I the Tour De Technoscience: Lance Armstrong and the Sociology of The

The Tour de Technoscience: Lance Armstrong and the Sociology of the Techno-Athlete

Samuel Quinn Haraway

B.A. (Coe College) 2009

M.A. (University of California, Davis) 2013

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Sociology

in the

OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

of the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

DAVIS

Approved:

––––––––––––––

Patrick Carroll, Chair

––––––––––––––

John R. Hall

––––––––––––––

Hélène Mialet

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Committee in Charge

2018

SAMUEL QUINN HARAWAY

2018

Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction……………………………………………………………………..……………..1 Chapter 1: Assembling LANCE …...………………………………………………………...11 Chapter 2: Techno-Sport in Action…………………………………………………………..33 Chapter 3: Enacting Lance-the-Hero…………………………………………………..…….54 Chapter 4: It’s All About the Blood…………………………………………………..………89 Chapter 5: Armstrong Dissolved……………………………………………………………..131 References……………………………………………………………………………………...151

iii

Abstract

This dissertation is a socio-historical study of the “techno-athlete” that treats Lance Armstrong’s seven-consecutive Tour de France victories (1999-2005) and subsequent doping controversy as a case with which to reexamine questions concerning technoscience, bodies, and doping in high- performance sport. I reconstruct sport as “trials of strength” (Latour, 1988) through which heterogeneous actor-networks engage in struggles to produce advantages over one another. Far from competitions between human individuals or symbolic representations of the “pure” body, what I call “techno-sport” is anchored in assemblages of laboratories, materials, bodies, knowledge, institutions, and sponsorships. Techno-sport is about power. I then explore

Armstrong’s preparations for the Tour de France, reassembling “LANCE” as an “extended body” (Mialet, 2012) composed of teammates, coaches, aerodynamic science, clothing and equipment designs, periodized training methods, blood-boosting techniques, the media, and more. I argue that Armstrong’s bodily abilities and management of his doping controversy was a material-collective and relational achievement of LANCE. By understanding how techno- athletes are at once distributed and centered by heterogeneous networks, we can escape the myth of the pure body around which the biopolitics of anti-doping expands today.

Acknowledgements

I owe immeasurable thanks to the many people who have helped me along the path of completing a dissertation in sociology. The members of my dissertation committee have each provided incredible support and inspiration. Patrick Carroll introduced me to much of the scholarship I now consider central to my own work and guided me throughout the conception and execution of this project. John Hall provided excellent feedback and encouragement on my writing, and also provided valuable mentorship throughout the early stages of graduate school.

Finally, Hélène Mialet’s work has strongly shaped this project. Thank you so much for your involvement. I hope this project is at least on its way to doing your book justice.

Thank you to everyone else who provided me with feedback in the various stages of my writing. Zeke Baker, in particular, generously read some very rough drafts and always provided exceptional comments and criticisms. Robin Rae, too, gave me helpful feedback during our many international FaceTime calls – and put up with my poor internet connection!

I am also grateful to the many professors at Coe College who transformed me from a “No

Child Left Behind” cookie-cutter kid into an intellectually curious and engaged student. Bill

Flanagan, Al Fisher, Lisa Barnett, Rachael Neal, Edmund Burke, Kim Lanegran, and Derek

Buckaloo, to name a few, all taught me the power of critical thinking and inspired me to seek to make a similar difference to others. I would not have made it here without you.

At the University of California, Davis, I received institutional support from the

Department of Sociology and its Power/Inequalities Workshop, as well as the Institute for Social

Sciences. I want to thank the Society for Social Studies of Science that hosted several

v presentations of earlier drafts, allowed Robin and me to organize a panel, and provided me with financial support as well.

Finally, thank you to everyone outside of the University who provided me with support, friendship, and love throughout this process. Andrea, Fox, Ellie, and Queen B, I love you all.

Introduction

For just a moment, let us remember the final day of the 2005 Tour de France.1 Lance Armstrong stood atop the podium of professional cycling’s pinnacle event for the seventh consecutive year.

The national anthem of the United States, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” rang down the Champs-

Élysées, and Armstrong proclaimed his love of cycling against the backdrop of l’Arc de

Triomphe: “Vive le Tour. Forever.” The usual accolades from the press followed.

“Paris salutes its American hero… a man whose single-minded will to win has made him a cycling legend.” – BBC News (Wyatt, 2005)

“He’s superhuman, a genetic freak, the one person on the planet so perfectly made to ride the Tour de France that competitors don’t have a chance.” – New York Times (Kolata, 2005)

“Armstrong’s new record of seven wins confirmed him as one of the greatest cyclists ever, and capped a career where he came back from cancer to dominate cycling’s most prestigious and taxing race.” – CBS News (Smith, 2005)

In this moment – atop the podium, drenched in applause – Armstrong incarnated the cultural figure of the heroic athlete, an individual whose talent and work ethic explain his achievement in sport. That he overcame stage four cancer to become the winningest Tour de France rider in history only underscored his legend.

Throughout his triumphs, however, Armstrong faced continuous accusations that his victories were tainted. He became a symbol for the crisis of modern sport, in which the

1 The Tour de France is the longest and most prestigious professional road cycling race in the world. It has been held every year since 1903, with the exception of ten years during the world wars. In its current format, the race covers approximately 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) in three weeks though the exact route changes every year. 1 performances of “pure” bodies are threatened by the “unnatural” advantages provided by performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).2 Celebration aside, the 2005 podium was another opportunity to fulfill the socio-historical requirement that Tour de France winners publicly manage their status as “clean” athletes, that is, to insist that they have not used PEDs to win the race. Armstrong rebuffed “the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics, the skeptics…

You should believe in these athletes… There are no secrets. This is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it.”

Fast forward to 2013, through eight more years of accusations, two additional (but unsuccessful) Tour de France attempts, and federal investigations by the United States Food and

Drug Administration and the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA),3 and Armstrong publicly confessed to using PEDs. In a nationally-televised interview with Oprah Winfrey,

Armstrong admitted to using testosterone, human growth hormone, anabolic steroids,

Erythropoietin (EPO), and blood transfusions, during each of his seven victories. Then, as if laid bare on a scaffold, he was stripped of his titles and banned for life from professional sport.4

USADA CEO Travis Tygart called Armstrong’s “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen” (Tygart, 2012: 1), whilst Union Cycliste

2 Recent events that highlight the salience of this “crisis” include allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russia, the suspension of anti-doping laboratories in Brazil, Maria Sharapova’s positive test for Meldonium, the creation of an independent anti-doping program in UFC, and the introduction of nighttime drug testing to the Tour de France, and more. 3 USADA’s “Reasoned Decision” report relied on the testimony of 26 former teammates and personnel from Lance Armstrong’s cycling team that also participated in the doping program. Whereas drug tests are crucial to everyday enactment of the anti-doping apparatus in professional cycling, the accumulation of testimonies against him constituted the final nail in the coffin. The period is often dubbed the “EPO era” for the prevalence of the blood-boosting substance Erythropoietin (EPO). 4 In a press release, USADA clarified that “a lifetime period of ineligibility as described in the [World Anti- Doping Code] prevents Mr. Armstrong from participating in any activity or competition organized by any signatory to the Code or any member of any signatory” (USADA, 2012b: 4). That is, Armstrong was banned from all sports operating under the World Anti-Doping Agency, which includes all Olympic sports and most professional sports. 2

Internationale (UCI) President Pat McQuaid declared that “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling.”

This is the modernist problematic through which sport is understood today: defined as competition between human individuals, sport is a meaningful event in which the accomplishments of professional athletes exemplify the extraordinary potential of the “pure” body (Waddington, 2000; Waddington et al., 2013; Møller and Dimeo, 2014; Coakley, 2015).

Against the backdrop of a tumultuous personal history it was Armstrong’s talent and hard work that explained his success in the Tour de France. Upon confessing, however, Armstrong’s body moved from an ideal physiological specimen to a grotesque distortion of “nature,” from the most determined individual to the ugliest transgression of sport itself. Though Armstrong claimed he was simply leveling the playing field in an era of prevalent doping in professional cycling (see

Rogan and Armstrong, 2015), from the gaze of the anti-doping apparatus, Armstrong was nothing more than a “disgraced cheater” who made a personal decision to use banned drugs, his performances too good to be true. Armstrong-the-hero and the Armstrong-the-villain stand in apparent antithesis, emblematic of the “pure” body and its profanity.

Techno-Sport in Action: Or, Where STS Meets Sport

“[Armstrong] tended to treat us like we were extensions of his body” - Tyler Hamilton, Tour de France teammate (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 143)

The singularity of the body, and its ability and work ethic, is central to the modernist conception of sport. In the event described above, it was Armstrong alone who stood atop the podium. It was his “superhuman” bodily strength and “single-minded will to win” that explained his performance. And it was Armstrong himself who, following a doping investigation that

3 solicited testimony from his teammates, competitors, coaches, trainers, and doctors, “[had] no place in cycling.” Cyborg studies of sport, which broadly study the interaction between humans and technologies, have engaged in thorough and productive critiques of the so-called “natural” or

“pure” body of professional and elite athletes (Cole, 1993; Franklin, 1996; Butryn and Masucci,

2003; McCullough, 2010; Fouché, 2012). Their general argument has been that the natural body is produced in relation to the technological, rather than in opposition, that it is an always already cyborg body. What remains underdeveloped in the sport studies literature, however, is a critical exploration of the purported bodily singularity that is also central to the anti-doping apparatus.

My interest here is both empirically- and theoretically-driven. Armstrong consistently distributed credit for his victories beyond himself. After his first Tour win in 1999, for example:

“I take credit for 5 percent of it, if that. I give all my credit to my doctors, to my team, to [team director Johan Bruyneel], to the sponsors, to my family… Hey, I really didn’t do that much. I trained hard, but without those other folks, there’s no way” (Wilcockson and Pelkey, 1999: 183-

184). While it is common for athletes to thank the people who worked with them, the implications of this statement, in which “a cycling legend” claimed that he really didn’t do that much in winning the longest bicycle race in the world, are compelling. On the one hand,

Armstrong rode nearly the entire Tour de France in the slipstream of his teammates, whose role in the race was to shield him from the wind and supply him with food and water. This common race strategy allows team leaders to save energy for the decisive moments of the race, such as mountain-top finishes, that are extremely physically demanding. On the other hand, the comment implicates a number of actors, such as sponsors, physicians, and trainers, who do not participate in the competition itself. If these actors do enough to warrant acknowledgement, as I will describe, the modernist conception of sport is perhaps too quick to enact a singularized subject.

These themes will strike an immediate chord with scholars of Science and Technology

Studies (STS) who have tirelessly deconstructed the image of the scientist as a singular, disembodied, rational actor whose “mind elaborates a world wholly independent of his corporeal situation” (Shapin, 1990: 210). If we want to understand science-in-practice, it is argued, we must follow the material-collective work of assistants and technicians (Shapin, 1994), the role of inscription devices in the “construction of facts” (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), and the material organization of laboratory spaces (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), among other processes, which are irreducible to a single mind (Latour, 1988). Actor-network theory, in particular, has proposed the most radical departure, arguing that individuals are co-extensive with their heterogeneous networks. That is, the individual is a network (Latour, 1983; Callon and Law, 1997).

If STS approaches have generally sought to reincorporate the thought and cognitive competencies of the singularized genius into its socio-historical environment (Collins 1992) or network of humans and nonhumans (Latour, 1983; Callon and Law, 1997), Mialet’s (2012) ethnographic case study of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking re-emphasizes the corporeal and embodied dimensions of scientific practices. By following Hawking and the heterogeneous entities that comprise what she terms his “extended body,” such as his graduate student researchers, instruments and machines, diagrams, and even the medical personnel who accompanied him on a day-to-day basis, Mialet provides a thick description of the material and collective practices through which Hawking’s genius identity was produced and managed. She writes:

The scientist is by no means the disembodied mind that he is described to be. In fact, [Hawking’s] disability … forces him to delegate his competencies to machines and individuals, his disability, far from making him an exception and a mindless body, reveals what is normally hidden or overlooked … this pure mind, far from

being isolated, makes visible the material and collective practices of theoretical work. (Mialet, 2012: 61-62).

Hawking’s dis-abled body, in other words, provides a window into the material and collective processes through which STEPHEN HAWKING – Mialet’s notation for Hawking’s identity as a genius – is produced, stabilized, and managed.

The myth of the scientist, as a brain-in-a-vat, a pure mind, and above all else, a genius, that is, appears to stand at the opposing end of the spectrum of bodily motility from that of the super-human and heroic body of the athlete. I therefore evoke the case of Lance Armstrong precisely because, as the individual who represents the greatest doping “conspiracy” in all of sport (see Tygart, 2012), his controversy provides a context in which to explore the material and collective production of techno-athletes. This concept highlights, rather than effaces, the material-collective networks through which bodily performances are produced. Accordingly, following Mialet (2012), I reconceptualize LANCE as the material-collective body through which Armstrong prepared for and competed in the Tour de France. LANCE is an ever-changing material-collective of humans and nonhumans that produces Armstrong’s bodily abilities. Its socio-historical description is necessary for the explanation of the Lance Armstrong controversy, because without it, Lance Armstrong does not win the Tour de France seven times in a row. This case study can further contribute to the research program of STS, and especially actor-network theory and related approaches, which have theorized “a subjectivity that is both distributed and situated in a singular body” (Mialet, 2009: 53-54; see also Latour, 1988; Callon and Law, 1997), by explaining the dissolution of LANCE that follows Armstrong’s doping confession.

Chapter Outline

Chapter one explains the processes of “assembling LANCE” as a result of the stitching together of professional cycling and cancer survivorship. By exploring the diagnosis and treatment of Armstrong’s advanced testicular cancer, as well as the subsequent founding of the

Lance Armstrong Foundation, I identify critical sites of convergence between Armstrong’s cycling and cancer networks. For example, Armstrong’s cycling-body strongly influenced the type of treatment he received and this treatment, in turn, not only enabled him to survive the disease but “reshaped” his body in ways that were suitable for the Tour de France. In addition,

Armstrong initiated contact with his doctors not as a typical patient but as a champion cyclist, and his doctors later not only served on the board of his cancer charity but also defended him against allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs to win the Tour. Thus,

Armstrong’s extended body is composed of elements from both cycling and cancer communities, and it was the bridging of these seemingly disparate collectives that produced his status as a sports hero.

Chapter two explores four sets of practices through which Armstrong prepared for the

1999-2005 Tours de France. In revisiting Armstrong as he (1) trained for the race, (2) previewed the race route, (3) learned an “efficient” pedaling technique, and (4) participated in wind-tunnel testing, I describe the material-collective production of his body and ability. As my account of these practices unfolds I ask, first, what happens to Armstrong’s body, and second, what does

Armstrong himself do as these practices unfold? Each practice highlights an extended body,

LANCE, composed of numerous associations of humans and nonhumans. Each trial of strength, in other words, is responsible for some element of the bodily performances through which

Armstrong wins the Tour de France – from this aerobic capacity to how he sits on his bicycle.

Moreover, these elements of his extended body become implicated in the management of his status both as a “hero” of cycling and a “clean” athlete. The question is, if LANCE is a collective assemblage of humans and non-humans, through what practices does he prepare for the Tour de

France and where do we find Lance Armstrong the individual?

Chapter three examines enactments of the mythic, heroic figure I term “Lance-the-Hero,” as they emerged during a sample of Armstrong’s public appearances and interviews. I analyze an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman (1999), four articles in Sports Illustrated

(2002 and 2003), and two Nike commercials (2001 and 2004), following how Armstrong’s body, work ethic, cancer survivorship, and components of his extended body such as teammates, coaches, and bicycles, were singularized and distributed in different ways. The empirical outcome is not only that Lance-the-Hero is “multiple” (Mol, 2002), that a slightly different

Lance-the-Hero is enacted in each media form, but also that his multiplicity explains the

“mechanics of power” (Law, 1992) embedded in such figures. In other words, it is how different versions of Lance-the-Hero cohere that then provide Armstrong with the resources to defend himself against allegations that he used banned drugs to win the Tour. Rather than understand the mythic figures of the “genius” scientist and the “heroic” athlete as operating from opposing ends of the “spectrum of bodily motility” (Ihde, 2013), this chapter highlights the curiously similar processes through which these individualities are enacted and transformed by associations of humans and nonhumans.

Chapter four explores the material-practices through which LANCE’s blood was prepared for the Tour de France. I first provide an overview that explains the importance of blood for endurance sport, by closely following the physiological study of exercise capacity, blood, and bodily performance. Blood transfusions, in particular, were essential technologies in

8 the physiological study of exercise in the 1950s. Then, using the affidavits submitted by

Armstrong’s former teammates and other team personnel for USADA’s “Reasoned Decision” report, I recompose the socio-material practices through which LANCE prepared its blood for the Tour de France. While the affidavits constituted USADA’s primary evidence against

Armstrong’s doping conviction and led to his lifetime ban from professional cycling, as well as the deletion of his Tour de France victories from the record books, they further provide a socio- historical window through which to recompose the material practices through which an extended body prepared its constitutive bodies for competitions. I treat the affidavits as detailed explanations of the blood-boosting practices of members of LANCE. The outcome is that the various methods with which riders can raise their blood hematocrit levels,5 which look completely alien to the casual observer, were part and parcel of other “normal” preparation strategies. The chapter provides yet another glimpse into the material-collective production of

Armstrong’s bodily abilities.

Finally, chapter five discusses the details of Armstrong’s doping confession and sanction, in addition to tracing these outcomes for Armstrong, LANCE, and the Tour de France. In the context of a one-on-one interview between Armstrong and comedian and sports personality Joe

Rogan, which occurred two years after his confession, I “zoom in”6 on my subject and describe how Armstrong, his story, elements of LANCE, and his Tour victories (or are they losses now?) are interpreted, put into historical context, and recorded in the wake of his confession. By

5 Hematocrit is the volume of red blood cells present in the blood. A high hematocrit percentage translates to improved oxygen circulation during exercise. The figure is often considered one of the indicators of maximal endurance performance. 6 In a recent interview reflecting upon Hawking’s death, Mialet states: “My book is constructed around this cinematographic idea of zooming in and out of my subject, of being far away or close to him. And contrary to the common conception that the closer you are to an individual the better you know him I was showing that the father [sic] I was from the better I knew who he was, and the closer I was to him the father [sic] I seemed to be from him” (Mialet and Rees, 2018:3). 9 approaching Armstrong in the wake of his formal sanctioning and subsequent doping confession, my analytic focus shifts from the “mechanics of power” through which LANCE achieved strength and durability to an exploration of an extended body and mythic persona in disarray.

What we find is a complex series of distributions through which Armstrong has dissolved his singularity as a former hero of the sport back into his extended body. That is, Armstrong has largely resisted the socio-cultural script that his confession has purified his body and instead highlighted the extended bodies concealed by his singularization.

Chapter 1 - Assembling LANCE: Articulating Cycling and Cancer Survivorship

“There are two Lance Armstrong’s, pre-cancer and post.” – Lance Armstrong (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 4)

On October 8, 1996, American cyclist Lance Armstrong held a press conference to discuss his health. Despite having won a stage of the Tour de France and the world championship road race, he remained relatively unknown in the United States. Armstrong announced the following:

I have some news regarding my health to share with you. On Wednesday, October 2nd, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Prior to seeing my doctor last week, I had been experiencing swelling and pain in one of my testicles and had coughed up some blood. On Thursday, October 3rd, I underwent surgery at St. David’s Hospital here in Austin to have the malignant testicle removed and the surgery was successful. A CT-Scan was also performed the same day. The CT-Scan revealed that my condition has spread into my lungs and abdomen. In terms of degrees of the disease, my condition is considered to be advanced and, thus, yesterday I began my first day of chemotherapy treatment.

I will undergo chemotherapy for at least nine weeks and then, depending on how I respond to the treatment, may have to undergo more chemotherapy or other procedures to fight this disease. I have the utmost faith in all the doctors with whom I am working and I am determined to fight this disease and to prevail… For now, I must focus on my treatment. However, I want you all to know that I intend to beat this disease, and further, I intend to ride again as a professional cyclist…

I want to finish by saying that I intend to be an avid spokesperson for testicular cancer once I have beaten the disease. Had I been more aware of the symptoms, I believe I would have seen a doctor before my condition had advanced to this stage. I want this to be a positive experience and I want to take this opportunity to help others who might someday suffer from the same circumstance I face today. (CyclingNews, 1996)

It is only in hindsight that Armstrong’s intentions to beat his disease, ride again as a professional cyclist, and become an avid spokesperson for the cancer community appear prophetic. Whereas biographical, documentary, and sport-journalist sources tend to mobilize

Armstrong’s individual qualities as explanations for his ascendance, ANT provides the analytic tools with which to explain Armstrong’s cancer battle and subsequent cycling success as outcomes of heterogeneous networking.7 Understood this way, Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, his return to professional cycling, and his subsequent involvement in cancer survivorship, can be explained as achievements made possible by the constitutive associations of

LANCE.

This chapter provides a description and analysis of Lance Armstrong’s diagnosis and treatment of stage four testicular cancer that raises a series of questions about the processes of assembling an extended body, its distributed agency, and power. Armstrong’s cancer experience and return to cycling provide a window through which to trace the process of assembling

LANCE, that is, how Armstrong’s extended body emerged through the networking of professional cycling and cancer survivorship. In examining the diagnosis and treatment of

Armstrong’s disease we will find a medical process that was shaped by his cycling in numerous ways, from how he met his doctors, to the particular chemotherapy regime used against the disease, to his subsequent identities as a cancer survivor and champion cyclist. Assembling

LANCE explains how professional cycling and cancer survivorship, which seemed completely unrelated prior to Armstrong, became inexorably tied to one another so that achievement in the former could give meaning to the latter.

7 See Latour (2005) for a critique of “social explanations” that mistake the explanandum and the explanans. 12

In a thick, analytic description of Lance Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, this chapter addresses two paradoxes through which assembling LANCE can be made visible. The first concerns how the treatment of Armstrong’s cancer produced a body that was materiality suitable for the specific demands of the Tour de France. I develop this point by addressing the following questions: How was Armstrong’s cancer treatment designed to accommodate a potential return to professional cycling? How did chemotherapy affect his body? What elements of his treatment did Armstrong control? What elements were performed by a heterogeneous network? These questions are inspired, in part, by new approaches in disability studies that argue that, as Ginsburg and Rapp (2013: 1) write, “disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that ‘dis-able’ the full participation of those considered atypical” (see also Moser, 2005). Here, I aim to explain how Armstrong’s abled body emerged through associations with his dis-abled body, i.e., how the social and material conditions which treated Armstrong’s cancer shaped his emergent cycling-body and persona.

The second paradox I address explores how the previously unrelated collectives of professional cycling and cancer survivorship were articulated together through LANCE. I ask the following questions: how did Lance-the-cyclist’s experience with the illness become meaningful to the cancer community? How did the success (or not) of Lance-the-cyclist become a “matter of concern” (Latour, 2004) for the cancer community? In what ways did Armstrong’s cancer network follow him beyond his treatment, during his return to professional cycling? I thus explain assembling LANCE as an outcome of articulating Lance-the-cyclist and Lance-the- cancer-survivor, a process which begins during his treatment but continues throughout his cycling career. For example, as I explain in subsequent chapters, future doping allegations against Armstrong are met with elements of his cancer network – such as support from his

13 doctors and cancer charity, and variations of a theme that exemplify the durability of cycling- cancer associations: a man who was once so close to death would never risk his health by using banned performance-enhancing drugs.

LANCE returns to the 1999 Tour de France as an obligatory passage point for cancer survivorship and these associations make Armstrong socially and culturally powerful. For example, as I explain in later chapters, when Armstrong faces doping allegations elements of his cancer network will be mobilized to defend him. In subsequent chapters, for example, I explain how the particular networking of Lance-the-cancer-survivor and Lance-the-cyclist affects

LANCE’s management of doping controversies during the Tour de France and after Armstrong’s eventual doping confession. LANCE produces powerful advantages over competitors and critics alike, but it must first be assembled.

Methodological and Historical Materials

To reconstruct the events of Armstrong’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, I primarily draw on his autobiography It’s Not About the Bike (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000). The book was published a few months after his first Tour de France, though as the title implies, it primarily addresses his cancer experience. The text can certainly be considered part of the network through which Armstrong’s heroic status was produced (see chapter 4); however, it also provides a window into the specific events of his cancer diagnosis and treatment. This focus allows me to analyze (1) the impact of the disease on Armstrong’s body and abilities, as well as (2) the processes through which LANCE emerged as an outcome of Armstrong’s cycling and cancer collectives.

I enlist three conceptual formations to aid in my description. I use “Lance-the-cancer- patient” and “Lance-the-cancer-survivor” to distinguish between historical phases of

Armstrong’s cancer experience. In relation to these terms, “Lance-the-cyclist” distinguishes between the associations that Armstrong made through his identity as a cyclist and those developed over the course of his treatment. These concepts allow me to trace how professional cycling and cancer survivorship became interested in one another as a result of Armstrong’s

“work in enrolling and enlisting them” (see Latour, 1983: 143).

Treating Cancer, Accommodating Cycling

“Without cancer, I never would have won a single Tour de France.” - Lance Armstrong (Forbes, 2001: 1)

At his October 8th press conference, Armstrong announced that he had completed his first day of chemotherapy treatment. This treatment, as described by Lance’s first oncologist, Dr.

Youman, was part of the “standard treatment protocol for testicular cancer with lung metastasis” in which a cocktail of bleomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin (BEP) is intravenously administered to the patient (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 83). A standard BEP regimen consists of three to four cycles, each of which lasts five days. Patients are typically given two weeks to recover between cycles because they are often quite taxing; for example, patients experience fatigue, nausea, and a depletion of their white blood cell counts. During a consultation for the conventional BEP treatment, Armstrong was presented with the stark realities of its short-term and long-term side effects. As Armstrong recalled:

Because the treatment would leave me infertile, I would probably never have kids. Because the bleomycin would tear up my lungs, I would probably never be able to race a bike again. I would suffer immense pain. The more [the oncologist] talked, the more I recoiled at the vivid images of my enfeeblement. I asked him why the treatment had to be so harsh. “You’re worst-case,” he said. “But I feel this is your only shot, at this hospital.” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 99)

In other words, a bleomycin regimen would dramatically reshape his flesh-and-blood body in multiple ways. It would render him unable to have children without medical assistance.8 It would scar his lungs, thereby compromising his ability to transport oxygen to his muscles during aerobic exercise. Exercise capacity, the maximum volume of oxygen consumed during intense aerobic output, has long been understood as one of the most important physiological characteristics of endurance athletes (see Conconi et al., 1982). If Armstrong remained on a bleomycin treatment protocol, it would all but certainly damage his lungs and thus eliminate his return to professional cycling.

In this early stage of treatment, however, Armstrong received a letter from an oncologist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Wolff introduced himself as an “ardent cycling fan,” and he suggested that Armstrong seek out additional opinions on his condition. “You should note,” Dr. Wolff urged in his letter, “that there are equally effective chemotherapy treatments that could minimize the possible side effects to not compromise your racing abilities”

(Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 90). It is important to emphasize not only that Dr. Wolff

8 For a discussion of Armstrong’s (in)fertility in relation to the cultural image of the masculine sports hero, see Butryn and Masucci (2003). 16 identified himself as a cyclist, but also that his subsequent medical advice was specifically directed toward Lance-the-cyclist and the possibility that he might compete again.

During a telephone conversation shortly thereafter, Dr. Wolff asked Armstrong for his

HCG level. This endocrine protein should be absent in healthy men, and its presence is a telling blood marker for cancer diagnoses. Armstrong recalled the conversation:

“It says a hundred and nine,” I said.

“Well, that’s high,” Wolff said, “But not extraordinary.”

“Uh, what’s this ‘K’ mean?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment, and so was I.

“It means it’s a hundred and nine thousand,” Wolff said… [explaining] that there was too much HCG in my body, even with the lung tumors. Where was it coming from? (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 91)

An MRI, scheduled for the following morning, confirmed Wolff’s suspicions. Armstrong’s cancer had metastasized to his abdomen and brain. With a high enough HCG level to place

Armstrong in the worst prognosis category, Wolff urged him to pursue a treatment that was more aggressive than BEP. As Armstrong’s diagnosis became more severe, that is, Dr. Wolff urged him to explore alternative cancer treatments that would not affect his lung capacity.

Wolff put Armstrong in touch with Drs. Larry Einhorn and Craig Nichols, two oncologists at the Indiana University medical center who specialized in treating complicated cases of testicular cancer. At a consultation detailing their treatment option, Armstrong recalled the following:

Nichols stunned me: he said that he would like to tailor my treatment to get me back on the bike… He wouldn’t compromise my chances of living, but he wanted to alter my protocol to preserve my lungs (emphasis in original). There was another protocol of platinum-based chemo called VIP (vinblastine, etoposide, ifosfamide, cisplatin), which was a much more caustic regime in the short term, but which in the long term would not be as debilitating to my lungs as bleomycin. With ifosfamide, he said, I would have more nausea and vomiting and short-term discomfort. If I would withstand three cycles of VIP, in addition to the BEP cycle I had already undergone, I just might get rid of the cancer and be able to recover enough physically to compete. (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 104-105)

In addition to preserving Armstrong’s lungs by avoiding a bleomycin-based chemotherapy, Dr.

Nichols also considered forgoing the radiation therapy typically used to treat brain cancer.

