Lance Armstrong is a name synonymous with cheating. The brash Texan stole American hearts by winning seven consecutive Tours de France beginning in 1999, only to break them all a few years later by confessing to doping and having all seven titles stripped. That is the broad outlines of the story anyway, though the particulars are quite a bit more complicated.
Armstrong is perhaps the ideal subject through which to understand the theory and practice of doping. He had a good career on the bike before he was diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer, only for the sport to rapidly enter its erythropoietin, or EPO, era while he was away undergoing treatment. Armstrong's innovation was to streamline and professionalize a team-wide EPO operation, all while maintaining an outspoken public persona and loudly proclaiming his innocence. His saga unintentionally raises some interesting questions about cleanness, dirtiness, and how those terms are contested, because the Lance Armstrong story is a story about an almost undefinable ideal: the natural body.
Today that same language, that same false certainty, is largely applied in service of bigoted ends. The Armstrong era gave the public the language and epistemological framework now being used to fight for the exclusion of trans athletes from sports. That's the meat of this episode, and we were thrilled to be joined by Reo Eveleth of Tested and Coyote Media Collective. The episode situates Armstrong's story within a larger history of doping as a means to understand how his legacy was formed and how it is being wielded now.
Listen to Only If You Get Caught wherever you enjoy podcasts. The show is produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin and hosted by me. You can find the show's transcript here.
