I don’t blame Lance Armstrong for doping. I would have been tempted myself.
I’m as mad as the next person about Lance Armstrong’s lies and bullying, and the sociopathic way he destroyed other lives and livelihoods. For this, he deserves to lose everything: his millions and whatever reputation some anointed him with.
The actual doping, I can forgive. In fact, I think I would have been tempted to do the same in the late 1960s when I was running my best.
If you’ve never been there—among the best in the world—I don’t think you can fully understand the hunger, obsession, and logic. By 1968, I had been running 120 miles a week for two years. I didn’t know anyone else who trained as much as I did, though Gerry Lindgren was apparently doing crazy things out in Washington State. At any rate, I was running my arse off in hopes of being really successful: maybe winning a few big races, maybe making an Olympic team.
I was lucky enough to win the 1968 Boston Marathon, but never another major marathon, or to make an Olympic team, even though I kept pounding out 120 a week. You don’t train like that to lose five pounds or to lower your blood pressure. You train to win. Finishing seventh or eighth just doesn’t cut it.
In 1968, I didn’t take aspirin or even drink coffee. I was a bit of purest-naturalist, and actually considered it a potential benefit. After all, whoever has the cleanest body ought to run the fastest. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
More importantly, and very different from the Armstrong situation, I was 100 percent certain that none of my competitors were doping. In the 1960s, we figured steroids were only for weightmen and maybe sprinters, and the world contained no drugs that made distance runners faster. If someone beat me, it was either because he trained harder or had more talent. Since I believed I was training at least as hard as anyone else, that left only talent as a discriminating factor.
While I won many regional races, I lost when I competed at the national and international level. Obvious conclusion: The really good runners had more talent than me. I only had to compare mile times to see the difference. Guys like Kenny Moore and Frank Shorter could run a mile in close to 4 minutes. I was about a 4:15 guy. I was lucky they let me on the same starting line.
But now let’s imagine a different situation—one that brings me closer to the Armstrong environment. Imagine I was a 4:02 miler who knew I was training as hard as Moore and Shorter, yet they crushed me at all the races. What’s more, I had heard they were popping some special energy bars that Bill Bowerman cooked up on his wife’s waffle iron. What to do?
The point is you have two options: quit, or join. If you’re really stubborn and masochistic, I suppose you could also keep running 120 miles/week, and keep getting crushed at the races. But you can’t think you’re going to win. Not realistically. In track, you can’t beat the East German women of the 1970s and 1980s. You can’t beat Flo-Jo in 1988. You can’t beat the Chinese women in 1993. And you can’t beat Marion Jones in 2000. You can be true to yourself and your sport, but you can't win. It would make more sense to jog 20 miles a week for your health.
This is the situation Lance Armstrong faced in the late 1990s. He felt he was as good as the rest, he knew Americans could win the Tour (as Greg LeMond had done a decade earlier), yet he also knew he couldn’t win without doping, because that’s what the Tour leaders were doing. I’m no cycling expert, but it seems clear everyone in the sport knew that the top athletes and teams were doping.
So Armstrong, in my view, had few options: quit, settle for clean mediocrity, or dope. I understand why he doped, and don’t blame him for that. Quitting makes you a quitter; not winning makes you a loser (especially in the U.S., but also in other countries). If you either quit or finish seventh, and then start talking about the alleged dopers who beat you, that makes you a whiner, because you can’t prove anyone else is doping. And no one wins any popularity contests by whining.
So doping is easy to rationalize. It simply amounts to “leveling the playing field.” I know the expression is roundly denounced by many. I also know it seems completely reasonable when you are on the field yourself—on the downside tilt.
Now that the Armstrong-Tour de France doping culture has been blown wide open, we are left to wonder about other endurance kings and queens of the era. The late 1990s and early 2000s were what they were—a time when powerful new blood-boosting drugs became widely available, when doping tests couldn’t keep apace, and when athletes felt confused and angry about their competition.
Stuff happened. I’m not sure we want to learn more post-Lance. It’s rather convenient to heap all our scorn on one individual, the massively flawed Armstrong. But others must have been tempted as well.