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Can a Race Among Doped Cyclists Be Fair? One Former Armstrong Teammate Says No.

October 12, 2012, 9:17 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

Last Updated | Saturday, 1:38 p.m. Since Lance Armstrong waived his right to appeal the United States Anti-Doping Agency's finding that his victories in the Tour de France were aided by systematic doping - confirmed in the sworn testimony of 11 former teammates made public this week - some of his fans have suggested that, since it now appears that most of the professional peloton was doping at the same time, Armstrong should still be considered the winner of those races.

One of Armstrong's former teammates, Levi Leipheimer, wrote in his confession that professional cycling until recently was “a sport where some team managers and doctors coordinated and facilitated the use of ba nned substances and methods by their riders. A sport where the athletes at the highest level - perhaps without exception - used banned substances. A sport where doping was so accepted that riders from different teams - who were competitors on the road - coordinated their doping to keep up with other riders doing the same thing.”

In their confessions, many of the riders said that they agreed to use drugs or blood transfusions only after concluding that it was impossible to beat a doped pack while clean. Some of them also said that they did not consider taking performance-enhancing drugs cheating, because almost all their rivals were using the same techniques.

That may also help to explain the apparently genuine indignation expressed by many riders like Floyd Landis, who were stripped of titles after failing drug tests, only to see the victories awarded to fellow dopers who had evaded detection. When ABC News asked Landis in 2010 if he was calling Armstrong a fraud, he replied: “Well, it depends on what your definition of fraud is. I mean it - look, if he didn't win the Tour, someone else that was doped would have won the Tour. In every single one of those Tours.”

The widespread nature of doping in the sport led the sportswriter Buzz Bissinger to write in a Newsweek cover story defending Armstrong in August, “even if he did take enhancers, so what?” Bissinger argued:

Professional cycling is a rotten sport like all professional sports are rotten (anybody who believes otherwise is a Pollyanna fool). “It's Not About the Bike,” as the title of Armstrong's bestselling biography states. It's about winning by any means possible and then hoping to figure out a medical way of covering it up. Doping has been a rite of passage in the Tour de France. According to The New York Times, at least a third of the top 10 finishers (Armstrong included) have either officially admitted to using performance enhancers or been officially suspected of doping.

Need we say more? If Armstrong used banned substances, he was leveling the playing field. He was still the one who overcame all odds.

In an interview with ESPN before the antidoping agency released hundreds of pages of evidence on what it said was the elaborate doping system on Armstrong's team, the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell took the argument about performance-enhancing drugs creating a level playing field a step further, essentially saluting him for cheating better than any of his rivals. In a part of the interview transcribed by Business Insider, Gladwell argued:

When you look at what Lance is alleged to have done, basically he was better than everybody else at using P.E.D.s. He was the guy who sat down and was rigorous and focused and thoughtful and intelligent and cutting edge in how to use them and apply them and make himself better. Like, I don't kno w, so why's that a bad thing? He's being rewarded for being the best at his game. It was an element in the competition, and he used that element better than anyone else. Why don't we just make that a part of the definition of what it means to be a great bicyclist?

Gladwell went on to suggest that bike races might be better thought of as akin to car races, where the application of science by a support team is part of the challenge.

Another former Armstrong teammate, Tyler Hamilton, described in his new memoir, “The Secret Race,” in minute detail how the medical team around a rider became - like a pit crew with drugs, syringes and blood bags - an essential part of the competition in those years.

After leaving the United States Postal Service team, Hamilton needed to find another doctor to work with, because, he said, Armstrong paid to keep the Italian specialist Dr. Michele Ferrari from helping his rivals. Hamilton ended up retaining Dr. Eufe miano Fuentes, who offered him a special service, at a cost of $50,000 a year, plus bonuses for any victories, that was reserved for a select few clients. According to Hamilton, the others included Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Alexandre Vinokurov - Armstrong's main rivals during his reign.

So, is a race among doped cyclists a fair one? Absolutely not, according to at least one of Armstrong's former teammates, the talented climber Jonathan Vaughters, who retired early when he concluded that it was impossible to win without doping and later founded Team Garmin-Sharp, a squad dedicated to riding clean. In his sworn statement to the antidoping agency, Vaughters, who rode in support of Armstrong in the 1999 Tour de France, described the team's systematic doping.

In a telephone interview with The Lede on Friday, Vaughters said that a race among doped cyclists did not reward the best athlete but the best doper, because some people get a much bigger boost in their performance than others from using the same doping techniques.

That being the case, he said, “if you just opened it all up and you said, ‘Let's legalize it and it's all fair if they all do it,' what you would have is you would have races that were being won by people who were most physiologically adapted to the drugs that were available to them. You would not have the best athlete, who trained the hardest, who had the best team, the best strategy on the day - that athlete would rarely win. It would normally be the person whose physiology just happened to adapt to whatever biotechnology had to offer at that period in time. So it's absolutely untrue and it absolutely applies to the generation of racing that I went through.”

Speaking theoretically, but with obvious firsthand experience, Vaughters also noted that the widespread use of doping products distorted the playing field in others ways too. “Athletes with greater resources are going to be able to contact better doctors,” he observed, and “there are going to be some people who are going to be willing to take much greater risks with their bodies and their health than other people.”

In the interview, which can be heard in full below, Vaughters expanded on his own confession, made in a New York Times Op-Ed in August.

He explained that, even after he left Armstrong's team to race on a French squad that encouraged clean riding, he found himself drifting back into doping in response to the pressure to get results. The rider ultimately decided to quit racing and found a new team with a strict antidoping policy.

Vaughters also suggested that another rider who admitted doping in a statement published on Wednesday, George Hincapie - who helped shield Armstrong from the wind all the way around France in each of his seven Tour victories - might well have had a more successful career if no one had been doping in the races. Given his natural talent, and the relatively high red-blood-cell count he was born with, Hincapie probably got a smaller boost than many other riders from doping, but competed during his entire career against riders who were able to use medical products to decrease his physical edge.

Like many cycling fans, who have become accustomed to arguing in fine detail about science and medicine, Vaughters has become so expert at certain aspects of physiology affected by doping products that he can sound more like a graduate student in biology than a cyclist at times. He also discussed the ways in which in doping distorts competition in an interview with Joe Lindsey published by Bicycling magazine in August.

One of the stranger aspects of information about pervasive doping in the sport trickling out over the past decade on blogs and Twitter feeds writt en by cycling fans and amateur racers is that very few fans with knowledge of professional cycling were at all surprised by this week's revelations. Among others, the authors of the @NYVelocity Twitter feed, Andy Shen and Dan Schmalz - who also write and illustrate a cult comic strip series following the soap-opera of professional cycling called, “As the Toto Turns” - took issue with Gladwell's level-playing-field defense of Armstrong.

The sports physiologists Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas, who write the Science of Sport blog and Twitter feed also noted that Gladwell's suggestion that bike racing should be compared to Formula 1 or Nascar racing - with riders' bodies treated like machines to be tweaked with science - ignores the fact that race cars are only allowed to be refined within set parameters.

While many active professional cyclists were hesitant to denounce Armstrong this week, one sportsman did speak out clearly. “It's good that they are trying to clean this sport up,” the Formula 1 driver Mark Webber told reporters. “It sends a message to lots of sports, and it's a good message.” A fan and keen amateur cyclist himself, Webber said, “It's been quite obvious in the last few years that this was going to come out.” He added: “Karma will come and get you.”