Nichols suggested that surgery could remove the brain tumors while avoiding the risk of damaging Armstrong’s central nervous system, as balance and coordination are paramount for professional cyclists.

In the diagnosis of his late-stage cancer, and in determining a medical treatment protocol, we see the first articulations that will constitute LANCE. It is Lance-the-cyclist who is contacted by Dr. Wolff, and it is Lance-the-cyclist whose body – and its aerobic ability – must be accommodated by an alternative treatment. Whereas the “only shot” for the severe diagnosis of

Lance-the-cancer-patient is a bombardment with bleomycin, Drs. Einhorn and Nichols offer

Lance-the-cyclist an alternative treatment that could potentially preserve his lungs, coordination, and balance. The alternative treatment plan showed that his cycling-body could interfere with and affect his patient-body (Hirschauer, 1991), that is, by arranging a treatment specifically suitable for an athlete. As Armstrong’s treatment and recovery unfold we will see how his disease, in turn, affected his cycling-body.

Undergoing Surgery, Recovering the Body

On October 25, just seventeen days after his press conference, Armstrong underwent surgery to remove two tumors from his brain. He laid on the operating table for six hours as the surgeon removed the lesions. The tissue was sent to a pathologist, who analyzed it under a microscope. The surgery was deemed successful: the tissue appeared necrotic, and the surgeon had removed it without disturbing Armstrong’s cognitive and coordinative abilities (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000).

Hirschauer (1991) describes surgery as the functional extension of two bodies. The patient-body becomes immobilized during the procedure, reduced to its visually relevant parts, while the anesthetist takes on the role of “defending” her or his life. “The life of the patient-body seems to be externalized” during surgery, Hirschauer (1991: 291) writes. Its muscles and joints extend through the operating table. The human’s lungs are kept operative by a machine located outside and above its body. Its utterances appear detached as a series of acoustic signals emitted by respirators and monitors, and finally, “the fluids circulating in the body are collected externally or supplied from the outside” (Hirschauer, 1999: 291). The surgeon-body is similarly extended through the cooperative and material dimensions of the surgical team, particularly with respect to its vision and hands. Whereas this process distances the patient’s body from its person during surgery, Armstrong’s experience provides insight into the process of reintegrating the patient-body and -person during the recovery process. I am particularly interested in how the

“immense imbalance of forces” between the patient-body and surgeon-body during surgery are recomposed as the body-in-recovery. I also ask, what are the consequences of these socio- material relations for assembling LANCE?

Armstrong awoke from the surgical procedure to find his body entangled with medical technologies. His skull was held together by titanium screws. His incisions were sealed with several staples in a zipper-like pattern. His head was wrapped in gauze and bandages. His bodily functions remained externalized in several hospital machines and devices. An IV provided him with fluid, cables measured his heart rate, a drainage tube hung from his nose, and a catheter ran up his leg and into his urethra. As he lay in the intensive care unit of the Indiana University

Medical Center, Armstrong reflected on the unfamiliar boundaries of his body-in-recovery:

There was nothing to do but sit in bed and let the toxins seep into my body – and be abused by nurses with needles. One thing they don’t tell you about hospitals is how they violate you. It’s like your body is no longer your own, it belongs to the nurses and the doctors, and they are free to prod you and force things into your veins and various openings. The catheter was the worst; it ran up my leg into my groin, and having it put in and then taken out again was agonizing. In a way, the small, normal procedures were the most awful part of the illness. At least for the brain surgery I’d been knocked out, but for everything else, I was fully awake, and there were bruises and scabs and needle marks all over me, in the backs of my hands, my arms, my groin. When I was awake, the nurses ate me alive. (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 121)

Armstrong’s description depicts the recovery of the patient-body as a process of dis-entangling oneself from medical apparatuses, of sorting out where one’s flesh ends and the wires, tubes, and pumps begin. It suggests that the imbalance of forces between the surgeon-body and the patient- body is continuously readjusted during the recovery process. Catheters are removed, then replaced. IVs are (re)inserted. The hands and eyes of the medical staff constantly scour the body, assessing its bruises, marks, punctures. The body-in-recovery remains functionally extended after surgery, though it is also composed by a different series of heterogeneous actors.

During surgery, nurses act as extensions of the surgeon’s hands and eyes (Hirschauer,

1991). They pass instruments used for cutting, clamping, and prying. They hold retractors and adjust the lights of the operating room, which allow the surgeon to see inside the patient’s body.

They speak about the patient-body as an object of the surgeon-body. Afterwards, however, nurses become extensions of the body-in-recovery, withdrawing blood for laboratory tests, cleaning catheters, and changing IV fluids. Armstrong’s nurse, LaTrice Haney, guided him throughout his treatments, from scheduling his chemotherapy to helping him walk around the ward in the afternoons. Moreover, Haney became integral to the linkage of cycling and cancer survivorship:

As I went through therapy, I felt an increasing companionship with my fellow patients. Often I was too sick for much socializing, but one afternoon LaTrice asked me to go to the children’s ward to talk to a young boy who was about to start his first cycle. After that, LaTrice asked me to speak to other patients more and more often. It seemed to help them to know that I was fighting alongside them. Now I asked about other people. I was startled to read that eight million Americans were living with some form of cancer… “Can you believe how many people have this?” I asked LaTrice. (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 150)

During the recovery process, the nurse not only flips from extending the surgeon’s competencies to helping the patient reclaim their body. In Armstrong’s case, his nurse was enfolded into the burgeoning LANCE network. It was beginning to tie cancer and cycling in new ways, for example, as Lance-the-cyclist urged other patients to continue fighting the disease as if it was an athletic competition.

Undergoing Chemotherapy, Reshaping the Body

As Armstrong awaited the beginning of the chemotherapy designed to accommodate

Lance-the-cyclist, he captured the precarious position of his extended body with a joke. Noting that the screws holding his body together were made of the same material as his lightweight racing bicycle, a titanium alloy, he quipped, “maybe it’ll make me climb better” (Armstrong and

Jenkins, 2000: 122). Prior to his cancer, Armstrong was not considered a cyclist who could win the Tour de France. He was simply too heavy to endure the race’s mountainous terrain, which was intended for riders with high power-to-weight ratios (measured in watts produced per kilogram of body weight). The higher riders’ watts/kg, the faster they could ascend a mountain.

What is remarkable about Armstrong’s treatment, from a cycling performance perspective, is that he walked away from the illness twenty pounds lighter. This was not the result of the surgical screws, of course. It was an effect of what was to come next, an intensive chemotherapy regime that, in his words, “reshaped” his body.9

As Armstrong recalled of the first days of his treatment, “my life became one long IV drip, a sickening routine: if I wasn’t in pain, I was vomiting, and if I wasn’t vomiting, I was thinking about what I had, and if I wasn’t thinking about what I had, I was wondering when it was going to be over” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 126). To make matters worse, Armstrong’s health insurance company informed him that due to a pre-existing condition, it was not going to cover this chemotherapy. That is, until Mark Parnell, the CEO of Oakley – one of the companies that sponsored Lance-the-cyclist prior to his illness – intervened. Parnell called the provider and

9 The biographies reviewed cite both a 15 and 20 pound weight loss from chemotherapy; it could be the case that different weights are compared, for example, from the end of his racing to his return vs. from the beginning to end of chemotherapy. 22 threatened legal action against the company if it denied coverage. It worked. Upon his eventual recovery, several more of Lance-the-cyclist’s sponsors would also support the first charity bike race held by Armstrong’s cancer foundation, another early step in the networking of cycling and cancer.

Armstrong’s chemotherapy was administered in five-day cycles, during which he was required to remain in the hospital amongst the medical collective of doctors, nurses, and machines (TedMed, 2012). The treatments were administered by a nurse who wore thick latex gloves to handle the medicine, which was labelled “hazardous materials.” Three 50cc bags were infused into his bloodstream over a three-hour period. In his book, Armstrong described his treatment experience:

The sickness was in the details, in the nasty asides of the treatment. Cancer was a vague sense of unwellness, but chemo was an endless series of specific horrors, until I began to think the cure was as bad as, or worse than, the disease. What a casual bystander associates with cancer – loss of hair, a sickly pallor, a wasting away – are actually the side effects of the treatment. Chemo was a burning in my veins, a matter of being slowly eaten from the inside out by a destroying river of pollutants until I didn’t have an eyelash left to bat. (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 126-127)

As Armstrong progressed through his treatment cycles, the effects of the chemotherapy on his body worsened. He was more fatigued and suffered heavy bouts of nausea. He lost his appetite.

“Without enough protein, which was a potentially serious problem,” Armstrong recalled, “I wouldn’t be able to rebuild tissue after chemo had eaten through my skin, my hair, and my fingernails” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 129). Brown splotches – “chemo burns” – appeared all over his skin. Armstrong found himself, yet again, attached to an IV drip, this time for the

23 duration of his treatment cycles. The IV administered a drug to shore up his immune system, which was severely weakened by the treatments.

During chemotherapy Armstrong developed myelosuppression, the inhibited production of red blood cells. He explained:

Chemo weakens your blood. During the third cycle, my hematocrit – the percentage of total blood volume flowing through my body – fell to less than 25, and the normal count is 46. Ironically, I was given a red blood cell booster called Epogen (EPO). In any other situation, taking EPO would get me in trouble with the International Cycling Union and the International Olympic Committee, because it’s considered performance-enhancing. But in my case, the EPO was hardly that. It was the only thing that kept me alive. (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 128-129)

As we will see in the chapters on training and anti-doping, blood is a “boundary object” through which Armstrong’s experiences of cancer and cycling are materially related (Star and Griesemer,

1989). As Armstrong further described:

There was an odd commonality in the language of cancer and the language of cycling. They were both about blood. In cycling, one way of cheating is to take a drug that boosts your red blood cell count. In fighting cancer, if my hemoglobin fell below a certain level, the doctors would give me the very same drug, Epogen. There was a baseline of numbers I had to meet in my blood tests, and the doctors measured my blood for the very same thing they measured in cycling: my threshold for physiological stress” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 89; emphasis added)

Chapter two further explains that blood tests remained central to Armstrong’s bodily preparations. For example, his coach, Dr. Michele Ferrari, administered them on the slopes of a training climb; and his teammate, Tyler Hamilton, made sense of his fitness in terms of the shade of his blood.

The chemotherapy radically reshaped Armstrong’s body. By his third treatment cycle he recalled how he “didn’t look like the same person. My physique was shot … my body was being steadily diminished: my muscles were smaller, and flaccid. This is the real McCoy, I thought.

This is what it means to be sick… I kept losing weight, no matter how hard I tried not to… and the toxins ate away at me like a school of fish, nibbling” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 134; emphasis in original). Nearly all of the muscle he had developed over the course of his athletic career rapidly deteriorated. “Look at my muscles! Look what’s happening to me,” Armstrong lamented in his book (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 124). By the fifth day of the cycle,

Armstrong could no longer walk. As he became skinnier and skinnier, despite his best attempts to visit the hospital’s rehabilitation center, his physical abilities succumbed to the disease and the chemotherapy.

Armstrong’s cancer treatment had profound effects on the materiality of his body. During his treatment, Armstrong was under the ongoing surveillance of a medical collective that enabled his survival yet left him “wasting away.” Armstrong’s chemotherapy was nothing short of a painfully horrific experience. It left the former world champion too “enfeebled” to shuffle down the hospital hallway yet, paradoxically, the disease reshaped his body completely anew. As

Armstrong described, “I returned a different person, literally… my body is different, because during the chemotherapy I lost all the muscle I had ever built up, and when I recovered, it didn’t come back in the same way” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 4). Following the disease,

Armstrong focused on building the body of a Tour de France winner – slender and light on top, muscular and lean on the bottom. Armstrong’s particular chemotherapy regime was shaped by his cycling, just as his eventual return to the sport was shaped by the effects of the chemotherapy on his body:

There was one unforeseen benefit of cancer: it had completely reshaped my body. I now had a much sparer build. In old pictures, I looked like a football player with my thick neck and big upper body, which had contributed to my bullishness on the bike. But paradoxically, my strength had held me back in the mountains, because it took so much work to haul that weight uphill. Now I was almost gaunt, and the result was a lightness I’d never felt on the bike before. I was leaner in body and more balanced in spirit. The doubt about me as a Tour rider was my climbing ability. I could always sprint, but mountains were my downfall. Eddy Merckx had been telling me to slim down for years, and now I understood why. A five-pound drop was a large weight loss for the mountains – and I had lost 15 pounds. It was all I needed. I [would become] very good in the mountains. (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 219)

LANCE, the extended body that networked professional cycling with cancer survivorship, took its particular shape through a treatment regimen that accommodated Armstrong’s sport, a medical collective that reshaped his body, and the ways in which these associations continued after his treatment concluded. It is to this final aspect that I now turn, the translation of Lance- the-cancer-survivor behind the confines of the oncology ward.

The Ride of the Roses and Beyond: Fighting Cancer by Riding a Bicycle

Figure 1. Above, the Bill Cass illustration of Armstrong that inspired the founding of the Lance Armstrong Foundation. It was originally printed in the Austin Chronicle (see Radostitz, 2004).

In a 2011 TedMed interview, Armstrong reflected on the impact of his cancer experience on his eventual return to professional cycling. “That was a significant moment in time in my life,

Armstrong commented, “the fact that [Dr.] Larry Einhorn took bleomycin out of my protocol and added other things in, gave me the opportunity to work again, gave me the opportunity to make a living, gave me the opportunity to win the Tour, to grow this foundation because of all that success” (TedMed, 2012). The comment not only anchored Armstrong’s chemotherapy protocol to his bodily performances in the Tour de France. It also underlined the importance of the Lance

Armstrong Foundation, which was established immediately following the end of his treatment, in extending and stabilizing the material relations of cancer and cycling over time. Armstrong’s

27 cancer charity was not simply an organization that raised money for cancer research. It was a punctualized actor that directly stitched cancer survivorship to his cycling performances.

When Armstrong concluded his chemotherapy on December 13, 1996, Dr. Nichols spoke to him about the “obligation of the cured” to maintain companionship with fellow cancer patients and participate in the global fight against the disease. “Cancer could be an opportunity as well as a responsibility,” Dr. Nichols declared, and he urged Armstrong to follow other cancer survivors who had “become dedicated activists against the disease” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 150).

Recalling Armstrong’s press conference announcement to become an avid spokesperson for testicular cancer, he was finally in the position to do so.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation was established in early 1997. It focused on event- driven fundraising – namely, organized bicycle rides – the proceeds of which would directly fund research on improved cancer detection and treatment methods. As Armstrong reflected, “I didn’t want the foundation as a pulpit for me personally. I didn’t think I was special – and I would never know how much a part of my own cure I was. On the meaning of [the Foundation],

I wasn’t really clear. All I wanted to do was tell people, ‘Fight like hell, just like I did’”

(Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 152). The Foundation thus extended Armstrong’s personal experience with cancer into the broader context of cancer survivorship and began to translate cancer survivorship into the practice of cycling. A new translation emerged from this work, whereby it was possible to fight cancer by riding a bicycle; that is, organized bicycle rides, which bore the name of Armstrong’s organization, raised money for cancer research and wellness. In addition, Armstrong’s racing results could become meaningful to patients and survivors, for example, as evidence of what hard work determination can achieve, both in

28 cycling and with respect to one’s disease. Finally, Armstrong’s survivorship itself would become a potent mechanism in managing the doping controversies that emerged once he won the Tour.

The Foundation stitched survivorship to cycling in important ways. First, both Dr. Wolff and Dr. Nichols agreed to serve on the board of the Foundation (Albergotti and O’Connell, 2013:

91). Dr. Wolff took a leave of absence from Vanderbilt University and moved to Austin to volunteer at the Foundation on a full-time basis. He became the head of the scientific advisory committee that oversaw the distribution of its funds (Radostitz, 2004). In this way, the

Foundation extended certain actors from the medical collective that treated Lance-the-cyclist into the broader context of survivorship. As Armstrong noted, “The foundation could keep me tied very closely to all of them… a host of new friends who were involved in the fight, directly and indirectly, patients, doctors, nurses, families, and scientists” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 152; emphasis added). Importantly, extending these associations into the future served a double purpose: in pursuing the work of cancer survivorship LANCE would become more durable and could eventually deploy these relationships in the event of controversy.10

Second, in addition to linking the personal to the global, the Foundation also translated the fight against cancer into a bicycle ride. The Ride of the Roses, the Foundation’s first of many charity rides, took place on March 23, 1997. It was attended by more than 2,000 riders, well over the number expected, all of whom paid a registration fee that funded the Foundation’s research grants. The Austin Chronicle later described the ride:

10 For example, whether Armstrong disclosed his use of performance-enhancing drugs in his medical history statement prior to treatment became highly contested and crucial to USADA’s case against him (see, for example, BBC (2015)). Whereas his former teammate, Frankie Andreu, and Andreu’s wife testified in the affirmative, Dr. Nichols and Dr. Wolff denied that the disclosure took place. This event is described in chapter 5. 29

The rest stops ran out of food and water – no small thing, given that many of the cyclists were riding 100 miles in 90-degree heat and 90% humidity. But the routes through the Texas Hill Country were beautiful, carpeted with bluebonnets. Most of the cyclists were willing to forgive the organizers for the various mishaps, in part because it was a first-time event, but mainly because Armstrong rode in the middle of the pack and allowed hundreds of amateur cyclists to tell their friends, ‘I rode with Lance Armstrong and kicked his butt.’ (Radostitz, 2004: 2)

It is important to bear in mind that at this time, Armstrong was virtually unknown outside of professional cycling. His professional return to the sport was still six months away, yet the Ride of the Roses generated some $20,000 to fund its first research grant.

What is critical here is how the Foundation generated a new translation that slowly accumulated material and interpretive force: you can fight cancer by riding a bicycle! The

Foundation enabled a “change in scale” that made possible a reversal of strengths (Latour, 1983).

On its own, cancer was a statistical, painful, uncertain future. But with LANCE, the fight against cancer was given a face, a narrative, and most importantly, a possibility of defeat. The

Foundation organized more rides. It raised more money. It reshaped survivorship so much that the term “the Lance Armstrong effect” emerged as an explanation for the impact of activist fundraising in the cancer survivorship literature (TedMed, 2012). Additional socio-material practices, such as charity rides, fundraising, and research grants, continued to strengthen the translation over time. The Foundation’s title punctualized Armstrong as a singular person who defeated a severe form of cancer as if through the strength of his individual determination alone; it stitched the sports discourse of solitude to that of battling cancer.11

11 I examine the discourse of solitude in sports training, which Mialet (2012) and Shapin (1990) explored in relation to the production of scientific knowledge, and DeNora (1999) analyzed in relation to musical talent, in chapter 2. 30

Epstein (1995: 420) explained a similar moment in the history of AIDS activism:

The extraordinary success of treatment activists (who have always been a relatively small group and whose ranks have been further depleted by burnout, illness, and death over the years) stemmed in large part from their capacity to convince the biomedical establishment not only that they spoke for the larger body of patients, but also that they could mobilize hundreds or thousands of angry demonstrators to give muscle to their specific requests. Once activists monopolized the capacity to say “what patients wanted,” researchers were forced to deal with them in order to ensure that research subjects would both enroll in their trials in sufficient numbers and comply with the study protocols. On the basis of their credibility, activists thus constructed themselves as an “obligatory passage point” standing between the researchers and the trials they sought to conduct. Of course, by the same token, the activists wanted to see the trials conducted; so the point, really, is that the relationship became a powerfully symbiotic one.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation similarly bridged the gap between activism and the research establishment, in this case by using its charity rides to directly fund the research projects its board of doctors determined to be viable. It also stitched cancer survivorship to Lance-the- cyclist’s race results. The Foundation, that is, grew in tandem with Armstrong’s success at the

Tour. What made LANCE so powerful was its position at the intersection of cancer survivorship and professional cycling. Inasmuch as the “global fight” against cancer and the Tour de France began to pass through Armstrong, Lance-the-cyclist referred to his medical history as evidence of the contrary. Moreover, when asked about his achievement in the sport, Lance-the-cancer- survivor echoed his role in survivorship. The process of assembling LANCE stitched

Armstrong’s survivorship to his cycling performances, and henceforth, their fortunes were intertwined.

Conclusion

In a documentary about the US Postal Service cycling team, Coach Johan Bruyneel reflected on the 1999 Tour de France: “The plan was very simple … Other teams, they didn’t understand what exactly we were going to do when we said, ‘we are going to prepare for the

Tour de France.’ ‘Who is going to be your leader?’ I said, ‘Lance Armstrong.’ ‘But he cannot climb,’ they said” (Road to Paris, 2001 documentary, 2:10-2:39). As this chapter has argued, however, Armstrong’s cycling abilities in the Tour were materially-semiotically tied to his cancer experience.

LANCE was a material-collective body whose assemblage was an outcome of stitching together cycling, cancer treatment, and cancer survivorship. Armstrong’s treatments were chosen to accommodate his potential return to cycling. The treatments, in turn, reshaped the materiality of his body and made it more suitable for a mountainous race like the Tour. As Lance-the- cyclist’s achievements in the sport gave meaning to cancer survivorship, his Foundation became increasingly influential in directing the research community. Finally, as Armstrong was embroiled in doping controversies, he deployed his survivorship network to manage the fallout.

As we continue along in this study, we will see how Armstrong’s association with cancer followed him throughout his training and racing, and how LANCE further developed as an extended body of cycling competencies.

Chapter 2 - Techno-Sport in Action: LANCE, Training, and the Tour de France

One of the most salient tensions in sport today concerns the potential for technologies to obscure the performances of athlete bodies. This anxiety lies at the heart of concerns about doping as well as what perhaps appears to be the more benign issue of the advantages provided by sports equipment and clothing. At first glance, most would argue that the former appears far more egregious. Controversies over the RZR Lazer bodysuit or South African sprinter Oscar

Pistorius’ prosthetic legs, for example, pale in comparison to the outcry over drug scandals. The prevailing fear about doping largely concerns the extent to which athletes are apparently willing to risk both their health and the competitive spirit of sport itself in order to win (see Beamish and

Ritchie, 2005). Such controversies over technologies and doping are anchored in the same overarching concern for the preservation of the so-called “natural” body.

A productive line of research in sport studies has used Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory to make this point, which in her words provides “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves (Haraway, 1991: 181). A cyborg intervention into the controversy over the LZR Racer bodysuit, for example, suggests that the

“natural” is in fact always already entangled with the technological (McCullough, 2010).

Moreover, the outcries over whether Oscar Pistorius should be able to compete in the Olympic

Games or if fellow South African sprinter Caster Semenya meets the International Olympic

Committee’s criteria to compete as a woman reveals the extent to which the narratives about the natural body are further intertwined in the policing of normative standards of ability, gender, and race and ethnicity (Fouché, 2012; Franklin, 1996). These cases are among the many that, as

Fouché argues, use cyborg perspectives to “draw attention to the instability of all bodies and, by

33 extension, the inadequate conceptualization of the athletic body as sport’s sacred ground” (2017:

22).

Whereas the cyborg sport studies scholarship makes the very important and critical intervention into the boundary work of the natural/artificial body, it ignores the equally questionable divide between individual and collective action. That is, while it correctly unveils the “host of cultural assumptions, beliefs, and practices that work to privilege the human body over the technoscientific” (Fouché, 2017: 4), it leaves the singularity of the body intact. This chapter reconsiders precisely how the individual athlete body is produced by material-collective networks within technoscientific sport. Such a focus not only further highlights the instability of the body, this time with respect to the boundary between individuals and collectives, but also challenges the extent to which sport remains (or perhaps ever was) a site of competition between human individuals.

Thus, this chapter traces key elements of LANCE made visible by a series of

Armstrong’s preparations for the Tour de France. I explore four of the practices through which

Armstrong prepared for the 1999-2005 Tours de France. In revisiting Armstrong as he (1) trains for the race, (2) learns an “economical” and “efficient” pedaling technique, (3) previews the race route, and (4) participates in wind-tunnel testing, I describe the material-collective production of his body and abilities. My analysis of these practices is informed by a series of questions:

Through what practices did LANCE prepare Armstrong’s body for competition? What elements of LANCE were present and how did they become involved? What did Armstrong himself do as these practices unfolded, i.e., where was Armstrong the individual? Each practice highlights an extended body, LANCE, composed of multiple, contingent associations of humans and nonhumans. Each material-collective practice, that is, was responsible for some element of the

34 bodily performances through which Armstrong won the Tour de France and managed his status both as a “clean” athlete and cycling “hero.”

As a sport in which human-technology and individual-collective relations are especially visible, cycling provides an emblematic case in which to conceptualize an extended athlete body as well as consider the meaning of sport today. Far from a meritocracy or an equal playing field upon which natural bodies compete, techno-sport unfolds as “trials of strength” (Latour, 1983) between extended bodies. Techno-sport is not about fairness and equality of opportunity. Rather, it necessitates that rival extended bodies struggle over the heterogeneous processes of generating and exploiting inequalities over one another. Techno-sport, in short, is about power. This chapter thus traces four practices through which LANCE attempted to generate advantages over its rivals. Whereas this approach is compatible with cyborg sport studies, and inspired by it to a degree, it aims to situate the body of the sportsperson within their constitutive heterogeneous network in order to challenge an additional mythic component of sport – that of the singularity of athlete bodies – heretofore ignored within sport studies.

Tuning a Bodily “Engine”

Beamish and Ritchie (2005) outline a general history of training regimes in high- performance sport, suggesting that a “paradigm shift” in the scientific conception of the body explains changes in training practices and, ultimately, performance-enhancing drug use. They argue that through the mid-twentieth century, training was essentially a synonym of “drill,” understood as “the repetitive practice of skills or movements designed to refine technique, improve coordination, and enhance precision and execution” (Beamish and Ritchie 2006, p. 53).

Training practices reflected the idea that “human performance” was largely pre-determined and could not be significantly improved, only made more efficient.

As they explain, “discoveries in Europe and North America during the first few decades of the twentieth century initiated a slight, but nevertheless tremendously significant paradigm shift in understanding the human body.” These studies, for example, reported physiological

“adaptations” in subjects who followed long-term exercise regimes – such as increased blood volume, elevated lactate threshold, and improved cardiovascular aerobic capacity (see, for example, Ekblom et al., 1968; and Ekblom, 1969). “Rather than thinking about it as a vessel with fixed, inherited traits and capacities,” they continue, “scientists began to conceive of the body as an adapting organism that responded to its environment” (Beamish and Ritchie, 2005: 420). By subjecting athletes to intense exercise at varying effort levels, training practices could substantially “enhance” bodily physiology, hence the new language of “building” fitness and

“boosting” performance. They might have also noted that this new model of physiology was developed, in part, by using blood transfusions to measure the effect of red blood cells on exercise capacity (see Ekblom, 1972), which later became a principal doping method used by

Armstrong, his teammates, and their competitors.

Beamish and Ritchie’s (2005) analytic goal is to “frame” the use of different forms of

PEDs, such as stimulants and blood boosters, within the fixed-capacities and performance- enhancement paradigms, respectively. Despite a brief discussion of the development of

“periodized” training, their analytic attention to “paradigm shifts” and “scientific discourse” overstates the extent to which performance enhancement replaced concerns with drills, repetitions, and efficiency. Their approach to this issue reflects a general weakness of forms of social constructivism, which in this case leave the translation of physiological knowledge into

36 training practices, and its stabilization over space and time, unspecified. My approach, rather, explains (1) the material culture of training that developed specifically in relation to professional cycling, (2) the temporal emergence of LANCE as a particular extended body, and (3) the translations through which Armstrong’s bodily abilities were materially and collectively produced. I use the concept of translation to capture the materialization of particular knowledge claims from exercise physiology and aerodynamic science into LANCE’s aerobic training regimes and aerodynamic body-bicycle positioning. These translations are central to how

LANCE generates power over their competitors; they are not always successful, however, and they entail struggle.

Examining the material practices of LANCE challenges Beamish and Ritchie’s idea that repetition and efficiency have been replaced by the performance-enhancement paradigm. In this section, I demonstrate how interval training attempts to enhance physiological abilities through new regimes of bodily repetitions. Interval training refers not only to periods of exercise that are precisely measured in the here-and-now, it also extends bodily ability into the future, for example, by imagining “peak” performances attainable by following a long-term training schedule. In a later section, I focus on the material-collective coordination of Armstrong’s

“pedaling efficiency” and bodily posture, and the use of drills to “optimize” his cadence. Finally,

I will describe how LANCE previews the Tour de France route – to learn about its mountains, road conditions, and so on – in order to transform the competition into yet another repetition.

These practices further complicate Beamish and Ritchie’s argument that the performance- enhancement paradigm replaces drilling and repetition. Instead, I argue that the training practices evidenced by LANCE are in fact stabilized as their own series of repetitions.

LANCE and the Mobilization of the Physiology Laboratory

The early studies of the performance-enhancement model of physiology utilized machines such as the cycling ergometer and respirator to record physiological attributes (see

Åstrand, Åstrand and Standard, 1960). These devices were large, immobile, and required athletes to attend laboratory trials in order to use them to develop their training programs. In a standard fitness test, for example, a cyclist pedaled an ergometer – a stationary bicycle whose resistance, and therefore the effort level of the rider, could be controlled. As the rider progressed through increasing intensities, a scientist or technician extracted a small sample of their blood. The samples were then assessed for their lactic acid levels, a byproduct of strenuous exercise whose accumulation will eventually shut down muscular activity. The fitness test identified the intensity level at which the production of lactic acid increased exponentially, and therefore where an athlete needed to train in order to become faster. This more focused approach, based on concrete physiological data, gradually replaced earlier training systems that relied on the athlete’s perceived level of exertion.

