Well it’s still July, and that means the Tour de France is still in mind. And at the risk of continuing to sound like an apologist for Lance Armstrong, I’ll still have more to say when I find something of interest. But more than what I have to say, I think Armstrong himself has a lot to say that hits some key points.
In an interview he did last year on NBC with Mike Tirico, he said some things that emphasize the point I was getting at in my earlier post. So, I pulled a couple of quotes that I think are most telling. Armstrong was clear throughout the interview that he was wrong and deserved what he got, but I think his assessment was right given the context of the times.
So here in his own words…
At 8:57, Tirico asks, “Was there the feeling that if we didn’t [use PEDs], that we couldn’t compete?” Armstrong answers, “Well, that wasn’t just a feeling, that was a fact.”
And given his competitive nature, what could we expect? The bottom line for Armstrong was that he wasn’t going to throw in the towel. At 9:20: “I didn’t want to go home, man…I was gonna stay.” An excuse? Or a reality?
And at 9:50, “I knew there were gonna be knives at this fight, not just fists I knew there were gonna be knives. I had knives. And then one day people started showing up with guns. And that’s when you say, ‘Do I either fly back to Plano, Texas, and…not know what you’re gonna do?’ Or do you walk over to the gun store. And I walked to the gun store. So…I don’t wanna go home.”
Armstrong loved the fight, and to say ‘no’ to using PEDs when the only way to win was to use PEDs was to quit.
So in that context at about 10:50, he says, “…kids from Plano and Glenwood Springs, Colorado and, and Brooklyn, and, and Montana; as young Americans if we’d have gone to Europe and everybody’s fighting with their fists…we still win. I promise you that.”
He’s saying the same thing I was saying: on a level playing field, he still wins. Without the PEDs or with the PEDs, he was on a level playing field.
But it wasn’t just about the PEDs.
13:30 “I mean, look. What did we say? We said, ‘we work the hardest, we have the best tactics we have the best team composition, we have the best director, best equipment, best technology, do more research, recon the courses,’ all the things we said, we did. We left out a part [the PEDs], but we did all that stuff. Because now this one part is part of the story doesn’t erase all that. All that happened. If you just had this one thing [the PEDs], and did none of that, you get last.”
It was the times. It was wrong, but on the level playing field, he’s right – “we still win.”