Thoughts on Lance Armstrong [video]

I like Dan Ariely, and most of what he says in this video is true. However he doesn't address the whole Lance Armstrong story, and there is one correction to be made.

He says that it's possible that Lance Armstrong took EPO as a cancer patient, and that made it easier for him to keep taking it as a performance enhancing drug.

Lance tried a similar tactic in his interview last night -- he explained that his cancer changed him. It made him more of a bully, and more of a fighter, and he kind of justified taking testosterone since he had testicular cancer. However, Oprah had to point out that he was taking performance-enhancing drugs BEFORE he had cancer. So the cancer is a scapegoat.

Second -- people don't really fault Lance Armstrong for doping. I'm sure it's true that everybody was doping. And Ariely correctly points out that that makes it much easier for someone to justify to themselves.

What distinguished Armstrong is going over the top to destroy people who were telling the truth. He was vicious about attacking and suing people who told the truth, and trying to ruin their reputations, while he knew he was in the wrong. Oprah confronted him on this and he was like "oops ... sorry"

I watched the whole Oprah interview last night. I don't have a big interest in competitive cycling, nor have I really followed the Lance Armstrong story very much. But I did come away with the impression that he is emotionally "different" or verging on psychopathic. I don't want to venture too much into pop psychology, but he does seem to follow the stereotype of a "psychopath CEO". The only thing he cares about is results (and it worked spectacularly for a time), and he has literally no emotions about the tactics that got him there. I'm not trying to cast moral judgement, but just saying what is pretty apparent.

But in retrospect this is obvious... anyone who could so viciously and baldly and publicly lie for decades, when so many people knew otherwise (all the cyclists he rode with), has some weird psychology going on. It's not normal.

If anyone saw the Oprah interview, I think it's clear by now that Lance Armstrong is a sociopath. Even his admittance was a very calculated move intended to curb additional financial loss (even though it was supposed to be a tell-all interview, he chose not to talk about a handful of things; and a good half of things were straight lies: UCI gifts he made were not 'bribes', he did not use drugs after 2005, etc.). His appearance on Oprah was a calculated move to avoid jailtime and position himself for the coming onslaught of legal trouble.

Irrelevant points. He tries to deflect the issue from Lance and he shouldn't. I don't care if Lance cheated. I don't care if any athlete cheats as long as they get their deserved penalties from their respective sports authorities. The issue here is the hypocrite image that Lance and his PR team drew to the rest of the world. Everyone through of him as superman. He sold his image as a believer and fighter while he was none of that. Again, I don't care about cheaters but I despise hypocrite preachers.

Bearing in mind that Lance Armstrong is as much a cyclist as Red Bull is an energy drink it might be of interest to watch an advertising and marketing centred discussion of whether the strategy of losing the doping war but winning the PR battle is a good one.

> Is there a point where running away is the right PR move? How much immunity does a cancer charity buy you? Why are his sponsors standing by their cycling-man?

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruenplanet/pages/s3583424.htm

Episode on Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/48928785 (Lance Armstrong discussion starts @ 3 minutes in)

I always find these video logs to be a very inefficient way to communicate. Having watched through the whole thing, the main argument that Ariely is making here is that there is a much larger problem than just the "Lance Armstrong problem." People do these PEDs because they have a sense that "everyone else is doing it."

Now, it's not clear if everyone else was doing it in this case, or whether the crooks were convinced (falsely) that everyone else was doing it. Ariely doesn't draw this distinction, but it is critical. If you want to clean up the sport, it's not sufficient to make sure that everyone is clean. It has to be so sparkling clean that no one should even suspect that others could be cheating. Unless all the participants are convinced that everyone else is clean, they will have the motivation to cheat themselves, which in turn makes others cheat, and so forth.

And the vlog didn't get into Armstrong's psychology. I would have liked to hear how the cognitive dissonance between his private reality and public (fake) persona change his personality. I would suspect that, even if one does not begin the game as a sociopath, living for decades with a lie would turn one into a sociopath.

He was very controlled until he talked about his Son (fake or real tears?). His answers seemed text book and learnt. He is arrogant and seems incapable of grasping just how 'low' he's behaved . I feel sorry for his children who will forever be tainted with 'your dad's a cheat'. He should face criminal prosecution. This interview doesn't cut it. He's definately a Sociopath. I think it teaches us that if you weave a web of lies you can actually start believing them to be true. Crazycatmum warsash

Though, I'm believing it now that the confession closes a chapter, A few things still linger in my heart about this whole thing.

A. They still can't prove, how he did it, how he was not caught for so many years, and barely proved that he did it, which in itself is not concrete.

B. It appears he is being forced to make all these statements, to do what? So he can be allowed to come back to sports again, his life's passion. If I'm a sportsmen, of that degree, I might would be vulnerable to blackmail if they took my one passion away.

C. After I read his Wiki page, it appears, to be case of sour grapes for some of his competitors, who pursued these charges against him over and over again. I mean, ok, we know now they were right, but what before that? They were no forensic experts, all the accusations were based on doubt and jealousy back then.

D. There is something terribly wrong with how this case has been pursued legally, a lot of things don't sum up. Like until 2009, UCI had him clear in a row with a doping official, at least officially, meaning, if any doubts, they were not being actively pursued by UCI. The biggest bolts in this story were by 2 of his former subordinates, who were both "Fired" before turning hostile. And it was actually Times Newspaper, that followed it up with a reprint of a 2004 book in 2012 (8 years later), the same time when another newspaper 'interestingly' sued a sportsman, i.e Armstrong.

Is there a transcript?

Lance says he wasn't caught because the drugs were already out of his system during the races. So was the doping just for training? I'm not clear on that part.

Ugly couch, but I love Ariely and it's an interesting little talk.