Blood (12 page)

Some eight years before he would be stripped of his victories and finally admit to Oprah Winfrey that he had repeatedly used performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions, Lance Armstrong was well en route to his unprecedented sixth consecutive victory in the Tour de France. On this particular day in July 2004, Armstrong and his teammates were riding in a bus on an isolated road after completing a mountain stage of the twenty-one-day race. One of the most gruelling sports events in the world, the Tour de France requires riders to race thousands of kilometres at high speeds, including several days climbing up and racing down the Alps and the Pyrenees. Needless to say, a race like that beats up your blood. Among other things, it drives down your natural red blood cell count, as well as your testosterone. Unless you resort to trickery, your body will deteriorate throughout the race — with some athletes deteriorating more than others. Cheating by such means as boosting the blood or adding to the testosterone count has become so widespread that to ride without chemical assistance is described, in the parlance of tour riders, as riding
pan y agua
, which is Spanish for “bread and water.” Riding without chemical assistance is likened, thus, to toughing it out on the diet of a malnourished prison inmate.

On the day in question, Armstrong and his teammates pulled off a stunt so brazen that even teammate Floyd Landis — who would win the Tour two years later, only to have his title stripped when he was found to have used testosterone — would admit later that he had never seen such a thing. The bus driver pulled over to the side of the road, feigning engine trouble. For an hour, every single rider on the team — Armstrong, Landis, and seven others — remained in the bus and underwent blood transfusions.

You cannot transfuse the blood of nine cyclists in a bus on a remote mountain road without meticulous planning involving numerous people, including athletes, coaches, doctor, and driver. Each cyclist needs to go somewhere — often travelling from one country to another and meeting secretly in a hotel room — to meet with a doctor who will withdraw about half a litre of his blood. The blood must be mixed with anticoagulant, preserved, and stored. It must be labelled carefully, so that each athlete’s blood is kept distinct from that of the others. The blood must be refrigerated, with no electrical blackouts, thank you very much. (In 2003, one year before the group transfusion on the bus in the mountains of France, Lance Armstrong had to travel away from his apartment in Gerona, Spain, and worried about the possibility of a blackout in his absence. The blood might be compromised without Armstrong’s even knowing it. The simplest solution was to hire a blood-sitter. Armstrong summoned Landis to his apartment to keep watch over blood bags stored in a refrigerator hidden in the master bedroom, checking the blood temperature daily to ensure that there had been no inconsistency in the supply of electricity. Landis came and provided the service, and later described the incident to the United States Anti-Doping Agency.) Machines must be purchased that can test the athlete’s blood and see when it is ready for the transfusion — the receipt of his own blood back into his system. One machine, for example, monitors hemoglobin levels, and another is a centrifuge used to assess one’s hematocrit (the percentage of red blood cells in the blood).

While keeping the blood cold, you need a courier to haul it past fans, journalists, television cameras, doping control experts, and others, and bring it to that bus taking riders down the slopes of a mountain. And then you need to hang those bags of blood above nine riders — one of whom is the most famous in the history of cycling, having survived testicular cancer to go on to obliterate his competition in the world’s toughest cycling event for six years in a row, lying all the time about how he was riding clean. You need to hook it up, find a vein, and wait the hour or so it takes for the blood to drip into the riders’ systems. With thousands of fans crowding each leg of the Tour de France, you need to dispose of the blood bags and other medical paraphernalia without anybody noticing, pretend that the bus driver has fixed the engine, and get rolling again so the riders can eat, rest, profess their innocence in the face of persistent questions from the media and doping control agents about whether they are riding clean, and race another day.

Athletes have always looked for ways to get a leg up on their competitors. In 1980, Rosie Ruiz pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in modern sport by winning the women’s category of the Boston Marathon in a record time of 2:31:56. This was about twenty-five minutes faster than a time she had earlier run to place eleventh in the New York City Marathon. In Boston, Ruiz finished the race three minutes ahead of the Canadian Jacqueline Gareau, the second woman to finish the race. American marathon legend Bill Rodgers noted that Ruiz looked unbelievably fresh at the Boston finish line. Ruiz was awarded the victory, but officials soon determined that she had taken the subway for part of the New York City marathon and had either taken the subway in Boston or found another way of getting herself close to the finish, so that she could run the last kilometre or so to “win” the world’s most famous marathon. Ruiz was stripped of her title. Gareau was brought back to Boston for a proper ceremony as the rightful winner, and as the first Canadian woman to win the race.

