Lance Armstrong: poor put upon hero or scumbag cheater? You know I honestly don’t really care. Spin his story either way and it is remarkable. However, at this point I’d have to say he meets the duck criteria…. at least if you look at the various results around him. I fully grant he passed the tests. Full stop, no argument. The sport had a testing regimen, he passed and I do truly believe that should be the end of it. This current process of performing ex post facto discoveries is evil regardless of whether or not it is finding the truth. There is a reason the US justice system has rules about ‘double jeopardy’ and ‘ex post facto’ prosecution. But we will get to that bit in a second.
First, lets get something out there that has to do with positive test results. That is the results of the top tier riders in the tour with Lance who undisputedly HAVE tested positive. This means if Lance didn’t dope he beat the rest of the worlds best cyclists who are proven dopers ‘au natural’. If you know much about the science and physiology of cycling that is a mind boggling concept. You are talking about a physical endeavor where the removal of say a 100 grams of weight in the equipment of a cyclist or making very small aerodynamic improvements can have not just a measurable impact in their results, but over the course of an event like the tour de france can convey a significant competitive advantage. In order for that to be the case, it means that at the professional level there are fairly minuscule differences in the physiological abilities of the riders in the pro peleton. How about some numbers. The tour is ~2000 miles long. In 2012 ~17 min separated 1st and 10th place. Total ride time for the winner was 5,254 minutes: 10th place crosses the line in 5,271 minutes. The difference is measured in 10ths of a percent (.4%). Dead last finished in 5,491 minutes. That is a difference on the order of few percent (4%). Now what is the impact of doping? Well EPO, Blood Transfusions and Testosterone used for performance gains are illegal, so there are no definitive tests clearly defining just how advantageous they are. That being said, most of the evidence that has wound its way out there indicates doping can impact riders personal efforts on the order of whole % point gains, lets say 5% at best. Interestingly this seems to be roughly the difference between the back of the peleton and the leaders.
So lets posit a theoretical clean peleton where the best rider represents 100% physical capacity of a human body without illegal assists. If the best rider dopes the theoretical performance max is 105% or 5% better than is possible without assistance. The theoretical worst rider in the clean peleton is at around 95% or 5% below that best unassisted rider. That would seem to indicate an ability spread from a low level clean rider to a top level doped rider of about 10%. Since the separation in Tour results seems to be fairly stable over the last 10 years or so at around 4-5% from best to worst would seem to indicate that to be a clean rider who can stay in the field you would have to be in the upper echelon and many lower level clean riders would be pushed out of the field of professional competition. Which is a sad story… but the bit I find more interesting is it would seem to indicate that there is no realistic way to be at the front of the pack without illegal assists unless only the lower tier riders were doping. The reality seems to be that doping is pretty wide spread in the pro peleton and spread across all skill levels.
How about technology? Well most technical advantages developed are typically measured in .1% or .01% or even .001% rates rather than whole percentage advantage jumps and anything that works quickly ends up spread across the entire peleton. Put simply, it generally cancels out but occasionally riders do find a small advantage over the field here and there… but nothing on a level that would account for 7 Tour Titles.
Bottom line? Whether he doped or not, Armstrong was certainly one of the upper echelon riders on natural ability alone. If he were strictly a back of the pack rider then a comprehensive doping program would have just made him competitive in a mixed field of clean and doped riders rather than dominate. Given his success then If he were the only comprehensive doper then he could have been a mid pack rider. The remaining explanation is that he was in a group of upper echelon riders that doped but probably not at the maximum levels possible in order to retain a decent margin of safety with regards to being caught.
Is it possible he could be clean? I would say its only possible if the Pro Peleton is largely clean or if the rumored wide spread doping is largely focused in the lower echelon riders serving to tighten the field up (i.e. a natural spread should be greater than 5% from to to bottom). Once you look at the scenarios with widespread doping across skill levels it gets to be a pretty impossible outlook very fast that the best of the best for 7 years was clean and still better than anyone aided by illegal methods.
That being said here is the likeliest ‘clean Armstrong’ scenario assuming widespread evenly distributed doping in the Peleton. He would have to be the absolute best rider in the world… i.e. he is the 100% example. In fact he would probably have to be the freak outlier best. Like Jordan in Basketball, Woods in golf etc… say 101% natural vs the normal range of human capacity. He would have to have a significant combinations of technical advantages every year he won giving him another .5 - 1 % advantage over the field. And the support of his team mates would have to account for another 1-2% advantage over just his basic natural skill… and to do that his team would have to be the absolute dirtiest one in the peleton by enough to convey that large of an advantage to their top rider. That could sit the best theoretical clean rider in the 102.5% - 104% range of a posited field that could house up to a 105% rider if the best riders were comprehensively doping. And for him to end up in the front of the pack 7 times in a row would mean that nobody above the 98% natural capability mark engaged in a comprehensive doping program with similar technical and team support.
