in a 3-4 climb stage and not care about finish time whereas finish time is *all* the GC guys care about.
• The White Jersey, given to the “best young rider” (riders under 24) on GC time, which gives other riders a vested interest in attacking or defending.
• Cash prizes, for things like “first rider to the highest point on this year’s tour” give riders an interest in attacking.
• Stage wins – the winner of each day’s stage is honored, wins money, etc., meaning that even if eking out a 1-second victory is meaningless in the final results, it’s meaningful for many.
• The “incumbent’ Yellow Jersey.  The leader of the GC at the end of each day gets to wear yellow at the beginning of the next, a huge honor and a big prize, meaning that each day he and his team have a responsibility to “defend” the yellow jersey by trying to stay in first.

 

• All of this gives each stage flavor.  The GC riders have a wholly different goal from the other competition riders, and each contender – for green, yellow, polka-dot, white, stage – has a team trying to work for him.  Attacks are the name of the game – when a KOM contender attacks the field to get a head start on a mountain, the GC teams have to determine whether it’s worth chasing him to stay on his wheel.  Remember, if they stay on his wheel he works 50% harder and they get a free ride, so to speak, at his pace…but the minute he gets a 3-4 bike length lead (which isn’t that hard given the element of surprise over that long a day) they have to extend themselves trying to catch up, which is energy they may need later.  Particularly if…another GC contender “sends” his teammate on an attack, knowing that if his teammate gets away, that’s good news for the team; and if the opponent wastes energy chasing him down, that’s also good news.

 

Which just all goes to show –  every stage has something.  On flat stages, the sprint teams want to get their riders toward the finish line at the front of the field to sprint it out for the day’s title and the Green points, but they can’t chase down every attack immediately.  So there’s almost always a mad dash to the finish – the handful of “breakaway” riders, exhausted from not getting nearly the wind-shield ride that the big group got all day, trying like crazy to summon the energy to stay seconds ahead of the hard-charging sprint teams who hope they calculated right when they decided it was “go time” to chase and make up lost time on the field (remember – no team wants to lead the way and waste that energy, so they almost always wait until their “economic” breaking point to decide they have to do it).  And in the mountains, GC guys try to attack KOM guys try to attack, and virtually everyone is gambling that they have enough to stay away or that the other guy they’re letting get away doesn’t have it.  Plus, for every uphill that isn’t a “summit finish”, there’s a daredevil downhill at 60+ mph.

 

So why should you care about the Tour de France?  Because it’s an event unlike any other, but one that includes all that makes sports great.  Teamwork, international pageantry, multiple events in one, a beautiful and historic tour of an exotic land.  And it’s inspirational – yeah, there were once drugs and there are probably still drugs, but only because these guys are constantly pushing the limits of what’s humanly possible.  Recreational cyclists gear up for “century rides”, 100-mile Saturdays that take around 6 hours, multiple refill-the-water-bottle stops, etc.  These guys go over 100 EVERY DAY for three weeks, and they throw in the biggest mountains in France to spice things up.  The event is a triumph of international brotherhood, an Olympian meeting of the world for a greater cause.  But the race itself is a triumph of humanity, overcoming our limits and pushing them higher and higher.  There’s nothing like the Tour de France, and regardless of who’s winning or who’s competing, it’s worth watching.

Vive le Tour.

 

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.

So you know tonight’s news.  Lance Armstrong is giving up the fight against USADA and in doing so he’s being banned for life from athletic competition and being stripped of his Tour titles.  As a huge Lance fan who ran alongside him up Mont Ventoux in 2009, I’m disappointed.  Not necessarily in Lance, either, but more just in “the system”.  A quick summary of the doping saga in cycling includes:

-Lance under suspicion for years, despite years of negative test results

-Years in which Jan Ullrich, Lance’s biggest rival, did not compete because of suspicion of drugs (and I *think* that Ullrich may have eventually tested positive…I’ll get to that uncertainty later)

-Years in which Alberto Contador, the next-great-thing after Lance, has not competed because of drug suspicion (and he’s been caught, but I don’t think he’s had to give up all of his titles retroactively.  Pretty sure he gave up 2010, though, that epic duel with Andy Schleck)

-Years in which the guys who have won haven’t been all that impressive (Carlos Sastre for sure, and I’d put Cadel and Wiggo the last two years in that group) if only because the competition hasn’t been to the same level

-Floyd Landis losing his 2006 TDF title due to drugs, fighting it for years, then finally admitting that he did it and turning on Lance, a former teammate

-Similar behavior from other Lance teammates including Tyler Hamilton

And here’s where that leaves us. I’ve followed the Tour closely since Lance’s third title run in 2001, after I read his book “It’s Not About the Bike”.  So over 12 Tours that I’ve watched, Lance’s five, Landis’ one, and one of Contador’s titles have since been vacated; Conta had two others that are pretty damned suspicious; Sastre won an unremarkable title; and most years the field has been thin because so many guys were sitting out for drugs or just suspicion of drugs.  My question:

How the hell is this good for the sport?