Armstrong’s training for the Tour de France must be situated within this historically- emergent physiological apparatus, a world “of bicycles, muscles, blood samples, and watts… of movement, endurance, power, and fatigue, a world where the limits of being human are tested and documented daily” (Johnson, 2013: 885). Armstrong, his teammates, and coaches, structured their training into “intervals,” which required them to alternate between different intensity levels for specific durations of time. Armstrong’s training took advantage of technologies that effectively mobilized the physiology laboratory. LANCE enrolled a portable heart rate monitor,

38 and eventually a power meter,12 and the field lactate threshold testing advocated by Dr. Ferrari and his mentor Dr. Francesco Conconi (see Conconi et al., 1982), to translate the epistemic advantages of the physiology laboratory onto their training roads. This “new” exercise physiology was made possible, in part, by the portability of the emergent technologies of the period that enabled riders, coaches, and trainers to visualize the body outside of the laboratory; these techno-scientific practices, then, unfolded as “engine science” (Carroll, 2001).13

Tyler Hamilton, one of Armstrong’s teammates, described the interval program designed by their coach, Dr. Michele Ferrari:

Until then, I’d trained like most old-school bike racers trained … [In] my daily journals, most days are marked by a single number: how many hours I rode – the more, the better. That ended the second I set foot in Nice. Lance and Ferrari showed me there were more variables than I’d ever imagined, and they all mattered: wattages, cadence, intervals, zones, joules, lactic acid, and, of course, hematocrit. Each ride was a math problem: a precisely mapped set of numbers for us to hit … [Dr. Ferrari’s] visits were like scientific experiments. (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 103)

Hamilton expressed not only the novelty of interval training in cycling at the time, but also the continuous quantification of their bodily performances. The comparison between “old school” training and LANCE’s approach, at first blush, seems to substantiate Beamish and Ritchie’s

(2005) language. However, the complexity that “replaced” drilling was itself a regime of repetition; for example, of riding a climb, testing one’s blood after the effort, inscribing records

12 Power meters have largely replaced heart rate monitors in the quantification of bodily effort in professional cycling. Whereas variables such as hydration, fatigue, and temperature influence one’s heart rate, power is a more consistent measurement of bodily output. 13 Carroll (2001) conceptualizes the material culture of scientific practice in relation to its four main engines. It is with meters, scopes, graphs, and chambers, first, that science generates its findings, and second, that it has temporal and spatial stability. Here, LANCE generates powerful riders, in part, with its use of power meters, heart rate monitors, training timetables, and wind tunnels. 39 of bodily fluids that are comparable over time, repeating the efforts, and so on. Drills did not vanish from training regimes. Quite the contrary. LANCE’s approach to interval training was characterized by the repetition of bodily efforts.

Dr. Ferrari often carried out physiological tests on the slopes of the Col de la Madone, just outside of Nice, France. As Hamilton wrote, in between a series of controlled efforts up the

Madone, “Ferrari would measure the lactate in our blood, charting the results on graph paper so we could figure out our thresholds (basically, how much power we could staidly produce without burning out). Then, we’d ride the Madone full gas, revving our engines to the maximum”

(Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 103-104; emphasis added). These tests also informed an additional method of tuning their physiological engines: “blood doping.”

Dr. Ferrari also used their blood samples to calculate their hematocrit level. The volume of oxygen-carrying red blood cells is a crucial metric of exercise physiology, and one that can be manipulated. Armstrong and his teammates, as well as their competitors, used a drug called EPO and blood transfusions to elevate their hematocrit. Both practices were banned, though a direct test for EPO did not exist until 2003. Even so, the testing regime was easily managed. As

Hamilton explained, the direct EPO test simply caused them to change how they administered the drug: “instead of injecting EPO subcutaneously (which caused it to be released over a long period of time), we [injected] smaller doses directly into the vein, straight into the bloodstream, where it would still boost our red blood cell counts, but leave our body quickly enough to avoid detection” (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 139). By combining interval training with blood doping, practices that unfolded within the context of the new physiology, LANCE became a high- performance “engine.”

As Armstrong trained for the Tour de France, his body was physically attached to devices such as heart rate monitors and power meters. His efforts were constantly quantified, sometimes innocuously inscribed as heart rate data that he emailed to his coach, other times more painfully extracted as a blood sample for lactate or hematocrit analysis. Moreover, this form of riding unfolded alongside teammates, coaches, physicians, and numerous machines. He was, simply stated, never alone during his physical preparations for the race.

“Staging” the Race Route

An integral component of Armstrong’s preparations for the Tour de France involved previewing the sections of the upcoming race route that might prove decisive. While his rivals participated in other races during the year, Armstrong and his team studied and rode the mountains of the upcoming Tour. By learning the duration, gradient, corners, and pavement condition of the climbs ahead of time, LANCE attempted to translate the climbs of the Tour – many of which would be comparatively unfamiliar to Armstrong’s competitors – into repetitions.14

In the months leading up to the Tour de France, the US Postal team held several training camps near the mountains featured on the race route. For example, in May 2000, the team held a camp in the Pyrenees that would allow them to preview a climb known as the Hautacam. As

Hautacam was the first uphill finish of the upcoming Tour de France, scheduled for the end of

Stage 10, knowing the climb could provide numerous tactical advantages for LANCE. Although

Armstrong stood alone atop the podium after the race, if we trace the practices through which

14 This practice of pre-riding potentially decisive climbs proved so advantageous that it is now routine for any Tour de France contender. 41

LANCE prepared for the Tour, it is clear that Armstrong himself was never alone and that his bodily actions extended through a material collective of humans and nonhumans.

The preview of Hautacam was scheduled during a training camp with some of his Tour teammates. It was important for teammates to train together so they could learn how one another rode. For the first couple days, Armstrong related, “we traced the routes we’d ride in the Tour, scouting the stages” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2003: 34-35). Armstrong pedaled alongside his teammates, took orders from his team director, and sent his ride data to his coach for analysis. As they rode intervals up the same mountains they would later race in the Tour, they looked for particularly decisive terrain: a narrow road, a steep gradient, poor pavement. After climbing the

Col du Soulour, Armstrong stopped at the top and a mechanic adjusted his handlebars. These trials rarely unfold as planned, however, and Armstrong crashed on the following descent and could not finish the camp due to injury.

Nevertheless, the camp was not without value. As Armstrong later reflected, “I had plenty of time to think, and it left me with the conviction that I didn’t need to make any more foolish mistakes or take unnecessary chances. I liked descending, I liked cornering, but now I decided that if I lost 30 seconds, that was okay. I could make it up” (Armstrong and Jenkins,

2003: 38). A crucial race tactic was thus developed as a direct result of previewing the course.

Armstrong now knew that the descent following the Col du Soulour was dangerous. He knew which corners were smooth and gradual, and could be taken at a high speed, and he knew which corners were sharp and demanded caution. By previewing the descent of the Col du Soulour,

LANCE developed crucial knowledge about the mountains that would be put into action during the Tour.

Once Armstrong recovered from his injuries, he returned to Hautacam. The climb was simply too decisive to remain an unknown. “The weather was blustery and I rode the exact route we would take,” Armstrong recalled, “only there were no spectators and I was alone except for

Johan in a follow car” (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2003: 38). This time, although he was without his teammates who were training and racing elsewhere, coach Johan Bruyneel followed

Armstrong in their team car. As they would during the Tour, they maintained constant communication through a small, two-way radio. Although relatively new to professional cycling at the time, Bruyneel used the radio to instruct Armstrong on his posture, pedaling cadence, and the road ahead.15 Thus, the coordination of the competencies of LANCE was of crucial concern for Armstrong’s Tour preparations. Despite Armstrong’s statement, he was never alone, he was never just Armstrong. He was always LANCE, an extended body in action, even when he perceived otherwise.

As Armstrong ascended the Hautacam, he recalled how he “studied the road as I went, trying to decide where I might attack, and where I’d need to save myself” (Armstrong and

Jenkins, 2003: 38-39). Upon reaching the summit, Armstrong remained unsatisfied. As he later explained, “a mountain could be a complicated thing, I didn’t feel like I knew Hautacam. I’d climbed it, but I was still uncertain about how to pace myself up it. At the end of a rehearsed climb, I wanted to feel that I knew the mountain so well that it might help me” (Armstrong and

Jenkins, 2003: 39). Armstrong descended the climb, turned around, and rode straight up again, this time achieving what he considered “mastery.” We find here, at the heart of LANCE’s preparations, yet another instance of repetition – the rehearsal of a mountaintop climb.

15 Race radios have since become the subject of ongoing controversies in the sport. Critics allege that they discourage riders from successfully breaking away from the pack, while supporters argue they improve safety by improving communication between race officials, team directors, and riders. See Tan (2002) for more. 43

Moreover, it is by knowing the climb that LANCE turned a stage of the Tour de France into a staging.

Bruno Latour used the term “staging” to describe Pasteur’s field trials during which, before the media, his hypotheses simply appeared to come true:

“Staging” is the right word because, in practice, it is the public showing of what has been rehearsed many times before in his laboratory. It is strictly speaking a repetition, but this time in front of an assembled public which has previously invested so much interest and is now expecting its rewards. (Latour, 1983: 151)

Similarly, when the 2000 Tour de France reached Hautacam, where competitors, the media, and fans expected a showdown, LANCE’s performance indeed appeared “miraculous.” In fact, as

Armstrong rode away from his rivals, race commentator Paul Sherwin exclaimed that

“Armstrong looks so controlled … He’s certainly proving today that he is one of the greatest climbers in the sport” (YouTube, 2006).16

By tracing the material-collective work of an extended body, we know that this is not a miracle but the result of previewing the course and transforming the competitive event itself into a repetition. As Armstrong climbed Hautacam during the race, he knew when the mountain was steepest and how far he was from the finish. He knew the condition of the pavement and how to pace himself up the climb. This regime of repetitions, to the extent that it was successful, amounted to an effort to bring the race under the control of LANCE. It transformed Stage 10 of the 2000 Tour de France into a staging of LANCE.

16 At the time of writing, a video of the original broadcast of the race was available at the following url: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6DmNMGEuI0>. 44

Coordinating an “Economic” Pedaling Technique

Loïc Wacquant wrote that “pugilist practical sense” is “acquired gradually through long- term contact with other athletes and with coaches, workout after workout and fight after fight, which remains as such inaccessible to conscious and deliberate mastery, in spite of the conjugated efforts of boxers, trainers, and managers most inclined to the rationalization of their trade” (2004: 127-128). By remaining overly concerned with consciousness, however, Wacquant foregoes consideration of the relationships between boxing bodies and the “mundane technologies” through which they acquire skills (see Downey, 2007). Wacquant’s focus on intersubjectivity – for example, in the dispositional dimensions of action informed by habitus – elides the analytic attention to material-collective action articulated in the case of LANCE, whose coordination of an economical pedaling technique unfolded through the translation of biomechanical laboratory practices that utilized devices, vocal prompts, training camps, and climbing repetitions.17 Armstrong’s climbing ability was produced, not at all “imperceptibly,” but through a material and collective chain of deliberate efforts to displace his former climbing style.

Whereas pedaling a bicycle may appear too simple to require deliberate practice, in the context of the Tour de France it was yet another site for the material-collective coordination of bodily action. As Chris Carmichael, one of Armstrong’s coaches, observed, “to become one of the world’s best climbers, [Armstrong] had to… change his climbing style” (as cited in

Armstrong and Carmichael, 2000: 186). Prior to winning the Tour de France, Armstrong always preferred to rise out of his saddle and use his body weight to push down on the pedals. This technique worked well on steep gradients and to launch quick accelerations but used too much

17 For a direct debate between Mialet and Wacquant, please see two essays in Body and Society (Mialet 2014; Wacquant 2014). 45 energy to be suitable for a three-week event. Pedaling in a standing position required a rider to hold their body up with their arms, which increased oxygen consumption and elevated their heart rate. “In a major race like the Tour de France,” Carmichael recalled, “with 3 weeks of relentless racing, Lance couldn’t afford to waste energy” (Armstrong and Carmichael, 2000: 187).

Armstrong’s technique was, in biomechanical terms, “inefficient” (see Cavanagh and Sanderson,

1986), and was modified by the articulation work of LANCE.

Armstrong’s coaches sought to coordinate an alternative technique through the

“economical” articulation of the body-machine (Armstrong and Carmichael, 2000: 224).

Compared to the frantic, pedal-mashing of the standing technique, in which the body moved wildly in its application of force to the pedals, economical climbing brought the body and its movements under precise articulation with the pedals. As Carmichael instructed, “as you start to breathe deeply from the climbing effort, slide your hands out to the bend in the bar. This opens up your chest cavity to expand the diaphragm and ease breathing. Also, this position allows the angle of your hips to make greater use of the muscles of the lower back, butt, hamstrings, calves, and triceps” (Armstrong and Carmichael, 2000: 188). Efficient pedaling is a relational achievement of the forces of a body-machine. But how was such a technique achieved in practice?

Carmichael recalled the material-collective coordination of this technique whereby, before the 1999 Tour:

[Armstrong and his teammates] devoted a weeklong training camp to pedaling up the Tour’s roads in the Alps and another week of training up the Tour’s roads in the Pyrenees. [They] wore ear receivers so that Bruyneel could communicate with them on the team radio. Each time Lance rose out of the saddle, Bruyneel asked, “What are you doing?” Lance promptly sat back down and shifted into a smaller gear. By

the end of the two training camps, he had changed his style to smaller gears and staying longer in the saddle (Armstrong and Carmichael, 2000: 187).

The “economical” climbing technique was deliberately learned through the material-collective coordination of Armstrong’s bodily actions. Armstrong learned to climb in a seated position, and to downshift to smaller gears when his muscles tired and began to ache, through a material- collective chain of translations that linked a formalized knowledge of climbing technique to

Armstrong’s rehearsals on the mountains of the Tour. The radios coordinated the competencies of rider and coach so that, during training and also the Tour itself, Armstrong’s actions – his posture on the bicycle, his pedaling style, and how deeply he breathed during an uphill effort, for example – became a product of LANCE.

“The Body and the Bike Have to Be Thought of as One”

On the final stage of the 1989 Tour de France, American rider Greg Lemond gained 58 seconds in a 25-kilometer individual time trial to overtake Frenchman Laurent Fignon in the general classification. Lemond’s unique tri-bars, tear-drop helmet, and rear disc wheel were a striking sight in comparison to Fignon’s traditional time-trial handlebars and especially his uncovered head from which a long ponytail fluttered behind him in the wind. Lemond won the

Tour by just 8 seconds,18 which remains the smallest margin of victory in history. As early studies in sport aerodynamics showed, because nearly two-thirds of the total drag of a cyclist is caused by the body (Kyle and Burke, 1984), it is entirely plausible that Fignon’s ponytail lost the

18 To put this slim margin of victory in perspective, after 104 editions of the Tour only 9 riders have won by less than one minute. Armstrong won his Tours by an average margin of 5 minutes 40 seconds. 47

1989 Tour de France.19 For this reason, the episode is among the most notable in recent Tour history and is frequently cited as triggering an aerodynamics revolution in cycling and sport more generally (Lukes et al., 2005), in which wind tunnels are used to test the wind resistance of equipment and bodies.

Lemond’s victory is emblematic of the earliest use of wind-tunnel testing, which focused on the drag of individual pieces of cycling equipment. During the late-1980s and early-1990s, for example, researchers used wind tunnels to test the aerodynamics of different types of handlebars and helmets (Kyle, 1989), wheels (Kyle, 1991a; Greenwell et al., 1995; Tew and Sayers, 1999), bicycle frames (Kyle and Burke, 1984; Kyle, 1991b), and the position of the rider (Kyle and

Burke, 1984; Grappe et al., 1997). Their focus, however, remained on comparisons within these categories of equipment. For example, that a disc wheel produced a lower drag coefficient than a standard 18-spoke wheel (Kyle, 1989b), or that the aerodynamics of HED- and Zipp-branded disc wheels was dependent upon the angle of the wind (Greenwell et al., 1995). Simply stated, the earliest wind-tunnel trials focused on either the materiality of cycling equipment or the position of the rider, therefore largely maintaining a body-machine boundary.

For the 2004 and 2005 Tours de France, however, a new approach for wind-tunnel testing emerged through trials conducted by LANCE. The “F-One Project,” which was comprised of personnel from Trek Bicycles, HED wheels, and Giro helmets, aerodynamics consultants from

Aerosports Research, and several of Armstrong’s coaches, used wind-tunnel testing to generate advantages for Armstrong. In contrast to the wind-tunnel projects organized for the 1984 and

1996 US Olympic cycling teams, the F-One Project was unique in that it focused only on

Armstrong. The earlier projects were applied to entire teams whose specific composition was

19 Kyle and Burke (1984) found, for example, a 7 percent drag reduction when a rider wore an aerodynamic helmet. 48 unknown at the time of testing due to the long process of selecting Olympic teams. As Bart

Knaggs, President of US Postal Service cycling team, noted, “we brought all the key suppliers together and made them understand there has to be a holistic connection between Lance and his equipment. The body and the bike have to be thought of as one” (as cited in Markoff, 2004; emphasis added). It is this particular epistemic context in which aerodynamic science adopted a relational approach toward the body-machine assemblage.20 Once again, let’s consider (1) what happened to Armstrong’s body and (2) what he did during this process.

In preparation for the 2004 Tour de France, Trek produced what it called the “narrow bike” (Coyle, 2005). It was named for the width of its bottom bracket, the area where a bicycle’s pedal arms are attached, which was eighteen millimeters narrower than a standard bicycle. The reduced width of the bottom bracket pulled Armstrong’s legs closer together, which therefore also reduced his “frontal area,” that is, the amount of air his body displaced as he traveled forward. By shrinking the size of the hole that Armstrong-and-his-bike would have to punch through the wind, the assemblage could move faster. In a wind-tunnel test, as Coyle (2005, 73) wrote, “the narrow bike combined with the smaller changes (new helmet, new bars) had been measured as thirty-six seconds faster over fifty kilometers than Armstrong’s previous setup.”

The data produced by the wind-tunnel trials suggested that Armstrong would ride over half a minute faster simply by switching to the narrower bicycle.

20 This is perhaps a strong empirical claim, so consider that in a review paper of aerodynamics and cycling, published after LANCE’s wind-tunnel trials, Lukes et al. (2005: 73) assert that future research “may develop dramatically if the flow around the entire bike and rider, as a whole, is examined, understood and quantified.” In addition, Lennard Zinn (2001: 4), a renowned cycling technology writer, argued that “back in the day, everyone had the same equipment and a level playing field. Now, you might say that is true again, but there has been a massive jump in equipment performance since 1999, much of which can be attributed to the ‘Armstrong effect.’” 49

To be sure, the history of testing the aerodynamics of cycling clothing preceded

Armstrong’s Tours de France. Kyle and Burke (1984), for example, found an 11 percent reduction in drag for swapping a full-length lycra skin suit for a traditional cut (i.e., a short- sleeved top and knee-high bottoms).21 The trials of strength specific to Armstrong’s clothing designs, nonetheless, depict practices specific to LANCE. The team’s clothing sponsor, Nike, designed 33 prototypical skinsuits to test in the wind tunnel. In a “process of adjustment,” in which “action is the result of associations with other entities” (Winance, 2006: 66), LANCE tested different fabrics and panel designs for their skinsuits. As a result of iteratively testing a total of 60 different fabrics, the wind-tunnel collective selected a polyester microfiber spandex, which was also used in one of Nike’s swimsuits, for the majority of Armstrong’s “Swift Spin” skinsuit. By varying the suit’s materials during testing, moreover, they discovered variations in the effects of the fabrics on the turbulent layers of air generated by different parts of the body

(see Kyle, 2004). As Markoff wrote:

Depending on the area of the body, the Swift Spin designers used different materials to alter airflow subtly with the idea of limiting low-pressure areas directly behind the rider’s body. For example, the shoulders and arms of the Swift Spin suit are finely dimpled, but the body of the suit is extremely smooth.” (Markoff, 2004: 3)

The use of zoned fabrics in the Swift Spin suit exemplifies LANCE’s relational approach to body-machine aerodynamics. The skinsuit was composed of several different textures that accounted for Armstrong’s time-trial specific position on the bicycle. Interestingly, in order to

21 Lukes et al. (2005: 69) add an interesting observation with respect to this finding, however: “It was proposed that this reduction was due to the covering up of arm and leg hair; however track and road riders do shave both leg and arm hair, so the reference value for this statistic appears flawed.” 50 ensure a tight, wrinkle-free fit, Markoff explained, “as Armstrong loses weight while he gains conditioning during the racing season, new form-fitting suits will be made regularly” (2003: 3).

All in all, the Nike Swift Spin skinsuit was estimated to save Armstrong 90 seconds during a 34-mile time trial. As LANCE’s wind-tunnel trials produced abilities for its team, the question remains, however, what did Armstrong himself do during this process? As Bruyneel explained, during the wind-tunnel trials at the University of Washington:

because we didn’t want to interrupt Lance’s training, we used a body double to test all of the equipment. A forty-one-year-old triathlete from Vancouver named John Litherland turned out to have nearly the same body dimensions as Lance, right down to the slight hump both riders got in their backs when they were arched forwards over their handlebars. I think of him as one of the unheralded heroes of Lance’s seven Tour victories. For hour after hour, Litherland curled over various arrangements of bikes and handlebars as the giant fan of the wind tunnel below a 35-mph gale in his face. (Bruyneel and Strickland, 2008: 100)

That is, Armstrong himself was absent from the processes of adjustment performed in the wind tunnel. The 90 seconds he stood to gain on his competitors in the Tour came not from his own efforts but from the adjustments made by a material collective in his absence.

Bruyneel continued, “our experts tinkered, calculated, ran computer programs, made adjustments a millimeter at a time, repositioned helmets. Litherland held his wrists flat, curved down, moved his shoulders forward and crouched down low over his bike, stuck him arms forward – whatever we asked” (Bruyneel and Strickland, 2008: 100). In comparison to the practices of interval training and pre-riding the race route, the particular epistemic advantage of the wind tunnel was its production of specific, incremental time gains over Armstrong’s competitors. Moreover, the wind tunnel allowed a collective to work on an absent, flesh-and-

51 blood Armstrong-body, to produce abilities for a body that was not there.22 In a final comparison to the staging and tuning of LANCE, the wind tunnel adjustments constituted the production of bodily abilities at their most distributed. Armstrong himself did not even have to be present for

LANCE to produce the bodily abilities through which he would win yet another Tour de France.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have offered an analytic description of the material-collective production of bodily abilities, which began with a brief sketch of the integration of technoscientific practices into cycling and elaborated on their further enrollment by LANCE. I first explained the practices by which Armstrong prepared his aerobic system for the Tour, which uncovered several aspects of the heterogeneous network through which his lactate threshold and hematocrit level were measured. Moreover, LANCE’s approach appears a significant counterpoint to Beamish and Ritchie’s claim that the performance-enhancement paradigm of physiology marked the end of drilling techniques.

Second, I analyzed how LANCE transformed a single stage of the Tour into a staging of its material-collective body. By conducting pre-race reconnaissance on Hautacam, for example,

Armstrong learned the specific contours and gradients of the mountain. During the race, his coach spoke to him about his efforts through a small radio. The result was the coordination of the competencies of rider and coach, the material-collective production of the action of a bicycle rider.

22 The strategy of conducting wind-tunnel trials in Armstrong’s absence continued. For the 2010 Tour de France, LANCE tested one hundred different helmet designs over the course of five different wind tunnel sessions, this time using a dummy rather than a body double (McClusky, 2010). 52

Third, I explored the coordination of an “efficient” pedaling technique that promised to save energy over the long duration of the Tour. Using technological devices, vocal prompts, training camps, and climbing repetitions, Armstrong gradually embodied this technique yet required constant work to maintain it. This point, which looks beyond inter-subjectivity and the internalized dispositions of the body and instead emphasizes the material-collective networks in which they are situated, multiplies the actors required to explain athletic performances.

Fourth and finally, I traced the work of a collective of humans and nonhumans through the dozens of wind-tunnel trials that sought to provide Armstrong with an additional 90 seconds in the individual time trial at the Tour. Whereas wind-tunnel testing previously focused only on which types of equipment were faster, the approach utilized by LANCE approached the body and bicycle as a single object. This relational approach, for example, directed wind-tunnel technicians toward the effect of posture on the position of the rider’s helmet and the impact of different skinsuit fabrics placed on different parts of the body on the speed of the bicycle.

Through these explorations of the material-collective production of Armstrong’s bodily performances we confront a paradox: bodily performances are embedded in, networked with, and constituted through material-collective networks while simultaneously singularized as a result of the hard work of a pure body. Turning to the latter dimension of this paradox, chapter three explores the transformation of LANCE into Lance-the-Hero, the singularized, mythic individual who overcame cancer to win the Tour seven times in a row.

Chapter 3 - Enacting Lance-the-Hero: Singularizing an Extended Body

Introduction

Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist who, after recovering from an advanced form of testicular cancer, won the prestigious Tour de France seven times in a row (1999-2005), was once an ideal incarnation of the heroic athlete – a mythic figure constructed as obsessively pursuing a practice, striving after a hard-to-reach goal, and perhaps most importantly, doing so in solitude (see Barthes, 2011). Armstrong’s seven victories were unprecedented in the historic race, which is regarded as the premier feat of bodily strength and determination in professional cycling. The accounts of his sporting success that circulated in the media often debated which part of his body was stronger, his legs or his heart, and his sporting triumphs were all the more impressive because he had been so close to death.23 Although he would eventually be stripped of his victories following an investigation by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (2012), during his streak of victories Armstrong embodied the heroic athlete: a will-driven, hard-working and singular body.

The mythic construction of the scientist, as a brain-in-a-vat, a pure mind, and above all else, a genius, appears to stand at the opposing end of the “spectrum of bodily motility” (Ihde,

2013) from that of the super-human and heroic body of the athlete. Armstrong provides an intriguing case with which to expand Mialet’s (2012) conception of the “distributed-centered subject” to the context of sport, to position the cultural figure of the heroic athlete against that of

23 Among countless examples, Bissinger (2012: 4) wrote in an article for Newsweek, that “in the eyes of many, the scope of Livestrong (Armstrong’s cancer charity), as well as his own story as a cancer survivor who went on to win all those Tour de France titles, makes him a hero regardless of any allegation.”

54 the genius scientist and explore their presumed differences through empirical comparison. Such a case study is significant, not only to build upon Mialet’s (2017) compelling theorization of singularity within actor-networks, but also because sport itself requires theorizations that reconcile the impact of technoscientific networks on athlete bodies (Fouché, 2017). Whereas

STS-inspired sport studies have begun destabilizing the “primacy of the body” (Fouché, 2017) in sporting cultures and narratives, for example, by examining the blurring of natural and artificial

(McCullough, 2010; Magdalinski, 2009; van Hilvoorde, Ivo and de Wert, 2007), health and injury (Johnson, 2013), and male and female (Fouché, 2012; Henne, 2015), the singularity of the athlete body remains largely intact. This latter focus is especially important as heterogeneous networks of physiological, biomechanical, material, and aerodynamic technosciences, among others, become entangled with athlete bodies in sport. The dual questions of who acts in techno- sport and how the boundary between individual/collective action is (re)configured – or not – as a result, is therefore a rich site of empirical inquiry for STS scholarship.

This chapter traces how a sample of Armstrong’s media appearances, interviews, and television commercials, singularized the material-collective body through which Armstrong’s cycling performances were achieved, which I term “LANCE,” into the heroic persona of “Lance- the-Hero.” When approaching Armstrong through his public appearances and the popular press, we find that his “extended body” (Mialet, 2012) of coaches, teammates, equipment, sponsors, and other heterogeneous entities was transformed into a singular, heroic individual through processes of singularization and distribution that hinged upon the themes of his own physiology, work ethic, and personal experience with an advanced form of cancer. Lance-the-Hero is neither a contradictory nor fragmented identity, as some cyborg approaches in sport studies have argued

(for example, see Butryn and Masucci, 2003; 2009). Rather, in analyzing the material

55 relationalities between the media, Armstrong, and different elements of LANCE, we find that

Lance-the-Hero is multiple (Mol, 2002), that its ontological states shift to suit the context of

Armstrong’s appearance, the narrative and content of a media form, and perhaps most importantly, the management of his ongoing doping controversy. Thus, understanding the enactments of Lance-the-Hero is crucial to explaining the “mechanics of power” (Law, 1999) of a mythic hero, and Armstrong’s situated body in particular.

Analytic Approach and Historical Materials

The theme of relational embodiment will strike an immediate chord with STS scholars who have tirelessly deconstructed a similar, yet seemingly opposed image of the scientist as a singular, disembodied, rational actor whose “mind elaborates a world wholly independent of his corporeal situation” (Shapin, 1990: 210). If the mythic constructions of the heroic athlete and the genius scientist have their obsessions and solitude in common, an imagined distinction is that the latter depends solely on his/her mind whereas the former relies on the condition of his/her body.

STS scholars have long since opened the black box of the former, situating the production of scientific knowledge in its social, cultural, and historical contexts. If we want to understand science-in-practice, it is argued, we must follow the material-collective work of assistants and technicians (Shapin, 1994), the role of inscription devices in the “construction of facts” (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), and the material organization of laboratory spaces (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), among other processes, all of which are irreducible to the mind alone (Latour, 1988).