Now there are all sorts of problems with the math up above in terms of determining the meaningful values used. Tweak the field range a bit, mess with your peleton doping assumptions, impact of tech or how useful doping really is and you can tilt it either way fairly easily. But the dirty team bit I suggest above is pretty much documented. Technical advantages are within the realm of possible, though the idea his team maintained that much of an edge in the tech for 7 straight years is not… IE I don’t think the tech improved a whole 3-7% in the years he won, and there is no way a .5-1% advantage remained a secret across that length of time. The fact he won I think clearly shows that he was one of the very best if not the absolute best with zero help. If all the top riders were doping then they were all doing so at levels not prone to detection so I would argue the very best were also less likely to maximize the advantages… which does leave a theoretical hole for a really good clean rider with assistance from a bunch of dirty riders to be able to do what Armstrong did. So that means my best case scenario is that he did it with help from a dirty team… and he somehow was in the midst of doping central and refrained.
Hence my statement earlier that in my mind there are to many ‘duck like’ qualities to the story to realistically think he didn’t dope.
Now on to those legalities. Legally speaking I don’t think there is a case for Armstrong’s doping. The US government dropped its case against US postal for a reason. At best the eye witness testimony claimed by the USADA suggests the doping was at insufficient levels to be detected. Throw in the obvious conflicts of interest of those giving testimony biasing them against Armstrong and all that testimony looks awful shaky. The only physical evidence being claimed by the USADA (as yet unverified by unbiased third party review) relates to the 2009 tour, and the samples in question passed all testing at the time of the competition. Re-testing the samples now smacks of ‘double jeopardy’ in trying to assess guilt on the same charges twice. Since the re-testing was not random, and it was not universal (all samples from that year re-tested in these same manner) it also smacks of unfair and unwarranted targeting of an individual. Finding positive results in this case should be deemed as similar to unwarranted search and seizure leading to inadmissible evidence. If the possibility of a later retest was not clearly layed out in the rules of the competition it also smacks of an attempt at convicting Armstrong through an ‘ex post facto’ process.
Now the USADA process is not a legal proceeding… but the fact it does not even try to hold itself to such basic principles of US judicial concepts lends a great deal of credence to Armstrong’s claim they are on a witch hunt. The process used assessed guilt prior to any kind of hearing and thus placed the burden on the accused to prove their innocence after their ruling. This is in direct contradiction to a foundation principle of US judicial process in which innocence is presumed and the burden is on the accuser to prove guilt. And finally, the USADA declaration that Armstrong is stripped of a title in an athletic competition it does not preside over is frankly disturbing. At the very minimum that should have been worked as the USADA recommends to the UCI (or whoever it is that presides over the Tour) that based on its findings Armstrong be stripped of his titles.
So let me put this plainly. I don’t care if everything the USADA claims is true. As I say above I think the odds are pretty overwhelmingly pointing to Armstrong having doped. But the process they have used is so utterly evil, unprincipled and in direct contradiction of numerous fundamental judicial rights of a US citizen that acting on their findings, no matter how true, is far more dangerous to society than allowing an alleged doping cyclist to retain the official record of a ‘win’.
Update 2/21/2013
I wrote the above prior to the Oprah interview where Lance admitted to doping in all but his last two Tour rides (neither of which he won). He claimed he was clean in the last two rides because of the bio passport system that he credited for largely cleaning up the pro peleton so that he felt a clean (un-doped) ride was a fair ride. He compared doping in his earlier rides to 'just like putting air in the tires... of course we did that..." but he steadfastly refused to name any other names or comment about or theorize about any other doping going on.
Even with that... I stand by this post. What the UCI did and how they did it is worse than any overall benefit to outing this truth. About the only good thing I saw in this whole debacle was Lance saying the reason he finally came forward was his Son defending him when he knew he was guilty of the charges laid out against him.
The UCI should have focused on strengthening programs that would keep widespread doping programs from being sustainable and moving forward. All they have done is once again proven that highly competitive athletes seek ANY advantage they can and that banning something you can't effectively test for is silly.
All in all if the man on Opera is truly a repentant of his wrong doings and not just 'spinning it' (pardon the pun) to his advantage then I actually look forward to his next book (assuming there is one) about setting the record straight and fully discussing at least HIS doping practice and how it worked. I actually plan to go back and re-read 'its not about the bike' in light of what he said in the Oprah interview.
