I think I admirably avoided ranting about this year’s main event, dropping only a single Lance Armstrong-inspired metaphor a few weeks back. For this, I have been congratulated for “keeping my Lance in my pants” by a certain fellow who ought not to be pointing because there are three fingers pointing back at him. (I’m sure he’ll see this after he gets back from passing gas in the mail room.)
Anyway, I was gone on vacation when the French daily newspaper L’Equipe published a story that claimed to prove that Armstrong had tested positive for an illegal performance-enhancing drug called EPO. (EPO boosts the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, and has thus been a very popular drug indeed in most endurance sports.) Today, this moderately well informed Chicagoan chides the American press for being too dismissive of the story, and blames it on anti-French sentiment. He has a point, but it’s a minor one in the big scheme of things. Aside from the highly dubious proposition of expecting a newspaper to conduct a neutral doping test [(1) get a hold of a six year old urine sample; (2)handle it properly; (3)insure purity and provenance; (4) insure peer review of the testing process], there are lots of problems here. Lance himself made many of them clear in an interview with Larry King earlier this week.
But two points have not been made. The Tour de France was founded, and for most of its existence, run by a French sporting newspaper, L’Auto. I don’t have a lot of experience with the culture of French sporting newspapers, but I do know that rivalries tend to be bitter and longstanding–and the birth of the Tour itself was the direct result of a nasty copyright squabble between L’Auto and another paper called Le Velo. French sporting newspapers have therefore taken not just a professional interest in the what has become one of the world’s greatest sporting events–the interest occasionally becomes morbid. L’Equipe, ironically, is the modernday corporate descendent of L’Auto. L’Equip has been hot on the story of proving that Lance Armstrong is doping ever since Armstrong won his first Tour De France. (They have previously published two separate, similar stories sourced to former disgruntled associates of Lance’s, who expected that their word would be enough. The stories thus never rose above the level of he said-she said insinuation.)
Second–and this is a point that gets quietly made because its subtle and a little thorny–EPO is one of the more effective tools in the treatment of cancer, particularly the kinds of cancer Armstrong was diagnosed with. In fact, if memory serves, Armstrong took prescribed EPO as a part of his (spectacularly successful) cancer treatment. This was not only lifesaving, but perfectly legal. Still, by the time he began racing his bike again in 1999, he would have been expected not to use the drug for any purpose, nor to test positive for its presence in his blood or urine. But it does not seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility that a man who once used EPO for legitimate medical reasons might thereafter show evidence of having used it. As an additional complication, until recently there was no direct way to test for the presence of EPO itself in the blood (it perfectly mimicks human hormones, or something like that). You could only test for its results, by checking the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood (hematocrit levels), and somewhat arbitrary levels were set as being natural versus unnatural. Needless to say, most world-class athletes have naturally high hematocrit levels. Some of the very best have unnatural levels.
I suppose you can’t blame L’Equipe for so relentlessly pursing this story, even if it isn’t there. It would be the biggest scandal in sporting history–yes, much worse than the Chicago Black Socks, when you consider all of the endorsements and charities and corporate interests and cancer survivors that ride on the back of Lance Armstrong. Which may be the strongest argument of all against the remote possibility, and until there is unimpeachable truth, I prefer to believe that quickness of body and largeness of spirit are possible without cheating.
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