STS approaches have generally sought to reincorporate the thought and cognitive competencies of scientists and engineers into their socio-historical environment (Collins, 1992)

56 or network of humans and nonhumans (Latour, 1983; Callon and Law, 1997). Mialet’s (2012) ethnographic case study of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, however, re-emphasizes the corporeal and embodied dimensions of scientific practices. Mialet (2017: 316) provides a thick description of Hawking’s “extended body” – for which she uses the notation “STEPHEN

HAWKING” – which “allows a man to think, act, be, and perform.” Yet, rather than reduce

Hawking himself to a node or point in a network (Callon and Law, 1997),24 Mialet (2012: 63) further specifies how STEPHEN HAWKING attributes “all this work to the ideas and singularity of a specific person.”25 Hawking’s genius persona, his extraordinary ability to think, write, even speak, is thus a product of multiple material-collectives composed of his graduate student researchers, instruments, machines, diagrams, media, and even the medical personnel who accompany him on a daily basis.

When we approach Armstrong through his 1999 appearance on the Late Show with David

Letterman, four Sports Illustrated (SI) articles on the 2002 and 2003 Tours de France, and two

Nike commercials in which he appeared in 2001 and 2004, we find that Lance-the-Hero is achieved by processes of singularization that “link an action to an origin” (Mialet, 2017: 320).

24 Callon and Law (1997: 169) write, for example, “work by Bruno Latour shows that Pasteur was nothing more than a network of heterogeneous elements… Pasteur was not a single entity… Pasteur was a network” (emphasis added). Mialet’s (2012: 116) approach, however, describes the material and collective processes of knowledge production emphasized by ANT, while also following “Hawking’s role in the collective work of constructing his genius.” 25 Mialet (2012: 6) emphasizes this distinction several times in her book. In the introductory chapter, for example, she writes that “in reconceptualizing the knowing subject in ways that reconcile the decentering analysis of recent science and technology studies that attribute knowledge production to the social and material collective, while still coming to grips with the singularity of individuals and events, I have tried to foster a new methodology and to propose new theoretical tools that can help us rethink these hierarchies and the myth of the individual, disembodied, rational actor that informs and justifies them.” In my case, the analytic concept Lance-the-Hero enables me to follow the socio-material constructions of Armstrong’s mythic figurations as hero while also examining how Armstrong the individual participates in and resists some of the multiple forms of Lance-the-Hero. 57

That is, elements of the extended body through which Armstrong won the Tour seven times, the media, and Armstrong himself – though not always as we might expect – attribute this historic accomplishment to the work ethic, physiology, and cancer experience of a single man. These media do not always reduce material-collective actions to a point, however. Processes of distribution at times delegate action(s) to something or someone else, be it teammates, coaches,

Armstrong’s lightweight bicycle, even a disease itself said to have remade his body. The concepts of singularization and distribution, therefore, allow us to understand how these narrative developments unfold not only in relation to the particular media forms in question but also in relation to Armstrong’s doping controversy and the public that Armstrong and his media allies wish to assemble.

Whereas Mialet’s (2012) ethnographic method allowed her to shift her own proximity to

Hawking, observing him through in-person ethnography as well as from a distance, my socio- historical approach allows me to utilize the analytic device of proximity in a different way. By examining media sources from a temporal distance, I consider how the proximity of Armstrong to other actors – such as his teammates and coaches, the author of an article or host of an interview, his sponsors, and his critics who alleged (correctly) that he used performance- enhancing drugs – explains the power dynamics embedded in Lance-the-Hero; for example, how the myth of a “clean,” i.e., drug-free, hero persisted for so long in spite of the accumulation of allegations and evidence against him. My analysis therefore considers who gets to be close to

Armstrong, who is kept at a distance, and how the media and LANCE perpetuate the cleanliness of its hero.

Finally, in describing enactments of Lance-the-Hero I trace Armstrong’s participation in and resistance to the media’s construction of his heroism. I consider this dynamic as a process of

58 self-fashioning. As Greenblatt (2005 [1980]: 1) first explained, “the power to impose a shape upon oneself is an aspect of the more general power to control identity – that of others at least as often as one’s own.”26 Biagioli (1993: 5) added, from his study of Galileo, that self-fashioning:

[does not] assume either an already existing ‘Galileo’ who deploys different tactics in different environments yet remains always ‘true to himself’, nor a Galileo who is passively shaped by the context that envelops him. Rather, I want to emphasize how he used the resources he perceived in the surrounding environment to construct a new socio-professional identity for himself, to put forward a new natural philosophy and to develop a courtly audience for it.

Mialet (1999: 569) similarly describes Hawking’s self-fashioning as frequently “inserting himself in the tradition of the greatest scientists,” for example, when he would point out that he was born 300 years to the day after the death of Galileo, or that his academic post was once held by Sir Isaac Newton. As we will see, Armstrong and the media similarly attempt to stabilize his heroism, in part, by comparing his cycling performances to those of the “greats” of the sport.

In what follows I trace different media forms – a talk show, magazine articles, and television commercials – as they enact Lance-the-Hero through a frequently-changing composition of entities anchored in the following narrative themes: (1) Armstrong’s flesh-and- blood body as more capable than that of other cyclists (e.g., physiologically, bio-mechanically, or compositionally); (2) Armstrong’s work ethic as unmatched by his competitors and sometimes even his own teammates; and (3) whether Armstrong’s experience “battling” cancer positively or

26 Greenblatt (2005 [1980], p. 13) further writes that “the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world” is a quintessential sign of power, adding “the more outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation of power.” I will draw attention to several such outrageous claims that arise throughout the enactments of Lance-the-Hero – for example, a comparison of Armstrong’s aerobic abilities to those of a professional hockey player or another professional cyclist’s “surprise” that Armstrong trains during the winter months – which nonetheless work, i.e., hold the heroic construction together. 59 negatively affected his cycling. Armstrong himself only partially controls his identity, as different forms of media largely construct his mythic, heroic persona without his direct input.

Yet Armstrong nonetheless intervenes whenever possible in order to impose a shape upon himself that suits his respective audience, and especially as it pertains to his status as a “clean,” i.e., drug-free, winner of the Tour de France.

The Late Show: Constructing Heroism and Managing Controversy

On July 30, 1999, just five days after winning his first Tour de France, Armstrong appeared on the popular American late-night talk show The Late Show with David Letterman.

The socio-material arrangement of the talk show – whereby the viewer only sees Letterman and

Armstrong on the stage, and only hears their voices and the laughter of the studio audience – transforms the extended body through which Armstrong prepared for and competed in the Tour de France. In its place appears the singularized body of Armstrong, whose heroic persona is anchored to discourses on whether his cancer experience positively or negatively interfered with his cycling performances.

Armstrong’s talk-show appearance is worth examining in detail so that we can follow how he participates in or resists the construction of his own heroism. As we will see, Lance-the-

Hero very much relies upon the construction of relationalities between cycling and cancer survivorship. During his conversation with Letterman, Armstrong will reference the competencies of his oncologists in curing him as well as his foundation’s support for cancer research projects. When the interview turns to the question of performance-enhancing drugs,

Armstrong will reject the suggestion that cancer positively affected his cycling abilities yet deploy his survivorship to refute the allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs to

60 win the Tour. In other words, Armstrong will use resources perceived in his immediate environment to self-fashion Lance-the-Hero for the public at hand, a largely American audience eager to witness their hero speak about the “incredible odds” he overcame to win the world’s hardest bicycle race.

Constructing Relations Between Cycling and Cancer Survivorship

To begin the interview, Letterman wondered whether the fitness of Armstrong’s flesh- and-blood body played a role in his cancer treatments.

David Letterman (DL): Let me ask you a question. I know nothing about any of this but I’ll just take a shot. I’m guessing that there’s something about the training that a bicyclist does that served you well in your period of fighting the cancer and your recovery. Did people say, “oh, you’re so aerobically fit that this is a help, that you have such great muscle tone that this is a help?” It must have been a factor, right?

Lance Armstrong (LA): I tried to ask the doctors that early on. I said, “look, Doc, you don’t understand. I’m a champion cyclist and I want to live more than anybody. Isn’t that going to help me?” And they told me, “yes.” Unfortunately, with an illness like this, with an illness like cancer, you have people that come in who are motivated, and they’re healthy, and they exercise every day, and eat well, and things don’t work out for them. That’s the bad thing about cancer. It shouldn’t be a numbers game but sometimes they put numbers on the illness and – I don’t know – I tried to get them to tell me that I was going to do better because I was an athlete. But who knows? I don’t know if it helped or not. I was lucky.

A mere five days after Armstrong’s first Tour de France victory, the interview navigated a web of emergent relations that linked professional cycling to beating cancer. In his opening question,

Letterman implied a causal relationship between the condition of Armstrong’s body and his surviving cancer. And although Armstrong did not affirm this causality, he carefully reinforced the association between cycling and cancer that he embodied and upon which his heroism

61 hinged. Armstrong admitted that he had posed the same question to his doctor – of whether his prognosis would improve because he was an athlete – in effect, expecting his medical staff to motivate him as if they were no different from other members of his cycling team. However, on the Late Show, Armstrong left the relationship ambiguous by suggesting that he did not know and that he was lucky.

Letterman then posed a second question that continued to probe the relationship between cycling and cancer, as if chasing absolutism.

DL: Is there anything to suggest that your sport may have contributed to this ailment, this disorder? LA: I ended up going [pauses], well you’ll like this… [Letterman shoots a toothy grin at the camera. The audience laughs.] DL: Well thanks for including me! I appreciate that! [Laugher from the audience and Armstrong.] LA: I was treated in Indiana… DL: Oh yes! [Applause.] LA: In Indianapolis at the University hospital … The reason I went to Indiana is because Dr. Larry Einhorn and Dr. Craig Nichols were the two key doctors there, and the two best doctors in the world for testes [sic] cancer. And they’ve seen more patients than anybody, they’ve seen more examples than anybody, and there’s nothing to suggest that a cyclist is prone, or a truck driver, or a teacher, or a doctor. There’s no evidence. DL: It’s just the way it came up … Now I hope I’m not putting words into your mouth here, but I know from what I’ve heard and what I’ve read about you, that maybe you didn’t get to a doctor as early as you might have. LA: No. DL: You kind of ignored the warning signs. You resisted them. I guess resisted them, not ignored them. LA: Well, nobody likes to go to the doctor … Especially when think they have a problem, nobody wants to hear bad news … Had I gone just a matter of weeks, or a month earlier, I would’ve been in a lot better shape … So much of what we’re doing now in cancer is about early detection and awareness, and if we can increase that – in all cancers – then I think the survival rates will continue to climb. DL: I just keep struggling to articulate just what about this is so wonderful, so miraculous, and I don’t know that I’ll ever, ever come close. But, as you must have recognized early on, maybe the greatest thing about this is: winning the bike race, that’s lovely. For saving your own life, that’s unbelievable. But you now have, and will continue, to save the lives of hundreds and thousands of other people around

the United States, and around the world too, by your example. And maybe that’s the best of this whole thing, you know? LA: I hope so. [Applause.]

Armstrong’s self-fashioning revolves around the continuous production of this relationship between his achievements in cycling and his survivorship. The socio-material arrangement of the

Late Show, in which Letterman and Armstrong are alone on the stage, singularizes an athletic hero whose victory in the Tour de France, in this example, gives him a public platform from which to also contribute to early detection and awareness research – the collective “we” in the above passage. Moreover, Letterman’s final words of praise project Lance-the-Hero into the future, imagining all of the lives he will save now that he has won the bicycle race. As the interview continues, however, this relationship will be used to rebuff allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs.

Cancer, Distributed in Controversy

The final series of questions turned, as they so often would for the remainder of

Armstrong’s career, to the topic of performance-enhancing drugs. Drug use in professional cycling is perhaps the most visible of any sport, in part, due to the number of high-profile scandals that have engulfed it (Dimeo, 2007; Hardie, 2014). Armstrong’s first victory, for example, came just one year after the 1998 Festina Affair nearly collapsed the race, as half of the

Tour’s teams withdrew from the competition following the mass seizure of banned drugs and the police raids, rider interrogations, and race-halting protests that followed (see Christiansen,

2005).27 The 1999 “Tour of Renewal” was therefore primed for a new hero to restore the public’s confidence in the sport, though no one, not even a cancer survivor, could escape suspicion.

DL: The Tour de France has fallen on hard times for some reason. It’s gotten a bad reputation because of drug taking, enhancement drugs, performance drugs, blood doping, all of that kind of stuff. And yet you come in, a man literally, clearly at death’s door, and you dominate the event. It’s just an amazing thing. And the press over there, those idiots… [Laughter.] DL: No, but I’m serious. They wouldn’t leave you alone, would they? They suggested that maybe there’s something about his disorder that actually makes him a better bicycler. [Crowd boos.] DL: Well that’s just crap, isn’t it? LA: “Crap” is a good word. [Laughter.]

By the end of the 1999 Tour, it was widely argued that Armstrong’s treatment not only defeated cancer but also reshaped his flesh-and-blood body in a way that made him a contender for the race (Butryn and Masucci, 2003). For example, Armstrong’s chemotherapy regime was specifically designed to limit the scarring of his lungs and his doctors limited the radiation treatments that could affect his sense of balance. In addition, he lost some twenty pounds of upper-body muscle mass, and his newly-fashioned, lighter body was therefore better suited to ascend the long, steep mountains of the Tour. On the Late Show, however, Armstrong participated in the media’s distribution of his cancer from Lance-the-Hero. Like Hawking, that

27 It is difficult to understate the scale of the Festina Affair, or the 2006 Operacíon Puerto for that matter, both of which involved several of the sport’s most successful teams. In comparison to other sports, for example, the largest performance-enhancing drug scandals in Major League Baseball have only involved individual players, such as Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Alex Rodriguez, and similar events have been nonexistent in the NFL and NBA. In fact, the MLB and NFL are known to notify players when they will need to complete an offseason test for substances such as steroids, whereas professional cyclists are subjected to randomized, out-of-competition testing throughout the year. 64 is, Armstrong sometimes resisted “having words put into his mouth” (Mialet, 2012: 105), particularly with respect to how his disease impacted his everyday life. In particular, and this point echoes Biagioli’s emphasis on self-fashioning as a technique in which an actor draws on resources from their immediate environment to develop an “audience,” Armstrong rejected the assertion that his illness was beneficial to his cycling abilities. Armstrong’s singularity emerged during moments when he intervened in the assumed constitutive relations of Lance-the-Hero.

Here he agreed with Letterman that the positive association between his cancer treatment and subsequent bodily performances in cycling was “crap.”

As the conversation continued, however, and Letterman asked about an assertion in the

French press that Armstrong’s performance was too good to be true, implying that he must have used performance-enhancing drugs because he won the race by such a large margin, cancer becomes reincorporated into Lance-the-Hero. Importantly, the oscillation of cancer survivorship, its flipping between positive and negative relationalities depending on the media and public in question, in part, makes Lance-the-Hero multiple (Mol, 2002), and multiplicities, in turn, explain the “mechanics of power” embedded in Armstrong’s heroism, enabling him to manage the doping allegations against him.

DL: Why did [the French press] do that? LA: I’ll explain it in a simple way. You know, when I was sick and my French team dropped me from my [contract], in my hospital, they said, “it’s not possible for Lance Armstrong to return, he’ll never race again.” When I decided to come back and I was looking for a team, all of the European teams said, “it’s not possible, he’ll never race again, he’ll never be the champion that he was before.” And so, when I do come back, and I return to the highest level and I’m leading the Tour de France and trying to win the Tour de France, what do the Europeans say? They say, “it’s not possible.” DL: Right, sure.

LA: Perhaps it’s a mentality there, I don’t know. It’s not a knock on all Europeans but it’s … I got that a lot, “it’s just not possible, there must be something there.” And they were making up things. DL: That somehow the chemo helped. That maybe the chemo helped. [Laughter.] LA: Performance-enhancing chemotherapy. [Laughter. Long Applause.] DL: The sport’s fans loved you, right? This was just the media. LA: This was a very few isolated journalists. If you have the press from the Tour de France of two thousand journalists, we’re talking a handful of people, and it came from sort of a highbrow political newspaper in Paris that never covers cycling. The only thing they wanted to do was cover a scandal. DL: You going back next year? LA: Oh, absolutely. Yes. [Applause.]

Mialet (1999: 557) notes that “linguistic operators, designations and attributions” can construct narrative associations between an actor, a discipline, and a model. Moreover, these associations need not remain static or fixed over time in order to cohere through an identity. Armstrong’s parallel language – his repetition of it’s not possible – deployed one of LANCE’s strongest translations: it rerouted the conditions of possibility for cancer survivorship through Lance-the-

Hero’s achievements at the Tour de France. This is a crucial dimension of the particular power of

Armstrong’s heroism. While Armstrong’s rivals rode for themselves, their teams, and perhaps their country if they were well known,28 Lance-the-Hero rode for an additional collective altogether. By winning the Tour de France, Lance-the-Hero reconstructed what was possible for cancer survivors and their bodies. This translation, in turn, enabled Armstrong to defend himself against allegations that he used banned PEDs by deploying a joke about “performance-enhancing chemotherapy” on the Late Show.

28 Armstrong’s reference to a European “mentality” that differs from Americans’ highlights the role of nationalism within sports heroism. This study does not deal with this theme, though interested readers should refer to Fouché’s (2017) excellent analysis of sport and nationalism. 66

A story published in the August 9, 1999, issue of SI – ten days after his appearance on the

Late Show – explained that Armstrong saw his television appearances as an “opportunity for public conversation.” The article continued,

[Armstrong] was the man who had won the Tour de France. He was the man who had kicked cancer’s ass, choosing riskier, more agonizing therapies so he could protect his future as a cyclist even while his life hung in the balance. And he had a message to deliver. This was his moment to speak, and he would not let it go. “If I can save five lives by going on some show, it’s worth it,” he said. “If I can save one life by going on all the shows, it's worth it. I’m prouder of being a cancer survivor than I am of winning the Tour de France. Believe me.” (Montville, 1999: 2)

Armstrong’s appearance on the Late Show was thus an opportunity to stitch together cycling and cancer survivorship, albeit in a way that suited the particular conversation and audience and allowed him manage the doping allegations against him.

Sports Illustrated: Explaining Tour Success

This section analyzes a series of articles from SI’s coverage of the 2002 and 2003 Tours de France, with a focus on the material relationality between Lance-the-Hero and Armstrong’s bodily physiology, work ethic, cancer experience, and elements of his extended body. It continues to trace the processes of singularization and distribution anchored in themes of

Armstrong’s physiology, work ethic, and cancer struggle, and contrasts their distributions relative to those of the Late Show interview. The 2002 articles, which named Armstrong the

“Sportsman of the Year” (Reilly, 2002) and referred to him as “SuperMan” (Anderson, 2002), enact Lance-the-Hero by distributing his unique work ethic from his exceptionally-abled body.

The articles echo a recurring debate within sport sciences that considers whether athletic abilities

67 are best explained by innate talent or training, i.e., physiology or hard work (see Tucker, 2012).

The 2003 articles, which narrated Armstrong’s fifth Tour de France victory (Anderson, 2003;

Reilly, 2003), coordinate Armstrong’s hard work and bodily physiology into a singularized enactment of Lance-the-Hero. To examine this development, I make a number of comparisons to

Mialet’s (2012) case study. For example, how the media constructs historical relationalities between Hawking’s and Armstrong’s personas and other “greats” of their fields; how Hawking and Armstrong react to the media’s enactment of their personas; and finally, how their diseases may both singularize their individualities as well as make their extended bodies visible.

[Above, from left to right, the covers of the August 2002, December 2002, and August 2003 issues of Sports Illustrated.]

The 2002 Sportsman of the Year

The cover of the December 16, 2002, issue of SI pictured Armstrong alone on an empty road, leaning against his bicycle in his United States Postal Service (USPS) uniform and shooting a steely glance at the camera. The banner text of the cover story applauded Armstrong for “his courage and commitment – not to mention his fourth straight Tour de France victory”

68 and saluted him as “the ultimate road warrior” (Reilly, 2002: 1). One possible explanation for

Armstrong’s success and what made him an “all-American hero,” author Rick Reilly (2002) suggested, is that Armstrong simply worked harder than his competitors. When Reilly and another professional cyclist, David Millar, called to notify Armstrong of his award, Armstrong answered his phone on his bicycle:

Rick Reilly: Hey, Lance, congratulations. You’re the Sportsman of the Year. Lance Armstrong (LA): Hold on. Gotta pass this semi. [Pause.] O.K., now, what? David Millar (DM): Please tell me you’re not on your bike. LA: I’m on my bike. DM: Nooooo! You mother! It’s December bloody first! How long have you been on it? LA: Three and a half hours. DM: Nooooo!

As Reilly (2002: 2) reflected, “this is [Armstrong’s] third hour on the bike today, and the Tour de

France isn’t for seven months. This is not natural. No other racer in the world is doing this.” The article suggests that Armstrong, stripped of his extended body, possessed a work ethic unmatched by his competitors. However, a brief review of popular bicycle training books from the period indicates that it would be in fact quite normal for a professional to ride for 3.5 hours in

December (see Borysewicz, 1985; Friel, 2009). The article thus presents an outrageous fiction

(Greenblatt, 2005 [1980]) that highlights the role of Reilly, SI, and even Armstrong’s competitor,

David Millar, in stabilizing Lance-the-Hero, in this case, by transforming a normal training practice into evidence of Armstrong’s exceptional will to succeed.

The article further reinforces Armstrong’s heroism by comparing his work ethic to that of his teammates. Reilly (2002: 4) wrote,

Armstrong works so hard that he’s dangerous to everybody else. Two years ago, U.S. Postal Service team director Johan Bruyneel let two of his best climbers train with Armstrong. “By the time the Tour de France started, they were injured or worn out,” Bruyneel groans. “We almost lost them.” Now Bruyneel lets Armstrong train with the team only two days out of three. “The other day he’s on his own.”

Armstrong’s exceptional work ethic is made visible by his training harder than his teammates, as well as repeatedly climbing one of the Tour’s toughest mountains just for practice. As Reilly

(2002: 4) continued, “take, for instance, the sinister Alpe d’Huez, a 21-hairpin, 6,060 foot bitch

[sic] that will be the key climb in next year’s Tour. Armstrong knows the first name of every mountain goat on it. He’s climbed it 10 times already and will do it twice more this spring before the Tour.”29 Armstrong’s agent, Bill Stapleton, further reinforced this theme, commenting that

“[Armstrong’s] just a guy who happens to work harder than anybody else alive” (Reilly, 2002:

3). So, the articles ascribe Armstrong’s heroism to the theme of hard work, but how do they address his bodily physiology?

Reilly (2002: 4) described the laboratory studies that documented Armstrong’s bodily strength over time.

University of Texas exercise physiologist Ed Coyle, who has tested athletes for 20 years, says that Armstrong at 31 (years old) produces 6% more power than he did at 21, despite weighing 15 pounds less … Coyle also discovered that Armstrong can ride a bike 32 miles per hour for an hour straight. The average fit college male can last at that pace about 45 seconds. “For the first 10 seconds they’re great,” says Coyle. “After about 20 seconds they think they’re gonna die. After 40 seconds they throw up.”

29 The narratives of Armstrong’s use of climbing repetitions to prepare for the Tour de France, present in his numerous biographies, suggest that Beamish and Ritchie’s (2005) language of a “paradigm shift” from drills to interval training is far too strong to explain the complexities of training practices in professional cycling. 70

The laboratory tests, performed over several years, chronicled the ever-increasing strength of

Armstrong’s body. With the kind of epistemic certainty that commonly can be derived only from laboratories (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), Armstrong’s body defied the expectation that aging led to a loss of vitality. Reilly (2002: 4) constructs an additional comparison between Armstrong and other professional athletes.

Among professional athletes Armstrong is mythic. New York Rangers defenseman Dale Purinton heard that Armstrong can ride a Cybex bike 2,700 rpm for an hour. “So I tried it,” says Purinton, 26. “I kept up for two minutes; then I had to quit. I was totally exhausted. My whole body was aching. The man is not human.”

The comparison between Armstrong’s aerobic capacity and that of another professional athlete, albeit a hockey player whose sport requires a completely different set of bodily abilities, mobilized Armstrong’s physiology as an explanation for his greatness. The assertion that the aerobic abilities of professional cyclists and hockey players are comparable, however, is a second example of an “outrageous fiction” (Greenblatt, 2005 [1980]), which holds Lance-the-

Hero together though the epistemic authority of laboratories.

Finally, the articles constructed linkages between Armstrong’s battle with cancer and his cycling success. First, Reilly’s initial phone call to Armstrong directly referenced his recently published autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000): “Armstrong is always on his bike. It’s not about the bike? It’s all about the bike. Hell, just to tell him he’s this year’s Sportsman of the Year, we had to reach him on his bike” (Reilly, 2002: 1). The suggestion is that because he is always on his bike, Armstrong’s hard work supersedes whatever effects cancer may have had on his flesh-and-blood body. Second, as Armstrong continuously suggested during this period, the alternative form of chemotherapy he chose enabled him to construct a body that was more suitable to the climbing-specific demands of the Tour de France (see

Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000). The data produced by Coyle’s laboratory tests are specifically tailored to support this aspect of Armstrong’s cancer-cycling narrative: since Armstrong could produce more power at a lower weight than before his disease, he was now faster at ascending mountains, specifically because of his cancer treatment. Whereas Mialet (2012) argues that

Stephen Hawking’s disease becomes an anchor point in explaining his “genius,” both as an obstacle he has to overcome as well as a condition that allows him to spend time thinking rather than conducting experiments, cancer is similarly multiple with respect to Armstrong’s abilities.

In the Late Show interview, for example, it was both treated as an obstacle to Armstrong’s success as well as a source of motivation and determination; it was something Lance-the-Hero had to overcome. In the 2002 SI articles, we are told his cancer treatments dramatically reshaped his body and improved his climbing abilities.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that a sports magazine emphasized the themes of hard work and physiological supremacy, but how did Armstrong respond to the magazine’s enactment of

Lance-the-Hero? The cover article from the August 5th issue of SI, published earlier that year, pictured Armstrong climbing alone in the yellow jersey and the following banner text:

“SuperMan: The unbeatable Lance Armstrong rides away with his fourth Tour de France”

(Anderson, 2002). In the article, Armstrong refuted the media’s singularization of his victories:

Every year the media comes up with something to describe my race,” said the 30- year-old Armstrong … “The first year it was ‘the comeback.’ Then it was ‘the confirmation.’ I don’t know what it was last year. This year, for me, it’s ‘the year of the team.’ I can’t say how I compare to the rider I was in 1999 or 2000 or 2001, but this team is much stronger than it has even been. It has made it easier for me. (Anderson, 2002: 2)

Armstrong contested the media’s “SuperMan” label by making a key component of LANCE visible, his teammates. While it is common for a sports figure to invoke team support,

Armstrong’s comment attributed his individual performance to the strength of his material- collective body. He intervened in the media’s enactment of Lance-the-Hero by distributing his bodily performance to his teammates who enabled him to save energy during the race by shielding him from the wind, fetching him food, water, and clothing, and even “pulling” him up the climbs by setting a high pace in front of him. Armstrong also pointed out a unique attribute of his extended body – that particular teammates can be added or removed in order to strengthen his performances.30 Thus, contrary to a strictly actor-network view of the subject as “enveloped” by or indistinguishable from its heterogeneous network (Callon and Law, 1997), the singularity of both the genius scientist and the heroic athlete appears when they decide to either participate in or reject the construction of their own myth. They may singularize their own personas or distribute their abilities to elements of their extended bodies depending on the context and audience in question.31 What I have emphasized above, however, is that unlike Hawking’s graduate-student assistants who resisted becoming “automatons,” Armstrong’s teammates were encouraged to sacrifice their own ambitions for the success of their team.32 That is, and this is an empirical outcome that differs from Mialet’s case, the more that Armstrong’s teammates became indispensable actors of LANCE, the more they were presented with the opportunity to break away from the team and perhaps even become heroes in their own right.

30 For example, as Johan Bruyneel commented, “we put this team together specifically for this course, and it turned out to be the best team I have ever seen” (Anderson, 2002). 31 For example, see Mialet’s (2012: 85) observation about Stephen Hawking, that “he himself either plays the game and lets the media exploit his writings or rebels and intervenes in the construction of his own myth.” 32 For example, Mialet (2012: 27) points out that Hawking’s assistants typically do not stay for more than one year, in their own words, and “underlining the routinized aspects of the work… ‘because it’s not going anywhere, because it would be the same.’ The assistants must resist becoming automatons.” 73

The 2003 “Tour de Lance”

The cover of the August 4th, 2003, issue of SI featured Armstrong’s familiar face, gritting his teeth as sweat dripped down his cheek. The cover article, entitled “Tour de Lance”

(Anderson, 2003), describes the “pain and suffering” Armstrong endured on his way to winning his fifth-consecutive edition of the race. The article, along with its supplementary piece, “Hurts

So Good” (Reilly, 2003), singularized Armstrong’s hard work, body, and cancer experience into his heroic persona. The authors then inserted Armstrong into a grand historical narrative of the

Tour by comparing his success to that of other famous riders. In contrast to the 2002 articles that enacted a boundary between body and mind, Lance-the-Hero is now assembled by adding these qualities together (Mol, 2002). Multiplicities emerge again in relation to the context of this second set of SI articles and the specific public they assemble.