More than half the Tour wins I’ve watched in my life don’t count now.  And like I said, I don’t even know for sure whether some of the biggest names in the sport were actually banned for doping or just suspected of it.  And I’m a big fan.  The pursuit of doping has ruined the sport, and yeah you could say that doping has ruined it but think about what we reward in sports.  Epic sacrifice in training; technological innovation in equipment, nutrition, and methods; “laying it all on the line”‘ etc.  Steroids and EPO just happen to fall on the wrong side of an imaginary line that we’ve drawn through all that.

So even independent of my opinions on Lance in particular, I offer these reasons why the sports world’s War on Drugs is as costly and ineffective as the American government’s war of the same name.

1) The war on drugs seeks to level the playing field, but that isn’t the effect.

Theoretically, getting rid of dopers would level the playing field.  But the problem is this – we know for a fact that we’re not catching everyone…far from it, in fact.  And we also know that the guys we “catch” are getting caught retroactively, years later.  This war on drugs isn’t making sports fairer, it’s just making them more confusing.  The guys who win may be clean, or they may just not have gotten caught.  I’d argue there’s some of the former and a ton of the latter, depending on the sport.  And as long as that latter group exists, we’ll never solve the problem – athletes will be willing to take that risk for the glory, the money, the lack of alternatives.  And we’ll continue with an uneven playing field, and worse…

2) The results are less conclusive than more.

Today doesn’t prove that Lance doped.  He’s had years of clean tests and the one test that they have on him these days is from his comeback after retirement, in 2010.  Years after his victories, in a Tour in which he placed third behind his own teammate (Contador, in fact).  USADA’s case against him was a lot of witness testimony, and testimony that USADA was dealing for in the form of clemency for those who testified against Lance.  Hearsay, bargained testimony, and one positive test in a sea of thousands of negative tests (probably well outside the tolerance of effectiveness for the tests…you could well argue that Lance was DUE for a false positive.

Now, it doesn’t prove that he didn’t dope, either.  But here’s what we have after the years of persecution of Lance, of Roger Clemens, of athletes all over the place:

We don’t know.

Clemens just won his case in federal court.  Does that mean he’s innocent?  Did he test positive?  Was that a civil case? Criminal?  Ask 100 sports fans and I doubt more than half will know, and that’s conservative.  I honestly don’t know, but I just heard on ESPN that he’s mounting a comeback.

And Lance?  We’ll never know for sure if Lance doped.  The tests, even, cannot directly test for the presence of drugs or not.   They simply test for symptoms – hematocrit or testosterone levels outside the normal tolerance.  The tests aren’t conclusive but they do suggest the possibility of drugs.  But we’ll never know.  With Lance, he’s a freak of nature to begin with – nearly all his measurements are above the 99th percentile.  So there’s one test out there for which those numbers are even crazier.  Do we really know?

The current system’s end result is confusion.  Who really won?  Did the guy who inherit the trophy after the winner was dethroned really win cleanly?  Or are we just not testing him as scrupulously because he didn’t, you know, really win?

And those we caught…did we really catch them, or did they fall into a trap?  Amy Van Dyken, the swimming gold medalist, was talking about Lance on the radio tonight, recounting a story of how she lost a world record because she tested positive…for asthma medication.  Her paperwork wasn’t on file at the doping office, and she had to fight to prove that she was allowed to take that drug for real medical reasons.  She almost lost that – and a year of competition – for a clerical error on the doping agency’s end.  Is this really fair?

3) The doping witch hunt ruins the sports experience

So did Roger Clemens really pitch those epic innings for the Yankees in playoff runs during his career?  Or do those not count?  Which seasons do we need to pretend didn’t happen?

Lance’s “positive” sample is from 2010.  But we’re supposed to ignore his titles from 1999-2005?  Who won those?  Ullrich, like I said, might have doped. Does he get credit for his second place finishes? Is he the winner now?

Think back three weeks to the women’s 400 IM at the Olympics and the Chinese girl who won that race going away.  Within seconds the commentators were speculating about drugs. How could she have won that convincingly?  Been that fast that late in the race?  Now every epic performance is suspect.  Was Alistair Brownlee doping in the Oly tri?  That was an amazing performance.  Did Bob Beamon performance-enhance that legendary long jump?  Jesse Owens in ’36?  Are we supposed to question every great performance?