As the scholar Mario Thevis says in his book
Mass Spectrometry in Sports Drug Testing
, people have been taking substances to gain an advantage in sport for thousands of years. Thevis notes that in the third to second century
BCE
, the Greek philosopher Philostratus observed athletes taking bread spiked with the juice of the poppy plant, which contains opium. Swimmers apparently used doping agents as early as 1865 during races in the Amsterdam canals, although it’s beyond me why anyone would willingly swim in any Amsterdam canal in any century. Beginning in 1870, reports emerged about widespread abuse of narcotics, stimulants, and nitroglycerine by cyclists in six-day races. In the 1904 Olympic marathon held during the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, the first man to cross the finish line was disqualified because he was found to have ridden in a car for part of the race. The second finisher was a British-born American runner by the name of Thomas Hicks. Hicks had run out of gas (pardon the pun) after ten miles (slightly more than a third of the way through the race) and had wanted to give up. His trainers pushed him on. They gave him two doses of strychnine, which is rat poison, but which in low doses also serves as a stimulant. He was also given raw egg white and a shot of brandy. Hicks had to be carried across the finish line and revived by doctors afterwards. Under current rules, Hicks would have been disqualified. But at the 1904 Olympics, he was awarded the gold medal.

Canada, of course, has its own infamous history of cheating on the running track. It’s hard to imagine a single Canadian born before 1975 who does not know that in 1988, the sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids after winning the Olympic 100-metre dash in a record time of 9.79 seconds and trouncing his archrival, the American Carl Lewis, whom Johnson led from start to finish. To clarify, anabolic steroids do not alter blood composition per se, but they travel through the blood to enhance muscle strength and recovery. Although Ben Johnson did not alter the composition of his blood, his blood carried steroids to the muscles. News that Johnson had cheated by using performance-enhancing drugs shocked Canadians just as profoundly as Americans and others were troubled by the truth — when it finally came out — about Lance Armstrong.

Johnson was turned into a pariah, and he endured a massive shaming in Canada. The same television networks that had replayed his victorious race over and over in slow motion camped outside Johnson’s house and contributed, in a way, to his demonization in the public eye. I do not condone the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Ben Johnson or any other athlete, but it struck me then and it strikes me now that the man would not have attracted as much media attention if, instead of becoming a world-class athlete and cheating on the track, he had been convicted of murder. Having followed the world of track and field for years, and having been an entirely mediocre middle-distance and long-distance runner competing in dozens of races in high school, university, and afterwards, I remember being struck, and horrified, by suggestions from some quarters that Ben Johnson may have been too naive to know that he had been taking steroids. You don’t progress through year after year of workouts, massages, and consultations with coaches and nutrition experts without becoming intimately acquainted with your own body and what is happening to it.

I never won an important track, cross-country, or road race in my life, but I could tell you what my resting pulse was on any given morning, without touching my wrist. I could guess, quite accurately, my own heart rate after a race, without having to hold two fingers up to my carotid artery, look at my wristwatch, and count for fifteen seconds. Athletes are aware of their blood, their heart rates, and what is going into their bodies. To my way of thinking, it was a slight to Ben Johnson’s intelligence to suggest that he did not know what he was doing. Although Johnson initially issued vigorous denials, he had in fact been taking performance-enhancing drugs for the better part of a decade. He knew what he was doing, and he was fully aided by his doctor, Jamie Astaphan, and his coach, Charlie Francis, in his training and doping techniques. The truth came out later in the course of his testimony before the Dubin inquiry — a Canadian federal investigation into the use of drugs and banned practices in sport. Two years after Johnson was dethroned, the Dubin inquiry released its report. Not surprisingly, it documented widespread cheating among Canadian track athletes, particularly those who had worked with Francis. At the inquiry, Francis admitted to encouraging many of his athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs. The inquiry named eleven Canadian track athletes who had done so. (It is worth noting that many other Canadian athletes were competing clean.) Many other athletes came forth to offer testimony about what they had done to boost their own performances artificially. And many of the international athletes against whom Ben Johnson had been competing on world stages were also nabbed for taking performance-enhancing drugs, although few were brought down with as much ceremony, hand-wringing, and concentrated media attention as Ben Johnson.