“Tour de Lance” (Anderson, 2003: 1) opens with a description of one of several crashes with which Armstrong was involved in the 2003 Tour, a now infamous incident involving a spectator on the slopes on the pivotal climb of Luz-Ardiden:

It was the moment everyone had been waiting for. Clinging to a 15-second lead over Germany's Jan Ullrich with less than a week to go in the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong was making his move to get an unshakable grip on the yellow jersey and his record-tying fifth straight Tour victory. With less than 10 kilometers to go on the climb to Luz-Ardiden in the French Pyrenees on July 21, Armstrong started sprinting up the mountain, attacking the 29-year-old Ullrich and a small group of other riders. Then, suddenly, Armstrong was sprawled on the asphalt, his handlebar inadvertently snagged by a fan who was waving a yellow cotton knapsack given to spectators by Credit Lyonnais, the sponsor of the yellow jersey.

Armstrong remounted and rejoined the group, which customarily waited for the fallen race leader, only to then break his right pedal and whack himself on the top tube of his bicycle. The event depicts, yet again, Armstrong’s exceptional physical strength. He can even win on a piece

74 of failed technology, a bicycle with not only a broken pedal, but as it was later discovered, a chainstay that cracked during the crash. Lance-the-Hero thus provides relief from the cultural anxiety that technoscientific networks threaten the human achievements in sport (Fouché, 2017).

In addition, as Anderson (2003: 2) explained Armstrong’s reaction to the crash, the hero’s ability to persevere through uncertainty is tied to his cancer experience:

Fueled by pain, anger and the concern that the Tour was slipping away, the 31-year- old Armstrong sprinted past Ullrich and cranked his way up the last eight kilometers on a bike with a cracked rear chainstay. As he rode, the usually deadpan Armstrong wore a look [Coach Chris] Carmichael hadn’t seen on his friend's face since 1996. “I saw the same thing when he was fighting [testicular] cancer,” says Carmichael. “The same fortitude, the same intensity. It was eerie.”

Armstrong’s disease is present in a different way. No longer a potential detriment to his physiological ability, his experience with cancer explains his ability to adapt to the uncertainties of the Tour. Armstrong, laying on the asphalt of Luz-Ardiden picks himself up and continues fighting, just as he did in the Indianapolis hospital. This theme – translating the pain of cancer to the Tour – also appeared in the supplementary piece. As Reilly (2003: 3) wrote, “Lance

Armstrong once had 14 tumors in him and a 40% chance to live. If cancer couldn’t bury him, a bunch of guys in Lycra shorts have no chance.” Cancer is not simply an obstacle he overcame, as it was during his Late Show interview. It positively impacted Armstrong’s response to the incidents on Luz-Ardiden. Armstrong is, of course, also one of the “guys in lycra shorts,” and yet his heroism draws a boundary between himself and his competitors; his competitors are vulnerable, but Lance-the-Hero is able to overcome all obstacles.

[Above: A collection of crash photos pictured in the August 2003 issue of Sports Illustrated (p. 52-53). The image on the far right depicts Armstrong’s crash on Luz-Ardiden, caused by a fan’s souvenir bag.]

The article continued with a description of the second week of the 2003 Tour, a struggle made visible by the weakened condition of Armstrong’s flesh-and-blood body.

As the Tour moved to week 2 and Armstrong’s customary showplace, the Alps, [Armstrong] seemed off his game. He had been lucky to escape relatively unscathed from the mass crash near the finish of stage 1 that sent a few riders home and left Armstrong’s former U.S. Postal Service teammate Tyler Hamilton, the leader of Team CSC, with a fractured right collarbone. Armstrong was also feeling the effects of a virus that he had caught from his three-year-old son, Luke. Even in the smaller climbs the peloton could sense something different about Armstrong. He didn’t have the same acceleration, the same quick cadence he usually does, and the heat was bothering him (Anderson, 2003: 3).

The riders’ physical pain provided a window through which to assess the condition of

Armstrong’s body at this point in race. The hero was visibly weakened and his accelerations and pedaling mechanics appeared slower than in the past. Reilly (2003: 2) explained that a problem with Armstrong’s shoes led to a “killer hip tendinitis.” The article wondered whether an error as miniscule as the position of the cleat on Armstrong’s shoe – off by perhaps a mere couple of degrees – could bring down Lance-the-Hero. Moments such as these always lurk as the slightest misalignment between body and machine can disable an extended body.

The temperature, too, hurt Armstrong’s physical condition. As Anderson (2003: 3-4) described, in “the first individual time trial, on July 18, a day in which the temperature reached

104 degrees … Armstrong arrived at the end parched. He had run out of water and finished 1:36 behind Ullrich, who was now just 34 seconds behind” overall. Reilly (2003: 2) added that during

“the last 30 minutes of that stage, [Armstrong] says, he lost 14 pounds” as a result of dehydration. Armstrong’s personal reflection, too, revealed anything but a “SuperMan.”

“I had an incredible crisis,” Armstrong said afterward. “At one point I felt like I was pedaling backward. It’s the most thirsty I’ve been in a time trial.” After losing 19 more seconds to Ullrich in the first Pyrenees stage, on July 19, Armstrong arrived at the finish in Loudenvielle-Le Louron the next day holding that 15-second lead but looking confused and depressed. He even conceded that the world might be witnessing his decline as a Tour champion. “It’s obvious I’m not riding as well as in years past, and I don’t know why,” he said. “Something’s not clicking” (Anderson, 2003: 3-4).

In the articles’ narrative of the 2003 Tour, Armstrong’s hard work and the condition of his flesh- and-blood body are not only made observable through the physical pain endured during the race.

This time they also expose the weaknesses of the Hero. As Anderson (2003: 2) wrote, “the centennial edition of the world’s greatest bike race was a classic in part because the elements that no rider can control – illness, weather conditions, spectator interference, crashes – shaped much of the race.” Paradoxically, Armstrong’s hard work and body, in contrast to the straightforward explanation of the “SuperMan” in the 2002 SI articles, now made Armstrong more human than ever. As his extended body appeared to fail, that is, Lance-the-Hero miraculously persevered.

The 2003 Tour de France was Armstrong’s smallest margin of victory, yet he emerged from the race as an even greater hero because the media could now insert him into a grand historical narrative of the Tour. In contrast to the resistance to previously demonstrated in reaction to the media’s singularization of LANCE (Reilly, 2002), this time he participated in the

77 enactment of his heroism. “When he stepped onto the podium in Nantes,” Anderson (2003: 4) wrote, “Armstrong received congratulations from Bernard Hinault, one of the four other cyclists to have won the Tour five times. ‘Welcome to the club,’ said Hinault.” By shaking Hinault’s hand, Armstrong accepted his own induction into the “club” of only five riders to have won five

Tours. Anderson (2003: 4) elaborated,

Armstrong’s 61-second margin of victory over Ullrich was the smallest – 5:01 – of any of his Tour wins. Armstrong says that this was his most difficult victory. Does he have what it takes to become the first man to win number 6? The four other five- time winners – Jacques Anquetil (1957, ’61 through ’64), Eddy Merckx (’69 through ’72, ’74), Hinault (’78, ’79, ’81, ’82, ’85) and Miguel Indurain (’91 through ’95) – struggled in their final victory, and all were Armstrong's age or younger.

Just as Stephen Hawking participated in the construction of his own genius persona by relating to other famous scientists (Mialet, 2012), the media also related Lance-the-Hero to other Tour de

France winners. In the above, Armstrong hierarchized his past selves. “I’m coming back, but I’m not coming back to lose,” Armstrong confirmed, “I’m coming back to return to a level I had in the first four wins, because this year’s level was unacceptable. I don’t plan on being this vulnerable next year” (Anderson, 2003: 4). Whereas, in the previous SI articles, Armstrong resisted the media’s historical comparison by saying he didn’t know how his 2002 performance compared to his previous victories, this time Armstrong confirmed his heroism by affirming his attempt to win a record six Tours and promising he would return with a stronger body.

Moreover, Armstrong mentioned only himself in this historical narrative – his teammates and a

(durable) bicycle remained absent. Paradoxically, Armstrong’s trials with uncertainty and near defeat during the 2003 Tour de France, with participation from the media and himself, enacted a more heroic persona. “If the French like drama in their Tour, and suffering from its champion,”

Anderson (2003: 2) cheered, “they had to be ecstatic about this year’s race.”

As we saw during his interview with David Letterman, Armstrong’s cancer survivorship was distributed from his athletic performance and instead deployed in the management of his doping controversy. In the SI articles, however, we found different relationalities between his cancer experience, body, and work ethic. In the 2002 articles, Armstrong’s body and work ethic were separated – either one or the other, but not both, explained his performances, whilst cancer remained absent. In the 2003 articles, Armstrong’s survivorship, bodily physiology, and work ethic were added together, and made especially visible through the sense of pain. Whereas in the former series of articles Armstrong resisted the media’s heroic narrative by making LANCE visible, he participated in his own heroic enactment in the latter articles. In summary, the SI articles not only singularized an extended body but also enacted multiplicities of Lance-the-

Hero, whose form was composed of different entities depending on his environment and the audience or public Armstrong sought to assemble. We also saw that Armstrong’s proximity to members of the media – from a face-to-face interview with David Letterman to a series of articles written about Lance-the-Hero – provided him with different degrees of control over these enactments. He navigated a complex web of relations between cycling and cancer survivorship and used them to defend his drug-free status as Hero. At the same time, Armstrong relied on his media allies to distribute such allegations when his heroism was enacted from a distance. But what if the assembled public was made, not by a media describing his athletic achievements to sports fans, but by a sponsor who sought to translate Armstrong’s heroism into consumption?

Consuming Lance-the-Hero: Cleansing the Body of the Techno-Athlete

Let us explore a third and final series of the processes of singularization and distribution, this time in two television commercials in which Armstrong appeared for Nike, Inc. The

79 company first endorsed Armstrong in 1996, prior to his cancer diagnosis (Benson and Pilon,

2012). When Armstrong returned to the sport, Nike became the clothing sponsor of the USPS cycling team for the remainder of his career.33 Whilst for their marketing of bicycling products,

Nike passed through Lance-the-Hero as what Callon (1986) has more generally called the

“obligatory passage point,” Armstrong nevertheless used the commercials to stabilize key elements of the narrative with which he defended his “clean” – that is, drug free – status. As I will describe, the anchor point in the commercials shifts from Armstrong’s work ethic to his survivorship as they compose Lance-the-Hero through a different formulation of entities than in the above cases of the Late Show and SI, this time to construct an affinity between the sports hero and consumption.

The heroic athlete conventionally is translated into an advertising discourse that encourages consumption. This affinity is exemplified by the advertisements pictured in the issues of SI analyzed above. For example, a USPS ad that appeared in two of the issues applauded

Armstrong’s personal “dedication” and, by association, implied that the Postal Service is a hard- working organization. A Subaru advertisement asserted an affinity between the sports hero’s work ethic and its vehicles with the slogan “driven by what’s inside.” In addition, it alluded to the discourse of laboratory physiology that conceptualizes the human body as an “aerobic engine” (see Friel, 2009). The final USPS advertisement draws on the “high five” to applaud

Lance-the-Hero’s fifth consecutive Tour victory. Whereas these affinities are also present in the

Nike commercials, there are important differences between them.

33 Interestingly, although Nike would drop its endorsement of Armstrong following his doping confession, it remained a sponsor of his cancer charity Livestrong. As Macur (2013) writes, rather emblematically, “Nike’s decision signals an end to a partnership that began nine years ago and turned Livestrong into a marketing marvel that revolutionized the way charities raise money. Armstrong’s brand also benefited. He had rebounded from testicular cancer to race the Tour again and become a global hero to millions as a symbol of hope to those fighting cancer.” 80

[Above, left to right, each of the one-page advertisements that featured Lance-the-Hero from the August 2002 (p. 11, 19, and 57), December 2002 (p. 32), and August 2003 (p. 31 and 35) issues of Sports Illustrated. Note that the USPS ad, which reads “dedication,” appeared in two issues.]

The first concerns the difference in scale of these sponsorships and the potential opportunities they provided. Subaru, Coca-Cola, and PowerBar channeled their products through

Lance-the-Hero with the hope of increasing sales. However, Nike, one of the preeminent sports equipment companies in the world, circulated Lance-the-Hero with much more capital and received a much greater return. Second, Nike participated in LANCE’s performances more directly than any of the other companies. For example, representatives from Nike attended

LANCE’s wind-tunnel trials, developed prototypical skin suits for testing, and provided the finished product Armstrong wore during the Tour de France (Brownlie et al., 2009; see also “The

Science of Lance Armstrong,” 2005). Third and finally, the television commercials simply do more for Armstrong than the magazine advertisements. Presented through a more participatory form of media – in which the proximity between Armstrong and his audience resembled that of the Late Show interview rather than the SI articles – the commercials are sites of Armstrong’s continued self-fashioning. Armstrong used the commercials to actively manage his ongoing doping controversy and further fashion a “clean” body.

It would perhaps be tempting to consider the appearance of Armstrong in magazine advertisements and television commercials as a case of the commercialization of sport (see, for example, Waddington and Smith, 2009, or Brewer, 2002). However, by examining processes of singularization and distribution as they unfold in the context of a material-collective network, I want instead to emphasize the extent to which Nike did not so much “exploit” Armstrong or

“distort” an essential meaning of sport. Rather, not unlike other entities embedded in LANCE,

Nike could only profit from Lance-the-Hero insofar as his mythic figuration became an obligatory passage point. In fact, Nike’s endorsement of Armstrong preceded, by several years, any of his victories in the Tour de France. This suggests that the company only grew along with

Lance-the-Hero.34 In no way did Nike, nor any of Armstrong’s other corporate sponsors, steer the ship, so to speak. My emphasis on embedding sponsorships within LANCE recalls Biagioli’s

(1993: 14) reframing of the role of patronage in Galileo’s self-fashioning:

The first step of this project involves the rejection of the notion of patronage as a mere set of rational strategies and relations through which a scientist makes a career

34 Similarly, as Biagioli (1993: 210) describes, it was the success of the patron-client relationship between Galileo and Cosimo de’ Medici, hardly known in advance, that enabled them to “grow together.” 82

(acquires money, power, and free time to do research). By perceiving patronage only in terms of its economic dimensions, we may end up believing clients to be rational individuals fully committed to some sort of research program in favor of which they try to manipulate the patronage system. However, “ends” and “means” are not categories that exist outside of the processes of self-fashioning that shape them. Consequently, it is by linking patronage to the social process of self- fashioning of clients and patrons (rather than simply to their economic subsistence) that we can relate cultural production and social context.

Nike did not simply exploit Armstrong’s body in their television commercials. As a sponsor of

LANCE, Nike needed to pass through Lance-the-Hero in order to reach its audience. This dynamic invariably opens the commercials up to the process of self-fashioning I have described.

As the embodiment of LANCE, Armstrong himself can shape the content and narrative of the commercials. He can deploy an already-existing configuration of Lance-the-Hero, or use the commercials to construct a new version that suits the context of the time. Thus, the commercials are yet another site in which to consider how multiplicities of Lance-the-Hero were produced and the context and audience to which they responded. I now turn to the Nike commercials in more detail in order to observe Armstrong’s body, search for components of LANCE, and attend to his growing controversy.

“What Am I On?”

A 2001 Nike commercial entitled What Am I On? begins with Armstrong surrounded by a scrum of news reporters and photographers. A man in a suit tries to push the crowd away from

Armstrong, who is seated at a table and dressed in his USPS jersey and shorts. A man in a white lab coat draws a vial of blood from Armstrong’s arm, presumably for a drug test. As the camera zooms in on the extracted bodily fluid, Armstrong himself begins a narrative that spans the remainder of the commercial: “This is my body, and I can do whatever I want to it.” The

83 audience is shown a montage of sequences and Armstrong’s voice describes a corresponding series of actions:

(1) Armstrong cycles across the frame, alone. He pedals out of the saddle, which conveys a high intensity: “I can push it.” (2) Armstrong pedals a stationary bicycle in a physiology laboratory. A heartrate monitor is strapped to his chest and he breathes into a respirator. A technician, standing next to him, takes notes on a clipboard: “I can study it.” (3) Armstrong pedals in a wind tunnel. A jet stream blows across the top of his helmet and down his backside. He is the only cyclist in the wind tunnel, but again we notice the gaze of laboratory personnel fixed upon his body. We also see several video monitors recording his movements from different angles: “Tweak it.” (4) Armstrong is asleep. The camera is focused on a close-up of his face. We can hear a soft whirring sound and are left to assume that this is also a scientific test of some kind: “Listen to it.”

The camera returns to the conclusion of the drug test depicted in the opening scene of the commercial. The media continues to take photographs as Armstrong applies pressure to the needle mark. Armstrong speaks again: “Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on?”

We are shown a fifth and final sequence: Armstrong pedals his bicycle through a heavy rainstorm, and answers, “I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?” The

Nike slogan – Just do it – and “swoosh” logo appear on the screen.

The commercial depicts glimpses of LANCE. A training session, physiology laboratory, wind tunnel, and sleeping study all briefly come into view, yet they are distributed by the presence of Armstrong’s flesh-and-blood body. As viewers of the commercials, we watch

Armstrong’s body seamlessly move between these networks at will. Moreover, Armstrong intervenes in them, “translating and linking up things which were previously unconnected”

(Mialet, 1999: 560). By placing his body at the center of these various networks, he not only translates problems from one to another but also feeds the power of his body and thus his heroic status. The commercial depicts what is, in comparison to the previous media, a form of heroism

84 that is relatively distributed – Armstrong works hard to prepare for the race, but does not do so in solitude. This distribution further enables Armstrong to manage his doping controversy. The viewer is left to believe that this collaborative hard work, not banned drugs, explains

Armstrong’s exceptionalism.

“The Magnet”

A 2004 Nike commercial entitled The Magnet depicts a montage of Armstrong training for the Tour de France. It opens with the camera soaring over an oceanic coastline. An acoustic guitar plays a soft melody, and we soon locate Armstrong alone on his bicycle. The camera zooms out and we are suddenly inside a train. A passenger observes Armstrong across the landscape on his bicycle. The camera flips to the reverse angle, and Armstrong rides alongside and slightly ahead of the train. The following sequences comprise the remainder of the commercial:

(1) Several children run through a hallway and towards a window. As two of them move in the foreground – one rolling an IV poll, the other in a wheelchair – we realize they are patients in a cancer ward. The camera pans out and we see that as Armstrong rides past, he throws up a fist of encouragement. The children cheer and urge him onward. (2) The commercial quickly flips back-and-forth between Lance continuing to pedal, by himself, and a stampede of buffalo. (3) It rains, but Lance continues to ride. He climbs a forested hill, alone, and continues to pedal. His face wears a serene, effortless expression. (4) Lance turns onto an urban street and, this time, is surrounded by other cyclists. As they ride through the streets it is clear that the other riders are neither teammates nor competitors, but recreational riders and fans. (5) Lastly, a young child tries to catch up to Lance, who is once again alone on his bike. The front wheel of the child’s bicycle wobbles closer to Lance’s rear tire, and the words “Just do it” – in yellow – appear on the screen.

The commercial again enacts a distributed form of heroism, in which making LANCE visible paradoxically depicts Armstrong’s singularity, a hard working flesh-and-blood. Whereas the previous commercial mobilized LANCE to deflect the doping allegations against him, this time it relies on Armstrong’s status as a spokesperson for cancer survivorship, so explicitly visualized in the children-patients, to overshadow his controversy. Echoing the tactic from his interview with

David Letterman, Lance-the-Hero dares the viewer to question the cleanliness of his Tour de

France victories and his intentions as cancer activist, for to be exposed as a “doper” would likely discredit his charitable work. Such is his durability in the twilight of his cycling career. Lance- the-Hero is composed of equal parts cycling star and survivorship spokesperson – to achieve in one is to “speak” for the other.

Through the lens of a camera, we have seen multiple enactments of Lance-the-Hero.

Armstrong was pictured alone on the covers of SI, while the presence and absence of some entities of LANCE were distributed in the narratives. In the Nike commercials, however, it is

LANCE’s partial visibility that paradoxically reinforces the strength of Lance-the-Hero. These moves, I contend, are not contradictory. Rather, it is the multiplicity of heroism itself that generates its power. Armstrong not only moves between different collectives, with the help of these media he also constructs linkages between them that suit the strategic management of the doping allegations against him.

Conclusion: From Material-Collective Body to Singularized Hero

This chapter analyzed a series of socio-material enactments of a heroic athlete who presumably occupies an opposing position from that of the genius scientist on the “spectrum of bodily motility” (Ihde, 2013), for example, because it is assumed that the latter relies on his or

86 her mind alone whereas Armstrong relies upon the condition of his body. However, by adapting the analytic approach from Mialet’s (2012) ethnography of Stephen Hawking to the case of

Lance Armstrong, and in particular by reconsidering the issue of proximity, I have suggested that the singularization and distributions of these extended bodies are perhaps not so radically different after all. The differences between these subject positions, then, exist as empirical outcomes rather than a priori of an assumed mind/body dichotomy.

I traced how the media transformed the material-collective body of LANCE into the singularized and mythic figure of Lance-the-Hero. I examined the constitutive entities of

Armstrong’s heroism, such as his work ethic, “natural” body, survivorship, teammates, coaches, and bicycling equipment, as they have participated in and become absent from its enactments.

Moreover, Armstrong himself chose specific moments in which to intervene, either to participate in or reject the media’s construction of his heroism. Finally, I argued that the multiplicity of

Lance-the-Hero is far from a contradiction or fragmented personal identity. Rather, I have proposed we understand Armstrong’s power as a cultural figure by tracing how his heroic identities were reconstructed depending on social context and the assembled public.

I explored the “mechanics of power” (Law, 1992) embedded in Lance-the-Hero by considering Armstrong’s proximity to other actors. Whereas Mialet (2012) varied her ethnographic proximity to Hawking to apprehend his extended and situated bodies, I have used my socio-historical vantage point to consider who gets to be close to Armstrong and who is kept at a distance. The multiplicities of Lance-the-Hero, different empirical outcomes of processes of coordination and distribution, provide a window into how power operates through “heroic” personas. First, Armstrong’s face-to-face interview with David Letterman allowed him to tie his cycling achievements to cancer survivorship and further assert that he competed drug free

87 because of this relationship; it was presumed that a man who was once so close to death would never put his health in danger by using performance-enhancing drugs. Second, the SI articles feature comments from Armstrong that reinforce Lance-the-Hero’s work ethic and physiological body. Whereas the 2002 articles draw a boundary between them, however, the 2003 articles coordinate his work ethic and body in the construction of his heroism. Third and finally,

Armstrong’s physical presence in the Nike commercials depicts a Hero powerful enough to move between multiple collectives at will. The commercials reinforce his singularity while encouraging consumers to participate in his heroism by purchasing sports apparel and equipment, and moreover, to become heroes themselves by overcoming their own obstacles.

Chapter 4 - It’s All About the Blood

“Chemo weakens your blood. During the third cycle, my hematocrit the percentage of total blood volume flowing through my body – fell to less than 25, and the normal count is 46. Ironically, I was given a red blood cell booster called Epogen (EPO). In any other situation, taking EPO would get me in trouble with the international cycling union and the international Olympic committee, because its considered performance-enhancing. But in my case, the EPO was hardly that. It was the only thing that kept me alive.” – Lance Armstrong (Armstrong and Jenkins, 2000: 128-129)

“How does a cyclist put sugar in his coffee? Roberto picked up the sugar packet and flicked it with his finger, like he was flicking a syringe. Everybody cracked up.” – Tyler Hamilton (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 143)

Introduction

Chapter 1 traced the linking of professional cycling and cancer survivorship as a central component of the durability of LANCE. One of the points of contact between cycling and cancer, I argued, concerned the material importance of blood. As Armstrong wrote in his book:

During cancer treatment and training alike, that is, it was normal for a person’s hematocrit to drop. Chemotherapy, for example, targets rapidly-dividing cancer cells. Unfortunately it also kills other rapidly-dividing cells such as those that grow your hair, the cells which make up the

89 lining of the gastrointestinal tract, and white and red blood cells. Thus, cancer patients often lose their hair and experience nausea, in addition to their lowered blood values.

During training, athletes’ hematocrit levels also drop. Although the exact mechanisms are not fully understood (see Mairbärul, 2013), decreased hematocrit percentage is a result of the increase in blood plasma that follows high levels of training. This is problematic for cyclists, not so much for the risks of anemia that cancer patients face, but because, as Bowers writes, “power output is directly related to the number of [red blood cells] in the body” (2012: 2). The administration of synthetic (or recombinant) EPO – which stimulates the body’s production of red blood cells – is one of the most significant sources of performance enhancement available.

“It is estimated that [EPO] can help a rider achieve a 10% to 20% increase in performance due to the increased energy, recovery and training capacity and endurance, and delayed fatigue,”

Bowers continues, “obtained through increased transport of oxygen to the rider’s muscle cells, allowing for increased maximum aerobic output” (2012: 2). Professional cycling has a well- documented history of the prevalent use of EPO (Voet, 1999), and despite Armstrong’s denials during his career, the USADA report outlined his team’s use of the drug with such detail that he eventually confessed.

This chapter explores the material-practices through which LANCE prepared its blood for the Tour de France. I first provide a brief overview that explains the importance of blood for athletic performances, by describing the history of the physiological study of exercise capacity and blood. Blood transfusions, in particular, were essential technologies of exercise physiology in the 1950s. Second, I use the affidavits submitted by Armstrong’s former teammates and other team personnel for USADA’s “Reasoned Decision” report to recompose the socio-material practices through which LANCE prepared its blood for the Tour de France. The affidavits

90 provide detailed descriptions of the blood-boosting practices of members of LANCE. While the team initially used EPO, they soon reverted to a combination of blood transfusions and micro- doses of EPO upon the UCI’s implementation of more advanced drug testing. Third and finally, I examine the processes by which rival extended bodies attempted to enroll one another’s blood boosting practices. I explain three processes of what I term “counter-networking”: (1) the construction of rival doping networks of clinics, doctors, knowledge, laboratories, and so on, with which to build doping programs; (2) the poaching of riders from rival teams, not only to acquire their experience in the Tour but also to enroll their knowledge of doping; and (3) the sharing of doctors, techniques, and even doping products across rival extended bodies. The chapter provides yet another glimpse into the material-collective production of Armstrong’s bodily abilities. Before I begin my empirical analysis, I will first discuss the source material for this chapter.

The USADA Investigation: Making Doping Visible, Producing a Historical Archive

On October 12, 2012, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) submitted its

“Reasoned Decision” report to the Union Cyliste Internationale (UCI) and the World Anti-

Doping Agency. The report detailed the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs on the US

Postal Service professional cycling team from 1995 through 2006. It was composed of the sworn testimony of 26 people, 11 of whom were Armstrong’s teammates. The additional 15 affidavits were submitted by team staff, riders from other teams, doping experts, and other witnesses. The report also included additional “direct documentary evidence including financial payments, emails, scientific data and laboratory test results” (Tygart, 2012: 1). As a result of the evidence against Armstrong, USADA issued him a lifetime ban from competition and the UCI stripped

91 him of all seven Tour de France victories. Rather than award them to the second-place finisher – as is the convention – the UCI left the race without a winner.

Armstrong’s teammates provided their testimony to USADA in exchange for significantly reduced sanctions of six months, which were applied during the offseason. Broadly speaking, the affidavits described the riders’ awareness of the rampant use of banned drugs in professional cycling and recounted their own decisions to incorporate doping in their training regimes. The affidavits also described how USPS team members acquired and stored banned drugs, as well as how often they used them. Several of the riders also described specific incidents when they used drugs with teammates, such as in their apartments, at a training camp, and even during the Tour de France or other races. The USADA report is one of the most comprehensive accounts of doping by a professional cycling team ever published. It led to several other investigations that have collectively painted the period of roughly 1995-2007 as “the doping era” in professional cycling.35 However, there are some clear shortcomings of the report, especially pertaining to the conclusions its authors draw from their evidence.

In a press release that accompanied the report, for example, USADA CEO Travis Tygart argued the following:

The evidence shows beyond any doubt that the US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen … The USPS Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices. (Tygart, 2012: 1)

35 For example, see the Danish Anti-Doping Report that described the doping practices of another rival team, Team CSC (Farrand, 2015), as well as the UCI’s CIRC Report (CIRC, 2015). 92

Although the doping program on the US Postal team was without a doubt complex and effective, a brief assessment of the limits of the USADA report is warranted before I discuss how I use the report’s affidavits in this chapter.

First, the USADA report only examines the doping practices on the US Postal cycling team and does not perform any systematic comparisons with other doping cases. Tygart’s claim that the US Postal team “ran the most sophisticated, professional and successful doping program that sport has ever seen” mistakes the depth of their singular case as an indication that no other programs of similar complexity have existed. In fact, other sources – such as the Danish Anti-

Doping Report (see Ryan, 2015; CIRC, 2015) and other confessionary rider biographies

(Hamilton and Coyle, 2012; Voet, 1999) – show that other teams appear to have used similar methods.36 I take up a brief comparative assessment in my later discussion of counter- networking.

Second, Tygart also claims that “the USPS Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices”

(2012: 1). Again, this statement is difficult to sustain from the affidavits provided in the report.

