I’ve been thinking about Lance Armstrong for a while
now. When the USADA report was finally
made public, I think at least I was in shock.
I was also distracted. Or maybe
easily distracted by the follies of presidential politics and other world news. It’s easy to not face a difficult situation
when you can joke about binders full of women.
It’s avoidance. I’ve been
avoiding facing the situation head-on because it’s hard for me to process both
intellectually and emotionally. I’m
ready to face it now.
Yes, Lance Armstrong is or was one of my heroes. It’s not really clear anymore. The jury is still out.
First off, I’m struggling with a new dimension in the field
of good versus bad. You see, we used to say
good and bad is not always black or white, but some shade of grey. That analogy doesn’t work anymore. I think we’ve either discovered a new color
wheel or a 4th dimension where you can be in more than one place at one
time. I’m trying to understand how a
person can be so wholly wrong in one area of life and so wholly good in another.
I don’t believe in weighing one area of his life versus
another. One man’s gain does not justify
another man’s suffering. The ends do not
justify the means. However, I wonder
some if part of his relentlessness in the fight against cancer was due to a
deep-seated guilt, maybe not even on a conscious level, of the pain that he
caused other people in the world of cycling.
Would we have had some of the great strides in patient support and
erasing the stigmas of cancer if it weren’t for Lance’s ego, Lance’s cycling
success, Lance’s celebrity appeal, and possibly Lance’s internal guilt?
Team doping Lance and LIVESTRONG Lance sound like two
completely different people, but they are one and the same. I’m not angry at him, but I am deeply
sad. Deeply sad about what will become
of his legacy, what his children and family have to deal with right now, what
all the cyclists who felt pressured to dope or maintained silence for so many
years have to deal with.
Long-term, hopefully Lance will open up to talk about what
happened. I truly want to understand how
he got to the point where he was not only using performance enhancing drugs,
but pushing his teammates to as well. I
don’t want to know in order to blame anyone else. I want to know to better understand the human
psyche and how we make mistakes like this.
Was it a “tyranny of incrementalism”?
One of my business school professors, Stephen Kaufman, used this phrase
to describe how good people slowly, in small increments, start moving away from
their moral centers until all of a sudden they are at the center of a massive
Enron-like scandal.
One of my favorite
lectures in business school was on a very similar topic – Clayton Christensen told
us about his own experience in wrestling with a decision that could compromise
his personal integrity. He was on his
university’s basketball team, and they made it to the championship tournament
which was scheduled for Sunday. For him,
Sunday is the Sabbath and he committed to not play basketball on Sundays. It was a difficult choice with pressure from
his coach and team, but he came to the conclusion that maintaining his
commitment was more important than a single game. Maintaining that line in the sand was a tough
decision at the time, but I bet it made all the rest of his decisions
easier. He has since written a book
aptly entitled How Will You Measure Your Life? and you can read more about it in
this HBS Working Knowledge article.
How many of us are certain that we would draw the line
somewhere before we end up crossing it?
I definitely race on Sundays.
What do I definitely not do? It’s
easy to say now that I definitely don’t dope, but I recognize that there has to
be several steps before we get to that point, one of which is being close
enough to have a shot at winning (something I don’t have which also makes any
decision leading up to doping easier for me).
It’s easy for us to pretend like we would never be doping ringleaders,
but are we really sure that we would say no when asked to try it the first
time? To say no when we’re about to
start the Tour de France? To say no to
an organized scheme with doctors? To say
no when some of our new teammates ask questions? At what point does it become easy to exit
once you enter the tyranny of incrementalism?
Never.
Maybe Lance has a fixed mindset. If you haven’t read Carol Dweck’s book about
Mindset, you should. It has a great
chapter on sports and the mindset of a champion. I actually read it in relation to my work in
public education, but it is also so very relevant to how we approach both sports
and personal integrity. In our culture, we
are so caught up in the idea of natural talent that the pressure moves those
with a fixed mindset to do anything to not appear like they are failures. I have a hard time believing this is the case
with Lance because even though I know now that he doped, I also know that he is
an incredibly hard worker, and he sustained success over such a long period of
time (albeit unfairly). I can’t imagine
someone working that hard who believes that we have finite abilities
pre-destined by our genetic background.
But maybe it had some role in pushing him into doping if he couldn’t
bear to lose to other dopers.
Do I think anyone can draw the line and still achieve success
in the area of their chosen passion? It
looks like the answer is no, at least not in the face of a brutally unforgiving
sport with officials turning the other way when the majority of its athletes
were taking performance-enhancing drugs.
One new hero is the cyclist that wouldn’t compromise his values (I
forgot his name, which is like a sad reinforcing joke). The NY Times ran an article a week or so ago about him – he didn’t cave to the pressure, but he also wasn’t able to follow
his passion. He quit cycling. Once we have gone down the wrong path, can we
pull back and start to make the change for good? I think the answer is yes, even though the
road would be rough. I look at baseball
and see athletes who eventually started freely admitting that they took PEDs
and know that they were wrong. The
weight was lifted, people were able to move on, and (hopefully) improvements
were made to detect abusers.
It’s not my place to judge – I will leave that to God. But I continue to feel sad for the teammates,
for the sport, for Lance and his family, for LIVESTRONG, and for people
suffering from cancer. Just reading
about the regret in his teammates’ statements makes me feel sad. I do forgive Lance, but I’m also not one of
those suffering the most. I’m not a part
of any of those people I just listed. My
only hope is that the victims will get catharsis, that LIVESTRONG will continue
to provide a great service to cancer patients and will continue to have legions
of supporters, that the sport of cycling will be cleaned up, and that the
ecosystem that allowed this to happen will no longer exist.
Lance and me at the Florida Ironman 70.3 race in Haines City, FL - I raised money for LIVESTRONG in memory of my cousin and fellow namesake Aspasia who lost her fight to cancer last year. Lance met and took pictures with all of us who raised at least $1500 for LIVESTRONG. He was patient, engaging, and grateful.
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