Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, The Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever

At the height of the Lance Armstrong’s reign, I was a grumpy 20 year old hocking Livestrong bracelets at Fleet Feet Sports in Chicago. I certainly wasn’t a cycling fan and, mostly for selfish reasons, I found the hoopla over the bracelets to be slightly annoying (that sounds bad doesn’t it?). While the bands were for a good cause, their scarcity led to frequent discontent among the eager seekers who poured into the store day after day in search of what I couldn’t produce.

Personal grievances aside, looking at Lance Armstrong from a common sense perspective, even in the moment I found his success fishy. Here was a Texan dominating a sport that–apart from Greg LeMond–had as much to do with Americans as berets.

Of course, there was no debating that Lance was an endurance animal with a fierce competitive streak.  To that end, during the summer of 2003 this epic moment won me over through the conclusion of that Tour:

In my eyes this maneuver captures the contradiction that is Lance Armstrong.  On one hand, we have the resilient cancer survivor, who always finds a way to navigate daunting obstacles. Here rides a true American superhero.

Yet, another part of me wonders–could a dose of HGH have improved his reaction time so as to make this move possible? Did a round of EPO ward off fatigue so that he could be clear headed in that moment? Is it legal to cut the course like that?

Aside from the last question (yes), there are no easy answers when it comes to Lance Armstrong. Seeking at least a bit more clarity, I picked up Reed Albergotti and Vanessa O’Connell’s excellent book Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, The Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever.

The the book’s central message is clear:  Lance Armstrong was an extreme doper and egomaniac who was one cog in the larger Lance, Inc., which included multinational corporations, government institutions, and finance bankers.

The overriding strength of Wheelmen is its careful analysis of the constellation of myths that makeup Lance Armstrong’s career.  Some of these myths are confirmed while others are debunked.

As far as confirmation goes, Wheelmen confirms that Lance Armstrong is and always has been, an egomaniac–maybe a sociopath. Exhibit A: Lance completely cut off his earliest and most dedicated supporters. Counted among the excluded was his mother, Linda and his mentor/father figure J.T..

For me the height of Lance’s brashness came when he refused to take a call from his mother because he was too busy swinging on a rope across a ballroom.

Albergotti and O’Connell tactfully resist any outright response to the familiar refrain: “Everybody was doing it.”  Instead they compose a piecemeal rejection by demonstrating the complexity of Lance’s doping regimen. Between the smuggling of syringes across international borders and blood bags hanging from hotel room walls, the United States Postal Service’s program was the veritable Mission Impossible of cycling.  Another counter to the “everybody was doing it” claim is the information that the sports other dominant riders backed off their doping programs following the “Operation Puerto” bust in 2006.

Finally, the sophistication of the USPS program is juxtaposed with snippets from other teams. Some teams didn’t have programs in place, leaving the doping up to the individual athletes. At one point, we encounter Floyd Landis nearly killing himself after a bout of self-doping gone wrong.

With regards to doping, the conclusion becomes: Yes, everybody was doing it, but not as effectively as Lance. After all, Lance had Dr. Ferrari, a mad scientist with a long history of doping infractions and nefarious connections.

Wheelmen also takes on the cancer myths.  Before reading Wheelmen,  I had always taken for granted the sentiment that Lance wasn’t “very good” before he got cancer.  While Lance wasn’t the most dominant cyclist in history before he got cancer, he did win a stage of the Tour de France as well as a world championship.

At the center of this pre-cancer doping, is the oft-referenced “hospital bed” confession in which, according to onlookers, Lance told doctors he had used performance enhancers.

The second part of the cancer myth was that Lance had reinvented his body post-cancer. Lacking formal physiology training, this was something I had also believed.  However, at least one scientist suggests that this wasn’t the case, as according to medical records Lance’s body weight was never so dramatically lowered so as to suggest an absolute cellular reformation.  Add to the mix the fact that Lance’s VO2 Max scores weren’t that far superior to other endurance athletes and you are led to search for some alternate explanation for Lance’s success.

One oddity of Wheelmen is the very close relationship that the authors had with this story as they wrote the book.  At various points throughout Wheelmen the authors refer to themselves in the third-person and describe their involvement in the surrounding events. Not necessarily good or bad, these moments gave the story an unfinished feel, which is quite accurate given the fact that Lance continues to fight his competitive ban.

My other critique would be the author’s treatment of the other riders. In particular, Floyd Landis and Dave Zabrieski seem, at times, to serve merely as innocent foils to the evil Lance Armstrong. I didn’t know much about either rider before picking up the book, but finished it with questions as to whether they were as innocent as they were made out to be.

But, to be fair, Wheelmen isn’t a book about Landis or Zabrieske–it’s a book about Lance Armstrong, and when it comes to depicting the main character Wheelmen gave me all that I could hope for and then some.