Armstrong’s teammates do not claim to have been “pressured” into using banned substances.

Their motivations for doping are a complex configuration of frustration over their own inability

36 For example, in his biography, Tyler Hamilton discusses the knowledge of competitors’ doping. He also recounts conversations with the doctor who organized his blood doping program while riding for Team CSC, Dr. Fuentes, in which they discussed his competitors’ doping. During one visit, Hamilton saw a number of rivals hanging out near the clinic and assumed they were there to visit Dr. Fuentes as well (see Hamilton and Coyle, 2012). 93 to compete against other riders who used drugs as well as an interest in maximizing their own performances by any means necessary.37 Most of the riders who provided affidavits for the

USADA report do not draw the same boundaries between licit and illicit performance-enhancing practices as anti-doping officials. Given the anti-doping rules, it is obvious why the program would have been conducted in secrecy; however, there is no evidence that the USPS team generated an “unfair” advantage over their competitors; doping was hardly a secret amongst professional riders.

Despite the shortcomings of Tygart’s argument, the affidavits provide a comprehensive window through which to explore the material-practices through which LANCE prepared its blood for the Tour de France. This chapter analyzes yet another material-collective that directly impacted Armstrong’s bodily abilities in the Tour. At this historical moment, practices of blood doping – however uncomfortable for contemporary observers – sat alongside wind-tunnel testing, bicycle engineering, aerobic interval training, biomechanical performance analysis, and course reconnaissance in relative symmetry. For the actors of the period it was not a question of drawing boundaries between these practices, but how to best configure them together so as to perfect, inasmuch as possible, the heterogeneous production of their cycling-bodies. The following section provides a brief overview of the importance of blood to exercise physiology before turning to the analysis of the affidavits.

37 I will discuss this further in this chapter, though interested readers may refer directly to the following affidavits: Vaughters, 2012: 3-5; Hamilton, 2012: 4-6; Leipheimer, 2012: 3; Barry, 2012: 10-11; and Zabriskie, 2012: 8. Vande Velde’s affidavit contains the only exception; he claimed to have been hesitant to use the PEDs presented to him and recalled a conversation with Armstrong, Ferrari, and Bruyneel about needing to use drugs on a consistent basis in order to prepare (see Vande Velde, 2012). 94

“Blood Is a Drug”38: An Overview of Blood and Exercise Capacity

Beamish and Ritchie (2005) identified a major epistemic shift in exercise physiology from the fixed-capacity to performance-enhancement paradigm. In chapter two, I argued that the latter was not characterized by a decline in drills and repetition, demonstrating their continued prevalence within LANCE’s training regime. This section revisits the development of performance-enhancement exercise physiology, this time analyzing how the material culture of the discipline articulated with professional cycling. By utilizing blood transfusions to study maximal sustainable exertion, exercise physiology inadvertently stumbled upon a doping technology that transformed the sport.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the physiological study of “exercise capacity” sought to explain the maximum physical exertion a subject could sustain over time. Of particular interest was the relationship between oxygen transportation in the blood and a measure of exercise capacity known as “VO2 max,” the maximum amount of oxygen a subject can utilize during exercise. Although a similar method was used in three previous studies (Pace et al., 1947;

Gullbring et al., 1960; Robinson et al., 1966), a 1972 study used blood transfusions on its subject to explore the relationship between blood volume and VO2 max. Ekblom described their method:

Group 1. Single venesection. Three subjects had 800 ml of whole blood withdrawn and stored in the blood bank … The packed red cells were thereafter reinfused to the subjects and the work tests were continued for an additional period of 2 weeks … Group II. Sequential venesection. In four subjects 400 ml of whole blood were withdrawn three times with an interval of 4 days between each bleeding episodes. Tests identical to the base-line tests were performed 3 days after each blood loss.

38 This quotation appeared in a 1985 article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which discussed the growing use of blood transfusions in athletics (Klein, 1985: 856). 95

Twenty-four days after the last blood letting, the red cells were reinfused and the day thereafter work tests were performed. (Ekblom et al., 1972: 175-176)

By increasing red blood cell levels (hemoglobin concentration) by 13 percent, subjects experienced a 9 percent increase in their VO2 max and a 23 percent increase in time to exhaustion during a treadmill run (Ekblom et al., 1972). What Eichner (1987) later described as a

“watershed study,” pioneered the use of blood transfusions as a laboratory practice with which to study exercise capacity.

This breakthrough in exercise physiology was replicated by a number of studies over the following decade (see, for example, Bell et al., 1976; Videman and Rytöma, 1977; and Gledhill,

1982). By 1982, at least fifteen studies had used transfusions to examine the relationship between blood and exercise capacity. These studies tested new storage techniques, for example, comparing the effects of blood that was refrigerated or frozen. They tested different infusion volumes to determine if there was a limit to the positive relationship between blood and performance. They tested storage duration, i.e., the time from blood draw to transfusion, to measure the effects of long-term storage on blood degradation. Taken together, as Gledhill wrote, the studies made apparent “that a significant increase in V02 max and/or endurance exercise capacity was observed consequent to a significant increase in hemoglobin concentration” (Gledhill, 1982: 186). What began as a material culture for studying exercise physiology, one of needles, IVs, refrigerators, centrifuges, and blood bags, soon became the preeminent enhancement practice in sports such as cycling, running, and cross-country skiing.

The speed with which blood transfusions moved from laboratory studies to sports competitions is striking. There is ample evidence of their use in the highest tiers of professional and Olympic sport as early as the 1970s, a development not lost on the physiologists who had

96 pioneered the technique in their labs. As Eichner wrote, “that blood boosting seemed to work was quickly noted by athletes. We now know that blood boosting was used – by a Finnish steeplechaser – in the Olympic Games as early as 1972” (Eichner, 1992: 359). Blood transfusions were “rife during the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games where the Finnish and East

German teams were the target of considerable suspicion” (Houlihan, 1999: 41). In 1977, German footballer Franz Beckenbauer described the “secret” to his fitness: “as for me personally, I have a special method to remain at top level: the injection of my own blood” (as cited in “Doping in

Football,” 2013: 6). Eichner wrote, the technique of “blood boosting” was also used by distance runners and cyclists in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games (Eichner, 1992: 359).

For example, the US cycling team used blood transfusions at the 1984 Olympic Games

(Cramer, 1985). In a letter written September 30, 1983, physiologist and coach Edmund Burke reflected on the place of transfusions within the team:

In preparation for the Olympic Games I am reviewing all avenues of preparation for our team, in addition to, bikes, wheels, clothing, sports psychologist, etc. [sic] One significant and controversial area of improving athletic performance is the area of blood boosting. Is it doping or illegal; my personal opinion and interpretation is no. This is one more area our cyclist will be behind the world of cycling if we do not keep up with the sports medicine research. (Burke, 1983: 1)

Dr. Herman Falsetti, a cardiologist from the University of Iowa who performed the transfusions, later commented that he “would never do anything which is illegal, unethical or detrimental to bicyclists” (as cited in Goodwin, 1985: 1). Also in 1984, Francesco Moser broke the world hour record in professional cycling, an event in which a rider covers the maximum distance possible in sixty minutes, having been “prepared” by a blood transfusion from Dr. Franceso Conconi

(Lundby, Robach and Saltin, 2012: 1307).

It is worth emphasizing that the relationship between blood and performance was situated within a historically-specific context of development, and that it was far from a knowledge from nowhere (Haraway, 1988). The unexpected defeat of American athletes in the track and field events of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games – which, at an elevation of 2,250 meters (7,380 feet), was the highest of any Olympic Games to date – provided clear inspiration for inquiries into blood. The defeat of American runners inspired a new scientific inquiry into the salience of blood in explaining exercise capacity.39 As Eichner reflected, it was only “after 1968, on the premise that runners from altitude had ‘thick blood’ that enabled them to win in ‘thin air,’ [that] research on blood boosting was stepped up” (Eichner, 1992: 359). Thus, Ekblom’s “watershed” study was conducted just four years after the Mexico City Olympics. The inquiry into the effect of blood on exercise capacity is inseparable from the context of high-performance sport, and the related anxieties which arose from the defeat of white athletes from people of color from the so- called “third world.” Though the laboratory studies would initially struggle “to document the benefits of blood transfusion in experimental exercise protocols” (Klein, 1985: 855), 40 they nonetheless marked the beginning of the processes through which blood became a drug.

The complexity of the blood transfusion – described at length below – was, quite remarkably, replaced upon the synthesis of erythropoietin (EPO) into a commercially-available pharmaceutical drug in 1987 (Robinson et al., 2006).41 A naturally-occurring hormone produced

39 African runners won gold medals in the 1,500 meter (Kenya), 10,000 meter (Kenya), the 3,000 meter steeplechase (Kenya), and the marathon (Ethiopia). 40 It is worth mentioning that throughout this period, in spite of its ample scientific replication and its use by athletes in numerous competitions, there remained skeptics of its efficacy. As Eichner cautioned, “Blood doping, if properly done, works in the laboratory, but there is insufficient evidence to state conclusively that it works in the field, and in any case, it is unethical and illegal” (1987: 129). The translation of a laboratory result to the field of sport, in other words, was neither obvious nor immediate. 41 The availability of the drug is contested within the literature. Robinson et al. (2006) date the appearance of EPO in European sport to 1987. However, in paper published two years later, Jones 98 in the kidneys, EPO stimulates the body’s production of red blood cells. The drug was primarily intended to treat anemia in patients with renal failure and thought to hold applicability as a cancer treatment as well (Erslev, 1991; Krantz, 1991). A drug that increased the bodily production of hemoglobin was immediately applicable to high-performance endurance sports.

EPO could accomplish the same goal as blood transfusions, an enhancement of exercise capacity, though they were hardly practical equivalents. First, the effect of a blood transfusion is immediate, since the practice instantaneously increases the number of red blood cells in the body. EPO takes effect more gradually, because it takes at least two weeks to produce enough new red blood cells to benefit athletic performance.

Second, blood harvest, storage, and reinfusion require a careful technique. Autologous transfusions (of one’s own blood), for example, require harvest several weeks ahead of the desired performance gain to give the host enough time to replenish their lost blood. A reinfusion performed prior to full blood regeneration diminishes the technique’s benefits because the goal is a net increase in hemoglobin concentration. As Sawka described, “refrigeration techniques may be used for short-term storage; however, [red blood cells] will progressively degrade and the maximum storage period is about 42 [days]” (Sawka et al., 1996: ii). Suboptimal handling and storage techniques will reduce the quality of the blood, and therefore diminish the potential benefit.

Blood doping with EPO, however, did not require the extraction of blood, so its user did not experience the reduction in blood volume that came with autologous blood doping. The effects of EPO on hemoglobin concentration were far more stable than those of blood

speculated that “perhaps the discovery and isolation of erythropoietin will make blood doping irrelevant. Erythropoietin is a direct stimulus to further red blood cell production and is a potentially cleaner method of achieving the same effects. Erythropoietin is not currently a banned substance and the potential for its being used to confer an unfair disadvantage is considerable” (Jones, 1989: 87). 99 transfusion, which tended to only last two to three weeks. “Administering EPO will slowly increase the number of RBC over several weeks,” wrote Sawka, “but the increase will be sustained as long as EPO treatment continues” (Sawka et al., 1996: ii). Of the existing blood- boosting techniques – transfusions and altitude training – EPO was closer to the latter because it involved stimulating the body’s production of blood rather than adding more RBCs. What made blood transfusions so observably “artificial” – the materiality of extracting, handling, storing, and re-infusing blood – was replaced by an injection that stimulated the body’s own production of red blood cells. As a result, EPO “soon antiquated transfusion doping” (Eichner, 2007: 390).

This is the historical context in which we now return to LANCE: shortly after EPO replaced transfusions as the preeminent method of blood doping, yet before a direct, urinary test for EPO forced LANCE to return to the former technology.

Origin Stories: How USPS Riders Normalized Doping

This section explains how LANCE prepared its blood for the Tours de France. I trace how several riders came to view doping as “normal” prior to joining the US Postal cycling team; that is, how they came to view blood doping as a common and accepted practice amongst cyclists that, in some cases, was even shared across competing teams and riders.

In 1995, Armstrong and two of his future teammates rode for the Motorola Cycling

Team. Frankie Andreu and George Hincapie, in their affidavits for the USADA report, explained their realization of the prevalence of drugs in cycling. As Andreu explained:

While I was competing on Motorola (1991-1996) the use of erythropoietin (EPO) became prevalent in the peloton. As the use of EPO increased it became apparent

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that it was going to be difficult to have professional success as a cyclist without using EPO. Over time a general consensus arose on the Motorola team that it would be necessary for us to use EPO to help in racing because there were so many riders against whom we were competing that were using EPO. (Andreu, 2012: 3)

George Hincapie explained that he had received vitamin injections during his preparations for the 1992 Olympics with Team USA and they continued when he joined Motorola. His recollection of EPO mirrors Andreu’s:

In 1995 there appeared to me to be a major change in the peloton. It was becoming very difficult to keep up, and I learned that the reason was the widespread use of erythropoietin (“EPO”), a banned blood oxygen booster for which there was, at the time, no effective doping test. As the speed of the peloton increased we seemed to be confronted with the choice of using EPO or not performing well in races. (Hincapie, 2012: 4)

Several more of Armstrong’s future teammates reported a similar timeline prior to their enrollment in LANCE.

Jonathan Vaughters, who rode the 1999 Tour de France with LANCE, was introduced to the drug while riding for a Spanish team in 1995:

I first used EPO on the Porcelena Santa Clara team. The team doctor provided it to me on the theory that it would simply bring me back to my natural hematocrit level and prevent me from being anemic. At this point I used 1000 international units about three times a week, for one month. (Vaughters, 2012: 3)

Tyler Hamilton, who rode for the USPS Cycling Team in its inaugural season, wrote the

101 following: “We spent more time competing in Europe in 1996 and found it very difficult to compete. The speed of the peloton was tremendous and it was generally acknowledged that doping with the banned blood boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) was prevalent” (Hamilton,

2012: 3). Finally, Levi Leipheimer was introduced to EPO by Vaughters while riding for

Comptel-Colorado Cyclist in 1997. By the time Leipheimer joined the USPS squad in 2000, he

“had come to believe that in order to be successful in professional cycling it was necessary to use performance enhancing drugs” (Leipheimer, 2012: 3). Leipheimer further explained that he was offered EPO in 1999 while racing for Team Saturn: “The EPO was offered by Other-7,” one of the team’s coaches whose name is redacted in the USADA report,42 “with whom I worked in

1999, 2000, and 2001... Other-7 put together my training plans and instructed me when to use

EPO. He also advised that I get a centrifuge to monitor my hematocrit, and I did this”

(Leipheimer, 2012: 3-4). By these riders’ accounts, the use of EPO was widespread and well- known by the mid-1990s, prior to the formation of LANCE.

Leipheimer’s comments further highlight the inextricability of training and blood boosting. As Vande Velde also remarked, “the terms ‘program’ and ‘preparation’ were specifically used to refer to combining drugs and training to bring the rider to a level of peak performance” (Vande Velde, 2012: 11). It was commonplace for riders’ training programs – which detailed their long-term training and racing schedules – to be supplemented by PEDs such as EPO, testosterone, anabolic steroids, and other banned substances. This dynamic contradicts the cultural narratives that equates PED use with “taking short cuts.” Rather, and this point will be made in much more detail later in this chapter, riders and coaches approached PEDs as

42 The USADA affidavits contain a number of redacted names, denoted as “Other-#.” I have preserved these redactions when providing quotations. 102 enabling harder and more intense training workloads, and in some cases, as enabling their bodies to return to their “natural” state following the fatigue of long training sessions (see Vaughters,

2012; Hamilton and Coyle, 2012).

Although these riders developed an awareness of blood preparation prior to joining

LANCE, Andreu, Hincapie, and Stephen Swart all recalled a particular experience in 1995 that directly involved Armstrong. For example, as Hincapie described of the team’s bitter experience at the spring classic Milan-San Remo, “coming home from the race Lance Armstrong was very upset. As we drove home Lance said, in substance, that he did not want to get crushed anymore and something needed to be done. I understood that he meant the team needed to get on EPO”

(Hincapie, 2012: 4). Swart recalled that several of the then-Motorola riders openly discussed using EPO: “The day after the Milan-San Remo race in 1995 I went on a training ride in Como when the subject of EPO use was discussed. Lance Armstrong … stated strongly that the riders who were in line to ride the Tour de France that year needed to begin an EPO program” (Swart,

2012: 1). In late 1996, however, Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer and forced into a tentative retirement to begin treatment.

The Festina Scandal: Doping Made Visible and the Role of the Soigneur

One year prior to Armstrong’s return to the Tour, the race suffered a high-profile drugs scandal during which riders’ blood preparations became public. Triggered by a seemingly routine customs inspection of a team car driven by Festina team soigneur (assistant) Willy Voet, police discovered over 400 vials of EPO, human growth hormone, testosterone, and other products (Wilcockson and Pelkey, 1999). Roughly half of the field withdrew from the race over

103 the next two weeks as police raids, arrests, and rider interrogations and confessions continued.

Fouché wrote:

[The Festina Affair] is an important marker for the story of Lance Armstrong and doping because it shed light on the seedy workings of professional cycling and exposed doping on an international scale. It moved the public perception of doping away from rogue individuals to a place where drug use was seen as systematic, not just within cycling but in all elite sporting communities. (Fouché, 2017: 155)

Moreover, as Christiansen wrote, “the investigations by the French police revealed that an entire cycling culture – riders, coaches, doctors and officials – had secretly lived with and practised doping as part of their particular lifestyle” (Christiansen, 2005: 497). The event thus exposed the of blood doping during this period, and more importantly, provided a glimpse into how extended bodies coordinated the doping practices of their riders.

In his auto-biographical account of the event, Voet (1999) explained that soigneurs had long transported and in some cases administered drugs to their riders. During the 1970s, for example, Voet helped his rider to prepare “himself … using ‘all available technology’” (Voet,

1999: 55). Voet prepared “fruit bars with eyes,” an energy bar which concealed five-milligram pills of amphetamine:

[the soigneurs] would stick them in like eyes, with a nose on top if the rider wanted three … In the morning, in the hotel, when I went from room to room asking who wanted eyes, a nose, even a mouth, in his fruit bar, everyone understood. Doping, in any shape or form, has always been an integral part of the culture of top-level cycling. (Voet, 1999: 57-58)

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Voet first heard of EPO doping in 1992 and it took just one year for his Festina team to incorporate it into their preparations. When the UCI set the hematocrit level to 50 percent in

1997, the Festina team doctor, Dr. Rijckaert, imposed a team-limit of 54 percent though other teams pushed their riders up toward 60 (Voet, 1999). A rider could maintain a hematocrit in excess of the 50-percent threshold and escape testing “positive” if, upon notification that they needed to submit blood for screening, infused enough saline to dilute their hematocrit to an acceptable level. This technique was hardly foolproof. For example, Italian rider and race favorite Marco Pantani was ejected from the 1998 Giro d’Italia – and prevented from racing for fifteen days – with a 52-percent hematocrit level. Voet’s detailed account suggests that soigneurs fulfilled an integral role in managing the riders’ blood – that they occupied an important position within their extended bodies – long before LANCE.

The USADA affidavits suggest soigneurs continued to facilitate the doping practices of riders on the pre-Armstrong USPS team. Emma O’Reilly, a soigneur on the USPS team from

1996-2000, described her participation:

in 1998 I had several conversations about the doping program and on one occasion actively participated in the transport of a banned performance enhancing substance. In May or June of the 1998 season, George Hincapie learned that I was traveling to Belgium and asked me to pick up a package for him from Other-11 … I remember being surprised by how small the package was and telling Other-11 that I would try to get the package to George in Girona but was happy to deliver it to him when I returned to the United States if I did not happen to see him before he left Spain. (O’Reilly, 2012: 6)

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O’Reilly’s role in the USPS doping program increased in subsequent years. For example, upon her promotion to head soigneur in 1999, she left a team training camp in the Spanish Pyrenees to pick up a pill bottle for Armstrong (O’Reilly, 2012).

O’Reilly described the USPS team’s reaction to the Festina scandal as it unfolded during the 1998 Tour:

It was no secret that Festina had a doping program, but I do recall that everybody was surprised when we learned about the amount of drugs that Voet was transporting for the Festina team. The news of Voet’s arrest caused a lot of anxiety among the Tour de France teams because it prompted raids and searches by the police after the Tour resumed in France. Dr. Celaya remained in an extremely agitated state until the U.S. Postal Service team made the decision to discard all of the remaining doping products during the Tour de France’s second time trial. (O’Reilly, 2012: 8)

Hincapie articulated a similar reaction with respect to the increased presence of police at the race. He recalled “that drugs were dumped overboard when the ferry carrying the team was making passage from Ireland where a portion of the Tour had been run. Later during that Tour, I was in the team camper when team staff flushed drugs down the toilet” (Hincapie, 2012: 6). In spite of the team’s anxiety over the pressure of the scandal, Hincapie still managed to use testosterone and human growth hormone (hGH) as recovery agents during the race.

Vaughters suggested that the doping program on the USPS team that year was “relatively open,” although the team’s first-year professional riders, such as Christian Vande Velde, “would

106 be more shielded” (Vaughters, 2012: 5).43 He described the team’s doping in 1998 at some length in his affidavit:

Dr. Celaya would deliver EPO to riders on the team in U.S. Postal Service water bottles with EPO vials packed in ice in the bottles. On the side of the bottle would be the same of the rider and the doses of EPO in the bottle. For instance, I might receive a bottle that would say “Jonathan - 5 x 2” meaning that the bottle held 5 vials of EPO containing 2,000 international units each. The first time Pedro injected me or advised me to use EPO was June, 1998 … The Festina scandal was a clear indication of what we already knew about our sport which was the performance enhancing drug use, and particularly the use of EPO was rampant in professional cycling. Lance and I, having been professional for years by that time, were under no illusions that we could be successful without EPO. (Vaughters, 2012: 4-5)

Vaughters’ description conveys not only the normality of doping within professional cycling at the time, but also an ironic and surely unintentional effect of doping scandals. Rather than “clean up” the sport, events such as the Festina scandal made doping visible amongst professional riders. They confirm what riders already know about their sport – that many of their competitors used banned substances to prepare their bodies for competition – and therefore provide them with further justification for their own doping practices.

The scandal is integral to the historical context of Armstrong’s return to the Tour de

France the following year. As Wilcockson and Pelkey wrote, “one year after some of its darkest secrets were aired to a shocked worldwide audience, professional cycling had a chance to display

43 In his own affidavit, Vande Velde (2012: 4) commented on his gradual introduction to drug use: “It was in this apartment early in my first season that I first saw EPO. ‘Hey, want to see EPO?’ Jonathan asked, as he held open the refrigerator and pointed out a vial to me in a water bottle with ice and plastic bags in it that had been placed there by Rider-17.” Later that year, Vande Velde was given his first injection of a vitamin mixture referred to as “recovery.” Toward the end of the season, Vaughters began schooling him on “the process of EPO use … such as how the body should be prepared by taking in iron, B vitamins and vitamin C to make the EPO more effective” (Vande Velde, 2012: 5). 107 its brighter side … and leading the way in the ‘good news’ department looked likely to be the top

American prospects, Lance Armstrong and Bobby Julich” (Wilcockson and Pelkey, 1999: 29).

Having assembled powerful associations between cancer and cycling, Armstrong was primed to become the new figurehead of a sport in need of a new hero whose victory would “confirm” a new era of clean cycling.44 Armstrong gladly embraced the prospect, stating during a July 12,

1999, press conference in Le Grand Bornard, “I want to be part of the renovation” of the Tour (as cited in Wilcockson and Pelkey, 1999: np). Thus, just as Armstrong returned to the sport as a triumphant cancer survivor, the 1999 “Tour of Renewal,” as it was known, was primed for a new champion who could signal a brighter future for the race.

Managing Blood at the 1999 “Tour of Renewal”: Cycling Bodies, Hematocrit and EPO

The 1999 USPS cycling team saw the return of American riders George Hincapie,

Frankie Andreu, Jonathan Vaughters, Tyler Hamilton, and Lance Armstrong. Emma O’Reilly also continued as the team’s head soigneur. Johan Bruyneel, a former professional rider himself, arrived as the team’s director. Bruyneel brought a new team doctor and a new trainer on board,

Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral and Jose “Pepi” Marti. According to several riders’ affidavits, the new team personnel initiated several shifts to the material practices through which LANCE prepared its riders for the Tour.

44 In addition, a string of suspensions and injuries of Tour contenders in the last few months before the 1999 Tour further reduced the field of contenders for the 1999 race. Marco Pantani was out after exceeding the 50-percent hematocrit limit at the Giro d’Italia. Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich, two other previous winners, had broken their elbows during the Tour of Switzerland. Hamilton and Coyle explained that “all that added up to make the 1999 Tour one of the most wide-open fields in modern history, the first in fifty years without a former winner in the lineup” (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 88). 108

Bruyneel was very attentive to his riders’ hematocrit levels. “Our new [team director] took a very active interest in the hematocrit level of each team member,” Vaughters wrote, and

“he always knew … whether it had gone up or down recently and would frequently discuss our hematocrit level with us” (Vaughters, 2012: 10). Hincapie similarly observed that “[Bruyneel] was more involved in my training and kept track of my blood parameters. He typically knew my hematocrit level … and generally called me if he had a concern about my hematocrit level, such as if it was close to the fifty percent cut off level over which we could not race” (Hincapie, 2012:

7). Hamilton added that Bruyneel’s interest in blood values was shared by Armstrong, “and he would sometimes go around the hotel at a training camp or race talking about everyone’s hematocrit” (Hamilton, 2012: 5). The management of hematocrits within LANCE strove for a delicate balance of raising it high enough to provide meaningful aerobic benefits for riders yet keeping it low enough that a hematocrit screening by the UCI would not suspect blood doping.

This ebb and flow of hematocrit was facilitated by increasingly bold team doctors throughout the period. For example, upon joining the USPS team in 1998, Andreu noted that

“Dr. Celaya was not as conservative as Max Testa, the Motorola team physician” (Andreu, 2012:

6). Dr. Celaya, in turn, was deemed more conservative than the physician who later replaced him on USPS, Dr. del Moral (see Vaughters, 2012). The riders noted key differences between the doctors’ administration of EPO. Vaughters explained, for example, that “while Dr. Celaya had tended to provide EPO in vials, Dr. del Moral provided EPO in preloaded syringes” (Vaughters,

2012: 9). This partly reflected a more cautionary approach to circulating doping paraphernalia in the wake of Festina, but also enabled a greater degree of control and precision with respect to dosages. A doctor who supplied a preloaded syringe could not only dispose of the vial himself – ensuring it would not be recovered in the event of a police raid – but could also control the exact

109 dosage of EPO in his riders’ bodies. Whereas all three doctors administered EPO to their riders,

Dr. del Moral’s more aggressive approach sometimes led to situations in which riders’ hematocrit surpassed the 50-percent limit and had to be further adjusted. As Hincapie explained,

“my hematocrit was relatively high, so when using EPO I had to be concerned about crossing the fifty percent threshold at which I would be kept out of races. Dr. del Moral provided saline infusions on many occasions during each year from 1999 through 2003 in order to keep my hematocrit level below the threshold” (Hincapie, 2012: 7). In the event that riders’ blood levels rose beyond the UCI’s threshold, they used saline to dilute their blood back to “normal.”

Whereas early adopters of EPO sourced it directly from European pharmacies, USPS riders received it from their team doctors and staff. For example, although Pepe Marti officially joined the team as a trainer, O’Reilly confessed that she “never witnessed him provide coaching to any of the riders. To me, it seemed that Pepe’s primary responsibility was to obtain and transport doping products for the team” (O’Reilly, 2012: 11-12). As O’Reilly continued, “Pepe would show up once in a while with a bunch of boxes of from [sic] the Valencia Institute, which is where he worked. Some of the product that Pepe transported would end up on the U.S. Postal

Service team truck and some of it would go to Dr. del Moral’s hotel room for distribution to the riders” (O’Reilly, 2012: 12). During training, EPO was distributed to riders for self-injection in accordance with their personalized training schedules. During mid-season “tune up” races, Dr. del Moral administered EPO directly to his riders. As Andreu recalled, “on several occasions I received injections of EPO from Dr. del Moral … in my hotel room at the time during or just after a race” (Andreu, 2012, 10). These sourcing practices were also present on Team Telekom, for which one of Armstrong’s primary rivals rode (Jaksche, 2012).

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Given that USPS riders often trained in remote locations all over Europe, the team-wide distribution of EPO was at times a complicated logistical task. As Vaughters explained,

On two or three occasions in 1999 Dr. del Moral drove from Valencia, Spain where he lived to deliver EPO to me in Girona. Girona is nearly 300 miles, and about a four-hour drive, from Valencia. On those occasions he told me that he was stopping in Girona on his way to Nice. I understood from this that he was delivering doping products, including EPO, to my teammates in Nice. (Vaughters, 2012: 11)

As head soigneur, O’Reilly continued transporting pill bottles and vials for her riders. In the event that riders exhausted their supply, they simply borrowed it from other riders (O’Reilly,

2012). Hamilton, for example, described a situation during this training for the 1999 Tour with

Armstrong. “In May of 1999,” he wrote, “my hematocrit was down, and I asked Lance if he had any EPO I could borrow. Lance directed me to the refrigerator where the EPO was next to the milk. I helped myself to a vial” (Hamilton, 2012: 5). Armstrong sometimes referred to EPO as

“butter” because of where he liked to keep it in this refrigerator (Vaughters, 2012).

