There's no question that Lance Armstrong is a great athlete and I was very disappointed to see him stripped of his Tour de France titles. In his defense, Lance always offers up the fact that he always passed all of his drugs test during his racing career. And this is true. Even though the Tour de France officials were very determined to catch him, they never did and he raced for years. How could this be? This is a letter of the law versus spirit of the law sort of issue going on.
Every athlete wants to do their best and they have a diet and training regime that they maintain. At the level Lance Armstrong competed at, there's usually a staff of medical personnel too, keeping their bodies tuned as the mechanics keep their bicycles tuned. And doctors have a lot of powerful tools to eek out that peek performance, some of them pharmaceutical. So what guidelines do the physicians follow to make sure they don't take their pharmaceutical solutions too far? The ones set by the racing commission. And to that degree, Lance did admirably.
In 2006 Floyd Landis lost his Tour de France victory when a blood test revealed unusually high testosterone. And the blood test was accurate enough to tell the difference between natural testosterone and the man-made version and there was a lot of the man-made kind in his blood. This is where it gets tricky. There's a naturally occurring level of testosterone in all men and if it's too low, there's always HRT, hormone replacement therapy. Likewise for women and estrogen. So if it's available, and a racer could benefit from HRT, how far should they go? That's why there are acceptable thresholds published by the racing commission.
Lance Armstrong always passed his blood tests. He met the requirements of the racing commission. A common practice of many aerobic sports is to train at high altitudes and have their bodies adjust to the thinner air. When they then attend Olympic events at a lower elevation, their blood is oxygen enriched. Floyd Landis used to sleep every night in a hyperbaric chamber for that reason.Is that an unfair advantage? No, not defined by the standards that were set. Likewise, Lance never cheated because he always met the standard. It's not an easy question, trying to decide between the spirit of the law, the letter of the law and winning the race. You can only pick two of them.