The sad thing is that that’s where we’re headed, and it’s a no-win situation.  As Lance has often said, you can’t prove a negative.  If everyone says you doped even though your samples are clean, then the world assumes you’re guilty until we finally get our “proof”.  And maybe you did it…but if you didn’t that’s a long time to carry that burden.  And for us as fans, it’s a terrible way to live.  We can’t watch sports innocently now, because if someone is just a little too great we can’t enjoy it, we have to doubt.  And that’s a bummer, because my main point here is…

4) We shouldn’t really care.

Listen, these athletes are genetic freaks of nature.  They’re not you or me, or our kids someday.  They’re off the charts, winners of the genetic lottery.  LeBrons – 6’8″, 280 pound guys who run like the wind and seem to see 360 degrees around them…they’re almost not real.  Lance and his resting heart rate of, what, 9?  He’s only human because we haven’t defined him.

And they’re all on something.  If it’s not an illegal supplement it’s a barely legal supplement.  They get IVs for dehydration (while they advertise Gatorade to us); they have teams of trainers working on them after each workout; they use every supplement up to that line of “legal”, assuming that they don’t cross it entirely.  They’re using equipment that you’d have to mortgage your house in order to buy.  Sports isn’t a level playing field – it’s played by the genetically gifted with every technological advantage they can get. So why is there an imaginary line on “EPO” or “steroids”.  EPO provides similar results to sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, and that’s legal.

The argument is usually “health of the athlete”, but do we really care?  The Lance sage tonight was covered in between football highlights on ESPN – highlights that included huge hits (“he got…JACKED UP!” we celebrate), injury reports, and players who probably: 1) have been involved in bounty scandals and 2) will end up with degenerative brain conditions from their experience.  But we still watch football even after Dave Duerson and Junior Seau and Mike Utley and countless other brain/spine/suicide situations.  We don’t care.

And as for “what about the kids?” – ask Louis CK for his take on how that plays with the gay marriage debate:  “What should I tell my kids?  I don’t know…it’s your fucking kid.  Talk to him.”  If your 17-year old is taking steroids because he thinks he can play in the pros…odds are you’re a bad parent, because not that many kids are close enough where that will make a difference, and if it’s even suspected you should be following that situation closely.

So why do we care?  Someday I’ll post my article on how I think it’s all Rocky 4 and Ben Johnson (in which cases the hardworking American had to face the juiced-up foreigner).  But my main point is that we’re chasing a shadow with the doping pursuit.  We’re not stopping it and in doing so we’re ruining sports.  Because in summary…

5) I know sports aren’t real.

They’re an escape – they’re soap operas for dudes, mainly.  The Kardashians, Situations, Snookis and Sheens of the entertainment world are terrible people but they serve the same purpose as the gladiators and lions did in Rome.  They entertain us.  They give us something to look forward to at the end of a long day of work.  They give a random day in July, or January, or September, some extra meaning; they spark some adrenaline in us that we’ve lost over centuries of farming and office work.  We don’t fight for our food, shelter or safety.  Our senses are dull.  Entertainment allows us to feel.  It’s not real but it’s necessary.  So if we need to turn a blind eye to some artificial performance enhancers, well, it’s not like we haven’t turned blind eyes to some pretty disgusting off-the-field situations with Michael Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, Kobe Bryant, and others.

One last word on Lance.  A lot is being made of the negative effect that today’s events will have on “his legacy”.  Here’s Lance’s legacy:

The Lance Armstrong Foundation and Livestrong have raised over $500 million dollars for cancer research.

That’s real. Sports are not.  I don’t know if Lance doped or didn’t, but if a couple syringes and extra red blood cells put him in a position to raise more than half a billion dollars to fight the disease that nearly killed him and that may well try to kill all of us, I say it’s a pretty good tradeoff for mankind.  Not to mention the millions who have been inspired by Lance to get out on a bike; train for a marathon; try a triathlon; and make fitness a priority in their lives.

My aunt is running her first marathon in October; she’s a cancer survivor and got into endurance sports because of her experience with Livestrong.  My father, sister, and I will be running with her.

I picked up a bike because Lance inspired me, as I watched his Tour stages and read his book  while training for my first marathon in 2001.  I was a lazy, binge-drinking recent college grad, and I’ve since done something like 15 marathons and a couple Ironman triathlons, and fitness is a major part of my life.

I don’t know what Lance did.  And to a pretty large extent I don’t care.  His impact on the world’s health and fitness supersedes whether he cheated to beat a few other cheaters or he was just that good.  So because he’s an Armstrong, I’ll proclaim his antics this way – whether his step toward fairness was a small one in the right direction or the wrong direction, his contributions to cancer research and world health have been a giant leap for mankind.