Hamilton continued training with Armstrong, and was eventually introduced to

Armstrong’s personal coach, Dr. Michele Ferrari. A former student of Dr. Francesco Conconi, who had influentially linked hematocrit level to aerobic threshold (Conconi et al., 1982), Dr.

Ferrari developed personal training programs for several professional riders. The affidavits suggest that Dr. Ferrari was, by far, the most meticulous with respect to his preparation of riders.

As Hamilton explained,

Dr. Ferrari would meet us at various locations in Europe where he would generally weigh us, conduct a climbing test or series of climbing tests and measure our blood

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parameters and lactate level… Sometimes we would drive from Nice and just meet Dr. Ferrari on the side of the highway. I recall the first time I met Dr. Ferrari we met him at a rest stop on the side of a road that runs between Monaco and Genoa, Italy, and he put us through a test on stationary trainer and then measured our body weight, lactate and blood levels. (Hamilton, 2012: 6)

These material practices were integral to producing knowledge about the effects of EPO on hematocrit and bodily performance. A spreadsheet recovered during a later investigation of Dr.

Ferrari showed that he not only tracked fluctuations in blood parameters from at least 1989 to

1998, he also worked with at least twenty-five other riders, from several different teams (see

Albergotti and O’Connell, 2013). Armstrong, Hamilton, and other USPS riders supplemented their EPO use with Dr. Ferrari’s olive oil-testosterone mixture, which they administered themselves, a few drops at a time, directly onto their tongues.

Whereas LANCE’s preparations for the Tour could be conducted with very little risk during training, as the UCI did not yet possess an out-of-competition testing program, the practices continued during the Tour in a much more scrupulous manner. Riders were subject to random tests at any time during the competition, so their hematocrits had to be closely managed at all times. Vaughters described the incredible depth of LANCE’s hematocrit knowledge during the Tour:

I paid close attention to the hematocrit levels of the riders on the team. Both Dr. del Moral and [Bruyneel] would frequently go around with a piece of paper with rider’s hematocrits listed, so it was relatively easy to keep with everyone's level. Plus, Lance was not shy about discussing others’ hematocrit levels. I observed that by the time of the 1999 Tour each rider’s hematocrit was nailed to the ceiling. Kevin Livingston was about 49.9. I was at 51 (I had a dispensation that allowed up to 52%, due to pediatric records that showed my natural level was quite high). Tyler was at

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49. Lance was almost 49, while he had been at 47 at Route du Sud and at 42 or 43 earlier in the year. (Vaughters, 2012: 13-14)

In the event that a rider was asked to submit their blood for a screening, Vaughters further explained, “Dr. del Moral had saline ready to keep our level below the 50% threshold as necessary … There were at least 3 or 4 occasions during the year where I and other riders used saline after receiving advance warning of a doping control” (Vaughters, 2012: 14). In fact, when

Vaughters voiced his anxiety about his own hematocrit level, Armstrong replied, with complete confidence in their extended body, “you’re looking at it the wrong way; we know the whole team is ready” (as cited in Vaughters, 2012: 15). In the event that one of its riders was selected for a blood test, that is, LANCE was ready to dilute their blood with saline and lower their hematocrit to an acceptable level.

Two events during the 1999 Tour exemplified the capabilities of LANCE to protect its riders’ bodies from scrutiny: Armstrong’s pre-race medical checkup and his later positive test for a corticosteroid. Andreu recalled “being with Lance just before a public medical check at the

1999 Tour de France. The media was to attend the medical check and it was to be done shirtless.

Just before going out someone noticed a bruise on Lance’s upper arm where he had been injected. The location was a place that I knew bruising could occur from EPO injections”

(Andreu, 2012: 8). The mark was left over from a series of injections Armstrong had undergone to raise his hematocrit to a competitive level for the Tour. Armstrong needed to conceal the bruise on his arm before appearing in front of the media. As O’Reilly confirmed,

Lance was concerned about the bruise because he was expected to make an appearance at the Tour de France’s official medical examination and photographers

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and other members of the media would be in attendance. Lance did not want to show up at the event with any marks on his body that might arouse suspicions among the assembled members of the media. (O’Reilly, 2012: 16)

As a soigneur tasked with the management of cycling bodies, O’Reilly “ended up purchasing a few different types of concealer makeup for Lance so that he could try them out and see which one worked best for him” (O’Reilly 2012: 16). The two even shared a laugh at the lack of skill with which Armstrong applied the makeup over the bruise, yet even so, none of the reporters mentioned the condition of Armstrong’s arm in their subsequent articles.

The second event in which LANCE managed Armstrong’s body from controversy occurred one week after the makeup incident, when he tested positive for a banned corticosteroid. Although the event does not directly pertain to the preparation of blood, it remains worthy of discussion because it demonstrates how LANCE was able to protect its principal rider in relation to his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Had LANCE failed to cover up the positive test result, Armstrong would have been ejected from the Tour, given a lengthy suspension from the sport, and Lance-the-Hero never would have emerged.

When Armstrong was notified of his positive test for Kenacourt, which he had injected intramuscularly at the Route du Sud (Vaughters, 2012), LANCE immediately went to work. The team was not so much alarmed by the positive test result as it was scrambling to conceal it from the media. O’Reilly recalled, at length:

I remember being in a room with Lance, Other-14 and Other-15 when the three of them came up with the explanation for the presence of corticosteroids in Lance’s sample … The obvious solution was to obtain a backdated prescription for the corticosteroid. I was there while Lance, Other-14 and Other-15 came up with the

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saddle sore excuse and figured out how far back to backdate the prescription. Once they settled on the saddle sore story Other-15 left the room to get the prescription from Dr. del Moral for the corticosteroid cream … Lance explained to me that [he] had not been worried about testing positive for corticosteroids because he had been tested two weeks prior to the Tour de France at the Route du Sud and the sample came back clean. Lance did not realize that a more sensitive test had been adopted and implemented for the Tour de France until his sample came back positive. It was clear to me after the meeting that Lance’s positive sample was not caused by the medical treatment of a saddle sore and that they only reason he obtained a prescription was to excuse his improper use of a prohibited substance … The U.S. Postal Service team provided the prescription Dr. del Moral wrote for Lance to the UCI and all of the commotion surrounding the positive test quickly died down. A few days later Lance won his first Tour de France championship. (O’Reilly, 2012: 17-18)

Whereas race organizers certainly did not want a positive test result, of the current race leader no less, to ruin their Tour of Renewal, the incident also exposed a loophole in the UCI’s therapeutic use exemption protocol in which riders can “legally” use corticosteroids under medical pretexts.45

In preparation for the 1999 Tour, LANCE carefully managed its riders’ blood in numerous ways. Hematocrit fluctuation was important to track of over time, first, because it naturally rises and falls in relation to fatigue, and second, because riders who used EPO needed to avoid elevating it in excess of the 50-percent limit. As new doctors and medical personnel joined the USPS team, they brought with them more complex methods with which to manage riders’ hematocrits. The use of EPO on the team was widespread and considered normal by riders who had witnessed it prior to joining the USPS squad. Finally, the events of pre-medical checkup and positive corticosteroid test demonstrated the extent to which LANCE could further

45 A hack of the medical records of the 2012 Tour de France winner, Bradley Wiggins, by an online collection known as Fancy Bears, exposed his TUE for the same corticosteroid used by Armstrong (see Fotheringham, 2016). 115 protect Armstrong from controversy. Thus, a complex extended body, whose members and practices changed throughout the years, prepared its riders’ blood for competition.

From EPO to Blood Transfusions: Reverting to Old Technology, Evading a New Test

There was also a second technique with which LANCE prepared its blood for the Tour.

In 2000, the UCI planned to implement a drug test, developed by an Australian laboratory, that could directly detect the presence of EPO in urine samples. In response, LANCE reverted to what had been a seminal technology in the physiological study of exercise capacity. Blood transfusions could provide the same benefit as EPO, increasing the oxygen-carrying capacity of the body, while avoiding legibility by the impending drug test. Below, I discuss Tyler

Hamilton’s account of his first blood transfusion, which appeared in both his affidavit and his confessional auto-biography (see Hamilton, 2012 and Hamilton and Coyle, 2012). I then describe a USPS training camp, held in late 2000, in which several riders were enrolled into the

USPS blood transfusion program. By tracing the extraction, storage, and reinfusion of athletes’ blood, I describe a complex material culture of needles, bags, refrigerators, timetables, and more, all of which were paramount to ensuring that blood remained “fresh” while outside of the body.

In addition, I describe the practices through which USPS riders continued to use EPO, for example, in small, intravenous doses; by injecting very small amounts of EPO directly into the vein, rather than under the skin as riders did previously, they could clear the substance overnight and test “clean.”

In June 2000, at the end of the Criterium du Dauphiné Libéré, Hamilton accompanied teammate Kevin Livingston with Armstrong and Bruyneel to Valencia, Spain. Bruyneel

116 explained that 500 CCs of blood would be extracted from each rider and reinfused during the

Tour the following month (Hamilton, 2012). When they arrived at their hotel, Dr. Ferrari, Dr. del

Moral, and Pepe Marti were waiting to perform the extraction. Hamilton described the event in his book:

I had expected to see a sophisticated medical setup, but this looked more like a junior-high science experiment: a blue soft-sided cooler, a few clear plastic IV bags, cotton balls, some clear tubing, and a sleek digital scale. Del Moral … tied a blue elastic band below my biceps, set an empty transfusion bag on a white towel on the floor next to the bed, and wiped the inside of my elbow with an alcohol swab. Then the needle … this one was huge – about the size of a coffee stirrer. It was attached to a syringe that was in turn attached to clear tubing that led to the waiting bag, with a small white thumbwheel to control flow. (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 123)

Despite the similar effects of EPO and blood transfusions on bodily performance, the practices are quite different at the level of their material cultures. When riders use EPO, they simply inject a few hundred milligrams of the clear liquid into their bodies. The drug then stimulates the body’s production of red blood cells. While not an advanced medical technique, a blood transfusion is comparatively more complicated. It involves a much greater number of human and nonhumans actors to remove blood from the body, store it for several weeks, and eventually reinfuse back into the rider. As Hamilton continued:

Every so often Pepe or del Moral would kneel down and take the bag in their hands, tilting it gently back and forth, mixing it with anticoagulant. They were gentle because, as they explained, the red blood cells were alive. If the blood was mishandled – shaken or heated, or left in a refrigerator beyond four weeks or so – the cells would die. Filling the bags took about fifteen or twenty minutes. The bags pumped up until the scale showed we were done: one pint, 500 milliliters. Then,

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unhook: needle out. Cotton ball, pressure. Bags taped closed, labeled, and tucked into the blue cooler. (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 123)

Following the transfusion, the riders headed out on a training ride. Having just lost a pint of blood, they experienced firsthand how closely their abilities were tied to blood volume. “Just a few days ago, I’d been in the best shape of my life,” Hamilton explained, “beating some of the best athletes in the world on Mont Ventoux. Now I could barely make it up this tiny hill … It shook me deeply: my strength wasn’t really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags” (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 124).

Midway through the 2000 Tour de France, Italian climber Marco Pantani was sure to challenge Armstrong on Stage 12’s ascent of Mont Ventoux. In preparation for the decisive day,

LANCE reinfused Armstrong, Hamilton, and Livingston with the blood they had extracted in

Valencia several weeks earlier. As Hamilton recalled:

during the transfusion Lance was visible from our room. Johan, Pepe and Dr. del Moral were all present and Dr. del Moral went back and forth between the rooms checking on the progress of the re-infusions. Each blood bag was placed on a hook for a picture frame or taped to the wall and we lay on the bed and shivered while the chilly blood re-entered our bodies. Kevin, Lance and I joked about whose body was absorbing the blood the fastest. (Hamilton, 2012: 12)

The next day, Armstrong kept pace with Pantani up to the barren summit of Mont Ventoux, though Hamilton did not perform as well as he anticipated:

I didn’t feel all that great. My legs were thick, waterlogged. I pushed hard, bumped against that old, familiar wall sooner than I’d expected. I pushed harder, but

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couldn’t seem to get past it … It would take me a couple of years to figure this out, but I hadn’t yet learned how my body reacted to a transfusion. When you have more RBCs, your body doesn’t obey the same rules: you can go harder than you think you can. Your body might be screaming in the same old way, but you can push through if you ignore all those signals and just ride. (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 129)

Hamilton was not yet accustomed to the sensation of riding with the extra blood. A transfusion does not make it any easier to ride, it simply allows the body to ride at a higher aerobic threshold. The transfusion was successful for Armstrong, who went on to win his second- consecutive Tour. He finished over six minutes ahead of his closest rival, Jan Ullrich of Team

Telekom.

At the end of the season the team held a training camp in Austin, Texas, during which

LANCE enrolled additional riders into its transfusion program. Bruyneel introduced the riders to

Dr. Ferrari and explained their new blood doping protocols (Hincapie, 2012; Vande Velde,

2012). In his affidavit, Hincapie recalled meeting Dr. del Moral in Belgium and Spain several times to extract his blood and noted that the practice was widespread within LANCE. “On several occasions I was present when other riders were having their blood re-infused,” Hincapie wrote, “for instance, I recall seeing Rider-5, Floyd Landis, Rider-6 and Rider-7 having their blood re-infused. On another occasion, Rider-8 and I laid side by side while team staff assisted with the re-infusion of our blood. After having our blood re-infused the team physicians and staff disposed of the blood transfusion paraphernalia, including needles and blood bags. The riders were told to were long sleeve shirts to cover the needle marks” (Hincapie, 2012: 10-11).

The team also resumed using EPO, though with a different method of administration developed by Dr. Ferrari.

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It took the drug-testing authorities several years and millions of dollars to develop a test to detect EPO in urine and blood. It took Ferrari about five minutes to figure out how to evade it … instead of injecting EPO subcutaneously (which caused it to be released over a long period of time), we should inject smaller doses directly into the vein, straight into the bloodstream, where it would still boost our red blood cell counts, but leave our body quickly enough to evade detection. Our regimen changed. Instead of injecting 2,000 units of [EPO] every third or forth night, we injected 400 to 500 units every night. Glowtime minimized; problem solved. We called it micro-dosing. (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 139)

Bruyneel later explained the dosage instructions in more detail: “the way we can still take EPO is to take intravenously no more than 10 international units per kilogram of body weight and it will be out of our system probably within 12 hours and certainly within 24 hours” (as cited in

Vaughters, 2012: 24). The micro-dosing practice required athletes practice the technique of intravenous injection on themselves: “micro-dosing required a steady hand and a good sense of feel, and a lot of practice; you have to sense the tip of the needle piercing the wall of the vein, and draw back on the plunger to get a little bit of blood so you know you’re in” (Hamilton and

Coyle, 2012: 139-140). Micro-dosing proved successful and no USPS riders tested positive for

EPO.

However, when one of the team’s newer riders, Levi Leipheimer, explained to the doctors that he was already using EPO on his own when he joined the team, an argument broke out: “I realized then that Johan’s concern and Dr. del Moral’s concern was not necessarily that I had used EPO but that because they had not been told of my use, and I might not be using it safely, that I could have had a positive test which could have lead [sic] to problems for the team”

(Leipheimer, 2012: 5). Years later, when French anti-doping authorities announced they would retest urine samples from the 2000 Tour with a more sensitive EPO test, Vaughters “asked

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George Hincapie if he was worried. He said that he was not because he understood that the way the team had been using EPO in 2000, injecting it intravenously, would not show up in doping tests” (Vaughters, 2012: 16).

LANCE prepared its blood for competitions by way of several practices that shifted in relation to the UCI’s emergent anti-doping tests. When the urinary test for EPO was implemented, LANCE reverted to transfusions as its primary method to increase the blood volume of its riders. The technique was complex, and yet its application to performance enhancement was well-developed in the exercise physiology literature that had used it to study exercise capacity since the 1960s. When LANCE eventually returned to EPO, they used only intravenous micro-doses that – according to Dr. Ferrari – would not remain in their bodies long enough to be detected by the urinary test. As Armstrong continued to win the Tour, however, rival teams attempted not only to hire its riders (to either assist their team leaders or become leaders themselves) but also adopt its doping practices.

Counter-Networking: The Circulation of Doping Practices in Cycling

The USADA affidavits provide further details of LANCE’s preparation of blood over each of Armstrong’s remaining Tours. When the team acquired riders who were already aware of doping or used drugs themselves, they were hastily enrolled into USPS’ programs (Leipheimer,

2012; Landis, 2012). In the event that the team acquired new professional riders who had yet to use performance-enhancing drugs, they were slowly introduced to vitamin injections before moving onto testosterone, human growth hormone, EPO micro-dosing, and blood transfusions

(Zabriskie, 2012; Danielson, 2012; Barry, 2012). Although continued discussion of riders’

121 accounts of their preparations for the Tour could be worthwhile simply for analytic depth, this section examines the processes through which riders, doctors, soigneurs, doping techniques, and knowledge circulated across rival extended bodies, which I term counter-networking.

In spite of a broad knowledge of normalized doping within cycling teams, there remained frequent attempts to learn how rival teams and riders prepared their blood. There was fierce competition over the most effective and efficient practices, not only to perfect their performance enhancements but also to avoid testing positive. This section traces three primary processes of counter-networking: (1) the construction of rival doping networks of clinics, doctors, knowledge, laboratories, and so on, with which to build doping programs; (2) the poaching of riders from rival teams, not only to acquire their experience in the Tour but also to enroll their knowledge of doping; and (3) the sharing of doctors, techniques, and even doping products across rival extended bodies. I trace these processes as they occurred on Team Telekom, Team CSC, and the

USPS cycling team.

Team Telekom

The preparations of Team Telekom are reassembled in reference to rider Jörg Jaksche’s

USADA affidavit and the 2009 Freiburg Report, the result of an investigation into doping allegations against doctors of the Department of Rehabilitative and Preventive Sports Medicine in Germany. Having interviewed 77 people, 25 of whom were directly involved with Team

Telekom, the Freiburg Report authors revealed that the clinic had been involved in doping dating back to the 1980s and that it was more recently involved in the administration of EPO. The investigation of the clinic also involved:

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a longitudinal analysis of 58,800 blood samples … [taken from] the period 1995 to 2007 … [Data] show a distinctly high incidence of laboratory values for haemoglobin, haemtocrit and reticulocyes among Telekom/T-Mobile cyclists, which in connection with other sources indicate to the commission that doping with EPO preparations or blood doping took place up until the 2006 inclusive. (Freiburg Report, 2009: 6)

The data contained in the Freiburg Report are especially compelling for their historical depth, establishing a timeline of doping practices that span nearly thirty years. For example, the report details the high dosages of EPO given to a “top rider” in 1993, of “1000 units every three days w/ additional supplements and aspirin to thin the blood” (Freiburg Report, 2009: 16). These dosages roughly double those administered by LANCE.

Jaksche learned of Telekom’s “organized doping program” at the Freiburg Clinic immediately upon joining the team in 1999 (Jaksche, 2012: 2). At a January training camp, he was given access to the clinic’s vast resources of doping products and techniques:

I received an initial delivery of between 20,000 and 30,000 units of EPO from Other-4 without a prescription … I also received from Other-4 a summary on the optimum use of EPO and on how to check hematocrit levels with a centrifuge. I obtained a centrifuge in 1999 as well. I received EPO deliveries from the Freiburg Clinic via either courier or post, or I went and picked up the EPO myself from the Freiburg Clinic. (Jaksche, 2012: 3)

Jaksche also mentioned that doctors at the Freiburg Clinic ordered therapeutic use exemptions without medical justification to allow Team Telekom’s riders to use cortisone. Jaksche received a TUE that allowed him “treat” his tendonitis (Jaksche, 2012). This practice mirrors that for

123 which LANCE scrambled to issue a backdated TUE for Armstrong during the 1999 Tour, only

Telekom appeared to better manage the paperwork and never ran afoul in this way.

Although Jaksche left Telekom after the 2000 season,46 he was told that former USPS rider Kevin Livingston was signed in 2001 specifically “to provide insight into the U.S. Postal

Service doping program” (Jaksche, 2012: 3). “This rider also subsequently told me,” he continued, “that Livingston revealed that U.S. Postal was doing blood transfusions” (Jaksche,

2012: 3). Team Telekom’s doping program clearly rivaled that of LANCE in its use of “EPO, growth hormone and cortisone preparations,” as well as in its conception of “preparation” as integrating doping with training. For example, once “the peaks in the riders’ performance in the season were established … they were then referred for ‘medical support’ to the team doctors

Professor Schmid and Dr. Heinrich” (Freiburg Report, 2009: 24). Counter-networking was an important dimension of these preparations because it enabled Telekom to gauge how aggressive or conservative they needed to be with respect to their own practices.

A series of emails, attached to the USADA Report as appendices, contain a discussion between Vaughters and Andreu in which they consider the doping practices of Telekom’s star rider Jan Ullrich. According to their emails, Livingston had told them that “after 2000 Ullrich never raced above 42% [hematocrit]” (Andreu, 2012b: 1). If true, this would mean that Ullrich was not on an intensive doping program. However, the Freiburg Report strongly contests this claim, and it is more likely that Livingston not only shared USPS’ doping practices with his new team but also attempted to circulate false information back to LANCE. Team Telekom thus

46 Jaksche then rode for the ONCE team from 2001-2003 where he was again enrolled into a coordinated doping program organized by former USPS doctor Dr. Celaya. His affidavit described the injections of “a clear liquid that raised [his] hematocrit,” a “recovery” product believed to have been growth hormone or IFG-1, and falsified TUEs for corticosteroids (Jaksche, 2012: 4-5). 124 engaged in counter-networking practices that attempted to build an extended body whose preparations could surpass those of LANCE.

Team CSC

Anti-Doping Denmark (ADD) investigated doping on Danish cycling teams from 1998 to

2015, a period that fully encompassed Armstrong’s Tour victories. In its report, the organization concluded that the manager of Team CSC, Bjarne Riis, was directly involved with the teams’ doping network, which included a blood doping program in Spain with Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes

(Farrand, 2015; Jaksche, 2012). Unlike USADA, however, ADD took no disciplinary actions because the events they uncovered were outside of their statute of limitations. The report, nonetheless, provides a complementary account of the practices of yet another of LANCE’s rival extended bodies.

In 2000, Team CSC established a “doping center” in Luxembourg at the apartment of one of their riders. According to Ryan, “products including EPO and human growth hormone were stored in the refrigerator and were distributed primarily to the squad's Danish riders” (Ryan,

2015: 1). The riders interviewed by ADD suggested that then-director Johnny Weltz supplied the products, and upon his investigation, Weltz admitted to “arranging the delivery of EPO and human growth hormone from a pharmacy in Andorra in 2000” (Ryan, 2015: 2). Interestingly,

Weltz was put in contact with the pharmacy by a former USPS team doctor, Dr. Celaya, who left

LANCE for Team CSC in 1998. This development highlights a counter-networking practice by which team doctors circulated products from clinics and pharmacies to rival teams. As the doctors moved from one team to another, they brought their clinical and pharmacological

125 associations with them. In this example, just as he had supplied banned substances to members of LANCE during their training camp, Dr. Celaya now used the Spanish pharmacy to supply his new riders.

In a second example of counter-networking on Team CSC, “the report also includes an allegation by [rider Bo Hamburger] that in 2000, Riis had asked him to buy EPO for Jorg

Jaksche, who was then racing for Team Telekom. Jaksche corroborated the story in his evidence”

(Ryan, 2015: 2). When riders transfer teams in professional cycling, there is always a period of overlap between the end of their current contract and the beginning of their tenure on their new team. This dynamic can complicate their preparations for races the following year, which are often planned several months – and sometimes a full year – in advance. It is remarkable that

Team CSC provided banned substances for a rider while they raced for competing team, in anticipation of their future enrollment with the squad. A similar incident will be discussed in more detail in the next section, with respect to Levi Leipheimer’s acquisition by LANCE.

Finally, Tyler Hamilton wrote that upon his transfer from USPS to CSC in 2002, Riis inquired about LANCE’s approach to “nutrition, training, uniforms, everything” (Hamilton and

Coyle, 2012: 155). Riis, in addition, put Hamilton in contact with Dr. Fuentes, who immediately began his blood preparations (Ryan, 2015; Hamilton, 2012). Hamilton further described the new transfusion technique practiced on Team CSC:

My first transfusion in 2000 (on the USPS team) had been the simplest kind: take on BB (blood bag) out, put it in the fridge for four weeks, then put it back in during a race. To get multiple bags ready, however, was a lot more complicated. You couldn’t take two or three BBS out four weeks before the race, because the blood loss would cripple your training. The method that had evolved solved this problem through simple rotation: taking out fresh BBs while re-infusing the stored BBs back

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into your body. This method ensured a fresh supply of BBs in the fridge while also keeping your body topped up and capable of hard training. We swapped them out every twenty-five days or so ... [Dr. Fuentes] taught me that each individual transfusion had to be done in careful order: (1) take out the new BBs; (2) reinfuse the stored BBs. This was to avoid filling the new BBs with old red blood cells that had already aged in the refrigerator. Freshness was everything. (Hamilton and Coyle, 2012: 160)

Hamilton’s account illustrates the adjustment of doping practices that occurred as riders moved from one team to the next. When Team CSC acquired new riders, such as Jaksche and Hamilton, they attempted to learn about the practices of their rivals and they used this knowledge to reconfigure their one preparations.47

The USPS Professional Cycling Team

A final example of counter-networking concerns LANCE’s preparation of a new rider,

Levi Leipheimer. Though Leipheimer rode for USPS in 2000-2001, he moved to Team

Rabobank for the 2002-2004 seasons and to Team Gerolsteiner in 2005. Leipheimer had continued to receive EPO from Pepe Marti while racing for other teams. “On one occasion in

2005,” Leipheimer wrote, “I met Pepe at a rest stop south of Girona, and, in addition to EPO for me, he gave me EPO and other drugs to provide to George Hincapie and Michael Barry who were on the Discovery Channel team which Pepe was working for at the time” (Leipheimer,

2012: 7). So, not only did the team trainer and courier for LANCE provide substances to a rider on a rival team. He also used Leipheimer to deliver substances to his own competitors.

47 The ADD report also mentioned the transfer of former-USPS rider Ivan Basso in 2008 who, among other things, brought with him a knowledge of LANCE’s use of small blood bags as a means of avoiding detection (Ryan, 2015). 127

This seemingly strange series of events explodes the notion that doping inherently compromises the “level playing field.” In fact, as this analysis of counter-networking suggests, doping practices, substances, and knowledge regularly circulated through rival teams. As

Leipheimer (2012) further explained, “I trained with Michael Barry on many occasions during

2005 and 2006 and we discussed the performance enhancing drugs we were using. I recall that

Michael was trying hGH and using EPO, testosterone patches and a testosterone product known as the ‘oil’” (Leipheimer, 2012: 7). Doping practices were openly discussed and even shared, and in this way, were viewed as imperative to one’s preparations for the Tour.

At the beginning of the 2005 season, Leipheimer accompanied Armstrong and a couple of his teammates to an altitude camp in Tenerife where he was introduced to Dr. Ferrari.

Leipheimer explained the event in his affidavit:

Beginning in March of 2005 I became a client of Dr. Ferrari and he wrote a number of training plans for me. We discussed my use of EPO, and Dr. Ferrari advised my how much EPO to take during my training for the 2005 Tour de France. On the training plans prepared by Dr. Ferrari he would use a code for EPO. A dot represented 500 international units of EPO. A dot with a circle around it stood for 1000 international units of EPO. (Leipheimer, 2012: 8)

It was Dr. del Moral, rather than Dr. Ferrari, who later assisted Leipheimer’s blood doping in

2005 and 2006. Notwithstanding, Leipheimer’s involvement with the latter continued, for example, at a second training camp in Tenerife held in May 2005. As Leipheimer explained, “the purpose of my attendance at this camp was to train at altitude and to have Dr. Ferrari monitor my training. Dr. Ferrari performed testing on me during training rides, including taking lactate measurements. At the camp I discussed with Dr. Ferrari the use of EPO and blood transfusion as

128 part of my training and racing program” (Leipheimer, 2012: 9). Interestingly, Leipheimer also noted that other rival riders, including Yaroslav Popovych, Andrey Kashechkin, Alexandre

Vinokourov and Michael Rodgers, were also present at the camp. If the objective of Dr. Ferrari’s preparations were to provide LANCE with an “unfair advantage” over his competitors, as a number of journalistic exposés have claimed (see Albergotti and O’Connell, 2013; Macur, 2014), surely LANCE’s rivals would have been excluded from his program.

In sum, the concepts of fairness and the level playing field are inadequate for explaining the events of this case study. If we follow Fouché’s (2017) alternative suggestion, that sport itself is about rival technoscientific networks constructing inequalities against one another, however, then counter-networking practices make much more sense. Ironically, doping methods alone do not appear to be the determining factor in explaining the strength of competing extended bodies, given the wide range humans and nonhumans that constantly circulate across networks.

Conclusion

This chapter has explained, at some length, the significance of blood for understanding the bodily performances of endurance athletes in general and Tour de France cyclists in particular. It has argued, based upon the rider affidavits, that the preparations for the event integrated the use of training and doping practices; that the boundary between clean/dirty sport, which so often presupposes the discussion of this empirical case, were not shared by the actors in question. This approach – rather than seek to justify their actions, however – has then traced the material-practices through which LANCE prepared its blood for the Tour.