Johnson, a black man, had a nervous stutter. He came as a child to Canada, from Jamaica. He did not do well in school. He lived with his devoted mother in a modest home in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. He had been a mighty Canadian hero when he won the Olympic gold medal, but after his shaming, some in Canada began to refer to him only as a Jamaican, disowning all ties with him, his accomplishments, and his failures. Johnson did not fare well in the aftermath. He apologized and said he would go clean, but he tested positive twice more in the intervening years for the use of steroids and a diuretic that can be used to mask the presence of other drugs in the body. Eventually, he was banned for life from competing on the track. Some described him as a national disgrace, and urged him insultingly to move back to Jamaica. At a charity event in 1998 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Johnson raced against a horse and a car. (After the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens also raced against horses.) Although Johnson’s participation was voluntary, the pitting of a black man against an animal caused me to cringe. Among the most enduring and offensive racial stereotypes is that the black man lacks intelligence but has prodigious strength and sexual prowess. In Charlottetown, one decade after he ran a victory lap at the Seoul Olympics while Canadians cheered — for a few hours, until the music abruptly stopped — Ben Johnson had been equated with a horse.

The Dubin inquiry uncovered the fact that other elite Canadian track and field athletes had also taken performance-enhancing drugs. None, however, had climbed as sensationally high as Ben Johnson, and none had fallen so far from grace. The inquiry recommended more stringent procedures for testing in sport. In the more than twenty years since the inquiry’s report was published, Canadian and international efforts to expose and punish cheating in sport have expanded exponentially, with Canada taking a leading role.

One of the similarities between the Ben Johnson and Lance Armstrong stories is how widespread cheating was among their contemporaries. Altering the chemical properties of their bodies and blood was not the sole province of Johnson and Armstrong. Many of their peers did the same thing. According to the United States Anti-Doping Agency, which hounded Lance Armstrong until it finally brought him down with the report that led to his being stripped of his multiple Tour de France victories, twenty of the twenty-one podium finishers in the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005 have been tied to likely doping through admissions, sanctions, public investigations, or hematocrit levels. In addition, of the forty-five Tour de France podium finishers from 1996 to 2010, thirty-six were by riders similarly tainted by doping.

Doping was so widespread that those practising it felt that it wasn’t really cheating at all. In his book
The Secret Race
, which documents his own doping history and that of his fellow Armstrong team members, Tyler Hamilton writes: “I’ve always said you could have hooked us up to the best lie detectors on the planet and asked us if we were cheating, and we’d have passed. Not because we were delusional — we knew we were breaking the rules — but because we didn’t think of it as cheating. It felt fair to break the rules, because we knew others were too.”

In the same book, Hamilton describes the mystery of having his own blood withdrawn so that it could be re-transfused later. “With the other stuff,” he writes, referring to erythropoietin and testosterone, “you swallow a pill or put on a patch or get a tiny injection. But here you’re watching a big clear plastic bag slowly fill up with your warm dark red blood. You never forget it.”

After Hamilton’s first blood withdrawal, for which he flew in Armstrong’s private plane from France to Spain so that they could conduct the clandestine procedure without detection, he, Armstrong, and another teammate went out immediately for a bike ride along the Spanish coast. At the time, Hamilton was in the best shape of his life. He had just beaten Armstrong to win the prestigious Dauphiné Libéré bike race, including a gruelling stage victory up the notoriously steep Mont Ventoux in France. But on this day in Spain, just minutes after having their blood withdrawn, Tyler Hamilton and his teammates could barely ascend “a tiny pimple” of a hill. “We joked about it,” Hamilton writes, “because that was all we could do. But it was unnerving. It shook me deeply: my strength wasn’t really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags.”