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The result has been an in-depth analysis of the production of yet another aspect of

LANCE. The riders who entered the sport in the mid-1990s, found the use of EPO to be widespread. They then normalized their own use of banned substances on the basis that the practice was shared across their competitors and that was necessary to fully prepare for their races. In building preparations for LANCE, the team enrolled doctors, trainers, and other riders whose experience with doping could be translated for their benefit.

This chapter also analyzed LANCE’s return to blood transfusions, upon the implementation of a direct urinary test for EPO. Slowly, upon the advice of their doctor, they were able to integrate intravenous micro-doses of EPO back into their regime. Finally, I traced the practices through which rival extended bodies – such as those of Teams Telekom and CSC – attempted to construct competing doping networks. One such practice involved poaching riders from USPS in order to learn about LANCE’s doping practices. The Freiburg Report (2009) also detailed the production of a rival series of clinics for Team Telekom, whereas the ADD investigation described the doping network of Dr. Fuentes as a counter-point to Dr. Ferrari

(Ryan, 2015).

The next chapter considers Armstrong’s public confession that he had used performance- enhancing drugs throughout his seven Tours. In particular, I examine how it made visible different aspects of his extended body and how Armstrong has managed his controversy in subsequent public appearances and interviews. What we find is a complex series of distributions through which Armstrong has dissolved himself – his singularity as a former hero of the sport – back into his extended body. These processes set Armstrong apart from other riders whose legacies have been damaged by doping scandals.

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Chapter 5 - Armstrong Dissolved

The previous chapters explored a multiplicity of extended bodies that enabled Armstrong to pedal more efficiently, preview the race course of the Tour, become more aerodynamic with his bicycle, prepare his aerobic “engine” for competition, use his own blood as a performance- enhancing drug, and manage the doping allegations against him. They have traced the processes through which LANCE was singularized into a heroic individual whose accomplishments were attributed solely to Armstrong’s physiology and work ethic. This concluding chapter examines

Armstrong’s doping confession and the processes through which he subsequently managed his public controversy. In the context of a one-on-one interview between Armstrong and Ultimate

Fighting Championship (UFC) personality Joe Rogan,48 which occurred two years after his confession, I once again “zoom in” on my subject and describe how Armstrong, his story, elements of LANCE, and his Tour victories (or are they losses now?) are interpreted, put into historical context, and recorded in the wake of his confession. The following series of questions inform the analysis:

(1) Where Is Armstrong? - Who won the 1999-2005 Tours de France? Was Armstrong a cheater or was he merely a product of professional cycling’s doping culture? How was Armstrong’s doping regarded relative to that of his competitors?

48 The UFC is an American-based mixed martial arts organization. It combines elements of several martial arts disciplines, including Jiu-Jitsu, kickboxing, karate, Muay Thai, and judo. For more on the history of the UFC as well as a thoughtful analysis of its “mundane technologies” and “bodily techniques,” see Downey (2007). 131

(2) Where is LANCE? - In the wake of Armstrong’s confession and sanction, what has happened to elements of LANCE, such as sponsors, teammates, coaches, and other allies?

(3) Who is Armstrong? - What has happened to his story, the associations between cycling and cancer, that once made his mythic heroism so powerful? Is Armstrong a fraud or is it possible to salvage something positive from the truth of his doping? How does Armstrong engage with these new narratives about his self, body, and LANCE, many of which now cohere around the theme of villainy rather than heroism?

Interwoven through my discussion is Armstrong’s repeated, almost obsessive, concern for what he can and cannot say about his racing, his controversy, his team, and even himself, in the wake of his confession. By approaching Armstrong in the wake of his formal sanctioning and subsequent doping confession, I shift my analytic focus from the “mechanics of power” through which LANCE achieved its strength and durability to an exploration of an extended body and mythic persona in disarray. What we find is a complex series of distributions through which

Armstrong has dissolved himself – his singularity as a former hero of the sport – back into his extended body. I now briefly discuss Armstrong’s confession before turning to the issues outlined above.

The Confession as a Technique of Power

On January 18, 2013, three months after the publication of the USADA report, Armstrong appeared on a nationally-televised interview with Oprah Winfrey to address the allegations.

Although his confession was widely anticipated, the pre-programming of the interview was dramatic. A deep, male, movie trailer-esque voice boomed over an opening cinematic:

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Narrator: Live around the world… After years of denial… Lance Armstrong (LA): [various clips from his past] I have never doped … Where is evidence of doping here? ... I’m sick and tired of these allegations… I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles. Reporter #1: Armstrong has consistently denied the doping claims. Reporter #2: His lawyer calls the [investigation] a witch-hunt. Narrator: Finally, a reasoned decision by USADA. Reporter #3: A dramatic twist in the case against Lance Armstrong… Pat McQuaid, Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) President: UCI will ban Lance Armstrong from cycling … Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. Reporter #4: Abandoned by his sponsors and his reputation destroyed. Narrator: The final blow… Reporter #5: Lance Armstrong is stepping down as chairman of the Livestrong Foundation. Narrator: For months speculation mounted. Would Lance Armstrong ever address the epic fall in a formal interview? Now, the worldwide exclusive, Oprah and Lance Armstrong.

Oprah began the interview with the five questions Armstrong had spent the past sixteen years avoiding at all costs:

Oprah Winfrey (OW): Yes or no, did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance? LA: Yes. OW: Was one of those banned substances EPO? LA: Yes. OW: Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance? LA: Yes. OW: Did you ever use any other banned substances like testosterone, cortisone or human growth hormone? LA: Yes. OW: Yes or no, in all seven of your Tour de France victories did you ever take banned substances or blood dope? LA: Yes.

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There is a growing literature in sports studies that explains the recent growth of the World Anti-

Doping Agency (WADA) and its national federations, such as USADA, as that of a biopolitical regime. The creation of an out-of-competition drug testing program, to which athletes must remain accessible 365 days a year, and technologies such as the Athlete Biological Passport, which constructs a longitudinal profile of athletes’ blood parameters through randomized blood samples, constructs a “visual space of surveillance by the global anti-doping apparatus” (Hardie,

2013: 85). “WADA embodies a surveillance culture,” Park adds, and “under the governance of

WADA, athletes become the objects of surveillance (Park, 2005: 181). In the midst of the expansion of its drug testing and surveillance controls, however, a crucial political technology – one which long preceded any of the above – has been underemphasized. The confession, in my view, remains one of the most consequential anti-doping technologies today. Not only was it central to the 1998 Festina scandal already discussed in this study, but it also generated nearly all of the evidence in the USADA report. If WADA operates as a biopolitical regime, it is not due to its emergent technologies emphasized in the literature. Rather, and this is especially observable in the Armstrong case, WADA’s biopolitics functions at least as much through mundane technologies that tie truth to power.

Foucault wrote extensively on the confession as a technique through which knowledge and power are intertwined:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive,

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console, and reconcile; … a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. (Foucault, 1978: 61-62)

In professional cycling, the confession purifies riders who have tested positive for banned drugs or otherwise been named in doping investigations. Although, immediately following a positive drug test, they may deny that they have used banned substances, riders who ultimately admit their wrongdoing are generally given second chances in the sport and public eye. After confessing and serving his sanction, for example, David Millar was “reborn” as a vocal advocate for drug-free sport (Millar, 2011: 239).

What is unique in Armstrong’s case, however, is his resistance to the purification narrative. In a May 2014 online interview with Outside Magazine, for example, Armstrong admitted that “I don’t feel a weight off my shoulders. I would have been fine never saying anything” (Outside Magazine, 2014). His ability to resist the script, to contest the notion that his confession unburdened him from his bodily truths, was of course partially tied to his stature as one of the sport’s biggest names. As Armstrong continued, however, the issue at stake became clearer: “for so many years, for a decade and a half, I was able to control the message, and to control the narrative, and control the direction of the story. That’s gone. I’ve lost all that … it’s way beyond my control now” (Outside Magazine, 2014). The confession, for Armstrong, was not an opportunity to reconstitute his bodily purity. Rather, it demonstrated with undeniable clarity that he had lost control of his own singularity and extended body. Armstrong’s interview with Joe Rogan thus provides a context in which to approach a post-heroic Armstrong and a crumbling LANCE. To the extent that the processes of singularization and distribution are again present, they now explain an altogether different outcome: no longer a durable heterogeneous

135 network constitutive of a cycling hero, Armstrong now manages his own controversy by highlighting the work of his material-collective so as to dissolve his singularity.

Who Won the 1999-2005 Tours de France?: Where Is Armstrong?

Chapter 2 traced four aspects of Armstrong’s preparations for the Tour. His aerobic ability, pedaling technique, knowledge of the race route, and aerodynamic time trial position were achieved by the work of humans and nonhumans. The approach I have followed thus decenters individual athletes, viewing their agency as distributed through the extended bodies in which they are prepared.

Complementary to these dynamics are the numerous processes of singularization by which

Armstrong nonetheless appeared an extraordinary individual whose performances were his and his alone. Chapter 3 traced the enactments of Lance-the-Hero that proliferated through several media during his victories. What made his heroic persona so powerful were all of the adjustments it endured in relation to the context of the conversation or interview, the media form, and his growing drugs controversy. On the Late Show with David Letterman, for example,

Armstrong proclaimed that his personal history with cancer made his Tour victory more meaningful. As his victories continued, a series of Sports Illustrated articles debated whether it was Armstrong’s physical talent or work ethic that explained his accomplishments at the highest level of the sport. Armstrong’s confession and sanction upended these dynamics. The processes through which LANCE produced a distinctive and extraordinary individual, now appear to be quite ordinary and banal in the context of technoscientific sport. In other words, many of the practices through which Armstrong previously appeared so unique, following his discipline and

136 punishment, now make him typical and commonplace. Following his confession, Armstrong avoided the script of a purified body and instead dissolved himself back into LANCE, that is, he highlighted the material-collective body concealed by his singularization.

At the beginning of the interview, Rogan and Armstrong discussed the extent to which

Armstrong’s doping practices set him apart from his competitors. Rogan opened with the assertion that “the scandal illuminated the real issue.” Rather than expose the unsavory practices of individual athletes, it showed “that the whole sport is like this.” When Rogan further asserted that all of the other top finishers in the Tour used banned drugs, a relativist argument that is fairly well substantiated,49 Armstrong replied that this is one of the issues about which he cannot speak:

JR: Of all the people who [raced] the Tour de France in all the years that you did it, you go back to people who either weren’t implicated or didn’t test positive, and what is it like 18th place or something crazy like that?

LA: You know, that’s probably generous. It would be hard to know that. Look, Joe, these are all easy for me to sit here and talk about and people would say, “well of course he says that.” (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

In the post-confession landscape, Armstrong remained highly attentive to how he engaged with his own biography. He carefully avoided remarks that could be interpreted as exonerating himself or ignoring the severity of his actions.

Rogan further pressed the issue. He argued that “it’s all out on the table now” (Rogan and

Armstrong, 2015), meaning that the USADA report illuminated widespread doping within

49 For example, only 5 of the 21 podium finishers from the 1999-2005 Tours de France have not either tested positive or since been implicated in a doping scandal (McLean, Tse, and Waananen, 2013). 137 professional cycling. Rogan thus dissolved Armstrong into the historical context of the sport’s doping culture, suggesting that his own practices were not at all out of the ordinary. Armstrong only partially participated in this interpretation.

LA: It was a fucked up time and you were at this crossroads in this very hard sport, a very hard event. Some would say one of the hardest sporting events in the world. Three weeks, 2,500 miles, conditions, terrain, etc, etc. So that meets really the perfect drug. You have a drug that’s incredibly beneficial and at the time totally undetectable … We held off as long as [possible]. EPO came along in the early ‘90s. We got to Europe in ’92-’93 and by ’94 it was full on, and we’re thinking, ‘ok, this isn’t good but surely they’re going to have a test for this,’ … and we waited [but] it just never came. Then we get to ’95, there’s tremendous pressure on the team, within the team, we’re losing the sponsor – will the sponsor renew? – the team wants results and we’re going, ‘we’re really fucked here.’ So we all collectively made the decision in spring of ’95. ‘Alright, we have to go play ball.’ … Literally almost everybody stayed, and we fought the way the fight was being fought … The people who were there, I think, can speak to it. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

Armstrong did not simply rehash what was, by the time of the interview, a familiar argument about professional cycling’s doping culture. He highlighted the many heterogeneous actors that collectively produced this outcome. Riders who preceded him in the sport, as well as his contemporary rivals, teammates, EPO, and sponsors assembled cycling in a particular fashion in which doping was not considered outside of the boundaries of one’s preparations for the Tour.

Moreover, although Armstrong asserted that he could not speak about the implications of this culture on his own practices, he was comfortable with his competitors’ and teammates’ views that he had still won despite the sanction (see also Outside Magazine, 2014).

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Where Is Armstrong?: The Empty Record Book

When the UCI banned Armstrong for life from participating in professional cycling races, it also stripped him of his Tour de France victories. Generally, in the event that the winner of an event later tests positive and loses the claim to victory, it is then awarded to the second-place finisher. For example, when Alberto Contador tested positive for clenbuterol following his 2010

Tour victory, the second-place finisher, Andy Schleck, was subsequently awarded the yellow jersey. Armstrong’s sanction, however, did not follow this tradition.

JR: I think if you have a sport where everybody’s [doping] … this is one of the things that drove me the craziest about this, what did they do with the seven years where you won but they said you’re not the winner anymore? Well who won it then and how do you find the guy who won it?

LA: Joe, that’s a problem.

JR: What’s in the record books now?

LA: It’s empty.

JR: Empty. Empty for seven years? [Laughter.]

LA: Yeah.

JR: That’s ridiculous. [Laughter.] (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

Rogan highlighted a peculiar result of the anti-doping decision against Armstrong. Despite the removal of Armstrong’s name from the record books, no one has replaced him. It is as if the

1999-2005 editions of the race never happened.

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As the discussion continued, Armstrong highlighted the boundaries of what he could and could not say, this time relative to other riders who have admitted to using banned drugs or been implicated in other scandals yet have not faced formal sanction.

LA: Look, I agree with you. But you can say that. I cannot say that. All I will say is that I don’t think it’s – far be for me to talk about what’s fair and not fair – but I don’t think it’s fair for the sport to leave those empty. I think that’s crazy. To compare and contrast, on the Tour you have the yellow jersey, who’s the guy who wins. You have the polka dot jersey, who’s technically the best climber. And then you have the green jersey who is technically the best sprinter. Those seven years where the green jersey was won by [Eric] Zabel, who admitted to having doped all seven of those years. The polka dot jersey was won by [Richard] Virenque, from France, who admitted to having doped all those years. Those all stand. Everything’s still there.

JR: That’s hilarious.

LA: But the yellow jersey has been erased. Second place, third place, all those places are still there. The years prior to me where someone admitted or was caught, all still there.

JR: There’s just an asterisk for first place.

LA: If you go to Wikipedia there’s just a line through it.

JR: [Sighs.] That’s so strange.

LA: It’s very strange, and it’s strange for me. And it makes me sad because, I’m going to be honest, I believe I won the races.

JR: No, you did win the races.

LA: Well, the people to ask are the ones who got beat.

JR: Yeah.

LA: If you ask them, right? If you ask Jan. If you ask Zülla. If you ask Beloki. If you ask any of them they say, “he won those bike races.” (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

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Armstrong occupies a complex position with respect to his victories (or losses). His name has been erased from the record books, yet no one replaced him. He cannot speak about the contents of the record books, yet he still considers himself the winner not because of the doping culture, per se, but because his rivals would say so. So, did Armstrong win the Tour? It depends on who speaks and the actors they mobilize.

Where Is LANCE?

One of the primary empirical points of focus in this study has been the analysis of the constitutive elements of LANCE. I have examined a range of practices – such as aerobic training, course reconnaissance, blood doping, and wind tunnel testing – that have brought multiple extended bodies into view. Whereas one might assume that a kind of frontstage/backstage dichotomy explains where one might observe Armstrong and LANCE, my analysis shows that such an interpretation does not capture the complexity at hand. It is not simply that Armstrong remained in the public eye while LANCE operated in the shadows.

Armstrong used elements of LANCE to manage his ongoing doping controversy, particularly in the media (chapter 3), which seemed to worsen year by year. As suspicion of his drug use grew, that is, a greater number of the elements of LANCE – his cancer, his work ethic, his charity, his sponsors, as so on – were enrolled in his defense. I have analyzed a number of events in which this dynamic was visible, for example, on the Late Show, in the press, in Nike commercials, and in post-race interviews. Returning to Armstrong’s interview with Joe Rogan, this section explores what happened to elements of LANCE, such as sponsors, teammates,

141 coaches, and other allies, in the wake of his confession and sanction. With its hero in disarray, where is LANCE?

The Singularization of Doping and the Proliferation of Actors

While the USADA investigation produced a number of doping confessions from members of LANCE, its primary target was Armstrong. The USPS riders who supplied affidavits, for example, received bans of only six months. Given the analysis so far, Armstrong’s effort to highlight elements of his extended body in various contexts will appear familiar. What makes the conversation between Armstrong and Rogan unique, however, is that in the post- confession context Armstrong resisted all attempts to singularize his performances. Rather than adopt the script that his confession had cleansed his body, he instead dissolved himself into

LANCE. This section identifies elements of LANCE made visible by Armstrong’s assessment of his post-confession self, whilst tracing Armstrong’s resistance to both confessionary cleansing and singularization.

During the interview, Rogan took a particular interest in how USADA carried out its investigation as well as it consequences for his guest. Rogan’s interest in USADA was also related to the its recently announced anti-doping protocol for the UFC. Although the mixed martial-arts league began without an anti-doping program at all, as Rogan put it, it was simply too dangerous “for fighters to be juiced to the gills … in a sport where you get your face pounded in” (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015).

JR: Why do you think [USADA] spent so much time and resources going after you, as opposed to all the other people who have won? 142

LA: Well, they needed a landmark case … I think there ought to be a place for [USADA], but I think there’s also, in reality, there are people that think they’re ineffective. They think they spend ten, or twenty, or fifty, whatever the number is, millions of dollars a year, and they don’t catch anybody, right? If you look at the amount of [positive tests], it must be less than 1 percent. Well if I told you, ‘Joe, we’re all good there’s less than 1 percent testing positive,’ [you would not] think that’s right … They needed a landmark case to say, ‘no, we are effective, and here it is.’ I think also, from a legal perspective, [the “Reasoned Decision”] set some legal precedents for them that they can use going forward with future cases. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

There is a contradiction between USADA’s methodology and its regulatory actions. The organization targeted Armstrong as the passage point of the material-collective made visible by its own report, but it approached him as if he were completely detached from these forces, as if they played no role or bore no responsibility for drug use. In spite of the practices that I have reconstructed concerning LANCE’s blood doping (chapter 4) – such as the personal monitoring of riders’ hematocrit, the injection of EPO, and the use of blood transfusions blood during the

Tour – it was Armstrong alone on its scaffold.

Much of the conversation between Armstrong and Rogan, then, was spent reattaching

Armstrong to his extended body. Armstrong highlighted some of the elements of LANCE that directly benefitted from his position at the Tour prior to his confession before describing the disintegration of LANCE that followed. Despite finally making these elements visible in public,

Armstrong was not able to speak freely on the topic. The confession had not completely absolved him of wrongdoing but placed new constraints on his ability to speak about particular issues.

JR: The economy of all this is a fascinating aspect, because there were a lot of people that were making money off your racing. A lot of people. There was a gigantic industry, and for them to pretend that they didn’t know what I knew as a fucking comedian, who again [only] peripherally watched cycling. I’d watch

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you win and think, “damn, that motherfucker won again.” That’s it. I’d never raced bikes. I’d never rode bikes … and I knew [you were doping]. How the fuck does the US Postal Service not know? How the fuck does Nike not know? They know! They can pretend they don’t know, but they know. If they didn’t know, then they’re irresponsible … they just said, “it’s alright, we’re kind of getting away with it.” But then, once the shit came down, they all wanted their money back.

LA: That one gets sensitive, gets tricky, for me … The Postal Service commissioned three separate studies to analyze the effect of the sponsorship on the team. We believe they made hundreds of millions of dollars. And we know that they were also using the team as a sales vehicle. So, during the Tour, bringing over potential new clients and converting their business to the Postal Service. And we know that that equaled a significant increase in their revenue. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

Whereas Rogan spoke quite critically about the companies that were involved in LANCE,

Armstrong practiced restraint. Despite the confession which could have laid his body bare,

Armstrong possessed a limited ability to speak about LANCE. He did, however, suggest that the

Postal Service used its connections with LANCE to further grow itself in its own industry.

Moreover, not only did the USPS escape culpability with respect to the network’s doping practices but it joined a whistleblower lawsuit against Armstrong that sought financial damages for these very associations. Armstrong’s post-confession strategy, then, was the identification of the new relations that LANCE generated for its actors.

JR: What is it like … to watch the economy of this story grow and develop? It wasn’t just the lawsuits, there’s also books, documentaries, all these television shows, all this focus, there’s ad revenue coming from those shows, there’s all these people who are dedicating all this time, their careers, [to] telling the Lance Armstrong story.

LA: It’s a small industry. There were the industries that benefitted on the way up, and I was one of those industries. And the sponsors. You look at Trek Bicycles before the first Tour and I think they did $125 million in sales. They do one billion now. So, yeah, big difference. So you have those sort of

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industries, and people are making money on the way up. Then on the way down … it’s probably normal and natural that people capitalize on the way down … there were plenty of people going, “ok, now it’s my turn to make some money,” and fair play. That’s just the way it is. Some people may think that’s BS, but shit, everybody was hopping on on the way down.

JR: Well they have to, right? It was a gigantic story. Now, your friends did know what you were doing. When it came out how many of them had a hard time with it, how many were cool with it, what was it like?

LA: Obviously, the sponsors fled.

JR: Did any of them stay?

LA: No. None. But they have to leave, right? Some of them were publicly- traded companies so they have concerns about that. Some of them were just covering their ass. Whatever, they’re all gone. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015).

In the above, we have seen not only the jettisoning of sponsors associated with LANCE that followed Armstrong’s confession. What is perhaps more surprising is how the primary sponsor has subsequently joined a whistleblower lawsuit to recoup financial damages for the association it once used to grow itself in its own industry. Whereas sponsors such as Trek and Nike simply cut ties with Armstrong, the Postal Service has repositioned itself so as to further capitalize on

LANCE without remaining formally tied to it.

So, in the post-confession context, where is LANCE? If we follow USADA’s legal discourse, it is everywhere and nowhere. The reports provide the thick description with which I have reconstructed elements of LANCE’s doping (see chapter 4), and yet USADA’s primary focus was Armstrong himself rather than the technoscientific sporting culture it made visible

(Fouché, 2017).

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“A Legend with a Caveat”: Who Is Armstrong?

By adopting the analytic tools developed by Mialet (2012), this study has reconstructed multiple extended bodies through which Armstrong’s Tour de France victories were produced. In chapters 2 and 4, contrary to the ideology of modern sport that presupposes a pure body training in solitude, I found that Armstrong was always amongst numerous humans and nonhumans. For example, his coach followed him up a mountain and through a two-way earpiece provided him with commands on his effort level, pedaling efficiency, and posture on the bike. Through rehearsal and repetition, LANCE was able to stage the mountaintop finishes of the Tour. In the wind tunnel, it was difficult to see how Armstrong himself was involved – and indeed sometimes he was not even present when the engineers and technicians made adjustments to his position on his bicycle.

I have suggested that we understand Armstrong’s performances as distributed across these extended bodies rather than reduce them to individual hard work and/or innate talent. Yet

Armstrong’s singularity has remained an important analytic concern as well. Chapter 1 traced his experience with cancer as well as the stitching together of cycling and cancer survivorship that was so integral to Armstrong’s persona. Chapter 3 explored this issue in more depth, tracing his multiple enactments as a sports hero in the different media as well as how his heroism was linked to the management of his doping controversy. This study has explored the heterogeneous production of Armstrong. Here, I offer concluding remarks on the aftermath of his doping confession.

As Armstrong’s interview with Rogan came to a close, Rogan read a quotation from the

American writer Hunter S. Thompson.

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Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of “the rat race” is not yet final. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

Upon reading the quote aloud, Rogan added, “that applies to you too, dude. That applies to your life, and that’s part of the reason, I’m sure, why people are pissed at you: You were a legend with a caveat” (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015). Rogan identified the primary anchor point in

Armstrong’s post-confession controversy, that his heroic status hinged upon a lie. “I understand that,” Armstrong replied (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015). The subsequent debate in the media largely oscillated between whether Armstrong was a complete fraud or if it was possible to salvage something positive from his cancer activism (see, for example, Albergotti and

O’Connell, 2013, and Macur, 2014).

Is Armstrong a Hero or a Villain? He Is a Mess.

In his interview with Rogan, Armstrong reflected on the impact of his confession on what he termed “the story,” that is, the configuration of cycling champion and cancer survivor integral to his persona. Together, Armstrong and Rogan proposed why the story had been so powerful, then departed from the media’s dichotomy between good and evil, heroism and villainy. They replaced what they viewed as an overly simplistic boundary with the messiness of Armstrong’s case. Armstrong provided a new narrative with which to evaluate his story, further dissolving himself into the extended bodies from which he emerged.

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LA: The story in its totality, if I was just a cyclist we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But the cancer part of the story is what everybody relates to. Nobody could relate to cycling, they got to figure it out, they started to watch it, ‘cool, he won again.’ The cancer part of it, everybody can relate to, right? Everybody has either had the disease themselves, or lost a loved one, or had a loved one, or a friend, or a neighbor affected by it, so they’re like, ‘alright, I’m in!” … and they rallied around that, and that’s why that fall came swift and hard, man.

JR: Well there’s parallels to life, when it comes to this story, in a lot of ways, because everything is kind of messy. The reality versus the narrative is always messy. And there’s so many variables that don’t get discussed, and there’s so many aspects of it that are flexible, and they move around. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

Rogan and Armstrong, quite remarkably, allude to some of the dynamics that I, as an analyst, have tried to uncover throughout this study. Although not in so many words, they puzzled around the distribution of Armstrong’s competencies and abilities to the heterogeneous actors that composed LANCE, returning to the seemingly paradoxical singularization of Armstrong as the hero/villain who stood at its center. The outcome of the entanglement of cycling and cancer, in the end, was mess (see Law, 2004).

The story, and its positive outcomes with respect to cancer survivorship, were predicated upon LANCE maintaining Armstrong’s drug-free status; in the wake of the confession, Rogan asserted that they retain meaning while Armstrong specified that he has lost his ability to speak about them.

JR: You’re also balancing out so much good with this lie, and this lie is helping all this good. The Livestrong Foundation is generating hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s helping all these people with cancer. I’ve seen you in the hospitals with these kids and, me having kids myself, it makes me cry, seeing these kids with face masks

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on because their immune systems are so compromised. They don’t have any hair and they’re just devastated. You’re hanging out with these kids and you’re generating all this positive energy for them. Generating all this money, all this research that’s being funded, so there’s all this good as well. You start telling the truth and that stops.

LA: Well we know what happens because it happened.

JR: It dried up. I don’t see any of those fucking bracelets anymore.

LA: We had a good run. 85 million bracelets. But, look, I don’t want anybody to be mistaken. My interests were selfish. I was defending myself and protecting myself, but at the same time it wasn’t just myself I was protecting. I was protecting the sport. I was protecting the sponsors. I was protecting the Tour. I was protecting the Foundation … We now know what’s happened to the Foundation. We know what’s happened to the sport. We know what’s happened to the sponsors. We know. We can now see. It was a devastating toll. Most would say, “well, that’s all your fault Lance,” and maybe they’re right … Especially on the Foundation side, it breaks my heart to see the effect it’s had on their effectiveness.

JR: It’s got to be way more complicated than just, “it’s all your fault.” It’s way more complicated because when you’re talking about an entire sport that’s dirty, for lack of a better word. An entire sport that’s being deceptive. An entire sport that’s using performance enhancing drugs, and then you’re talking about you – because you’re this weird outlier, you’re this one guy who is incredibly successful at it.

LA: Yeah. The story being what it was, a cancer survivor that comes back and wins this event, that transcends the sport, that brings the sport to [the US] … The story was too big, right? … My rivals, so if you take my main rivals, whether it’s Jan Ullrich or Basso or Belochi or Pantani, they’re star factor for lack of a better phrase was just different. They weren’t cancer survivors. There was this disparity which the sport enabled there to be because it’s just kind of an old school, janky sport in terms of the ways it’s organized and run as a business. It was like a South American economy. There were really the haves and the have nots. (Rogan and Armstrong, 2015)

The story is complicated. Armstrong acknowledged his role in enacting his heroic persona, but suggested that the stronger it became, the more distributed it became, and the more difficult it was for him to control. Eventually, the story took on a fully exteriorized life of its own, apart

149 from both Armstrong and LANCE, and as Rogan noted, seemingly fed the counter-LANCE forces that eventually took him down. Finally, Armstrong asserted that the confession exposed not a villain but the mess of the sport and of his accomplishments in it. By exposing the practices of LANCE, Armstrong claimed that the good-evil dichotomy in anti-doping discourses misses the entanglements of practices and actors with which extended bodies seek to generate power over their competitors. Sport is not so much about honorific and virtuous bodies, it is war by other means.

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