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10.1177/0193732503252176
IT’S
JOURNAL
NOT
OFABOUT
SPORT & SOCIAL
THE BOOK
ISSUES
ARTICLE
/ May 2003
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK
A Cyborg Counternarrative
of Lance Armstrong
Ted M. Butryn
Matthew A. Masucci
In his autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life,
Lance Armstrong claimed that his identity as a human being is not defined
simply in terms of his skill at racing a bicycle. Armstrong’s articulation of
multiple, competing identifications is consistent with a postmodern notion of
fractured, incomplete identity. However, following Butler, identity can be seen
as contested, negotiated, and often hegemonic. Drawing from the emerging
field of cyborgology, and the work of Birrell and McDonald, the authors construct a parallel cyborg “counternarrative” alongside the popular Armstrong
story. By interrogating Armstrong’s story through the lens of cyborg theory,
the authors will explore and articulate alternative meanings/readings of
Armstrong’s narrative of self as represented in his book and, finally, suggest
that Armstrong’s story can be read as an exemplar of the postmodern cyborg
sporting hero.
Keywords: cyborg theory; sport technology; sport heroes; Tour de France;
Lance Armstrong
I
n 1995, American Lance Armstrong won his second stage in a Tour de
France, the most prestigious event in professional bicycle racing. By
the following year, he was the world’s top-ranked cyclist. By most
accounts, including his own, he was a brash and arrogant young rider with
almost limitless potential, but in 1996, Armstrong’s rise to the top ranks of
international cycling came to an abrupt halt. Armstrong was diagnosed with
testicular cancer that had spread to his brain and lungs and given him less
than a 50% chance of surviving. In 1999, following chemotherapy treatment,
brain surgery, and the subsequent remission of the disease, Armstrong
staged perhaps the most astonishing comeback in contemporary sports history when, fewer than 3 years after first being diagnosed with cancer, he
emerged as the winner of the Tour de France, a race he would win again the
following 3 years. Armstrong’s story is indeed compelling, and his enormous
popularity transcends the boundaries of the almost obscure context of road
cycling in the United States. For many, Armstrong embodies the quintessential American hero, battling against all odds, from “inauspicious beginnings
Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Volume 27, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 124-144
DOI: 10.1177/0193732503252176
© 2003 Sage Publications
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK
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through triumph, tragedy, transformation, and transcendence” (Armstrong,
2000, in book jacket) to accomplish unprecedented heights. Due in part to
the overwhelming notoriety of Armstrong’s “heroic ascension” both within
and beyond the sporting community, and in part to the inspiration we as
competitive endurance athletes (a cyclist and distance runner) have found
in his intense and viscerally moving account, we endeavored to take a closer
look at Armstrong’s self-narrated “journey back to life,” paying particular
attention to the simultaneous juxtaposition and convergence of identity and
technology.
INTRODUCTION
In this article, we critically examine Armstrong’s account of his experiences as told, with the aid of writer Sally Jenkins, in his best-selling autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (2000). More specifically, we trace the role of technology throughout Armstrong’s story and its
role in the creation and recreation of thoroughly cyborg identities. From a
top bicycle racer, to a patient, to a survivor, to a father, to a multiple Tour de
France champion, we interrogate Armstrong’s ongoing process of
cyborgification, focusing on the myriad of ways that technology is infused in
his self-narrative and the ways that Armstrong relates to his own physiological identity through technological means. In the end, through this
cyborgian counternarrative, we confront the meanings of his status as a
cyborg “hero” for the 21st century and suggest that Armstrong’s story,
although not unproblematic, embodies a postmodernist view of fractured
and contested identity as keenly demonstrated through his marked and
unmarked relationship with technology.
Before we begin, it is important to note that we are in no way discrediting Armstrong’s accomplishments, and in fact, he has been an inspiration
for both of us in our own competitive sporting experiences. In his book,
Armstrong (2000) wrote that he wants to tell the reader “the truth” (p. 3).
Our intent is not to deny Armstrong’s version of reality or the stories of how
his identity has been constructed and reconstructed through his life events.
Rather, we wish, expanding on the work of McDonald and Birrell (1999) and
Birrell and McDonald (2000), and employing the transdisciplinary lens of
cyborg theory, to examine Armstrong’s intimate engagements with technology and how his project of self-technologization relates to his (interconnected) heterosexuality, masculine identification, and the “blood, sweat, and
tears” credo of sport.
An increasing number of scholars from the related fields of cultural
studies and cyborg studies have argued that our “human” identities have
been transformed through more intimate and regular engagements with the
wide array of technologies that exist in contemporary Western
technocultures and that humans should therefore be reconceptualized as
posthumans, or cyborgs (Balsamo, 2000; Downy, Dumit, & Williams, 1995;
Gray, 1995, 2001; Haraway, 1985, 1991, 1997; Hayles, 1999). Within academic circles, many consider the birth of cyborg studies, or cyborgology, to be
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Donna Haraway’s (1985) widely read article, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” a piece that laid the
groundwork for much of the current interdisciplinary work on cyborgs. In
the article, Haraway pointed to the need for a destabilization or “pollution”
of the borders that have been constructed between humans, animals, and
machines, a process she considers vital for the reclaimation of agency with
respect to the ways that our lives have become “technologically textured”
(Ihde, 1993). The 21st century, postmodern identity is not a unified “self ” but
rather a collection of politicized and fractured “selves” that denies the
dichotomous nature of modernist understandings of identity. As she stated,
“The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence”
(Haraway, 1991, p. 151). In short, to be a cyborg is to relish shifting subject
positions and fractured identities within the sociocultural and technological
web.
According to Gray (2001), “To fail to come to terms with our cyborgian
situation as part of both organic (the ‘natural’) and mechanic (industrial civilization) realms would be fatal” (p. 194). Although perhaps an overstatement, Gray’s point is well taken. Within sport studies, a small contingent of
scholars have, following numerous cyborg theorists, proposed that individuals should have the freedom to defy the boundary projects of modern sport,
including those between humans, machines, and technology (Butryn, 2000,
2002; Cole, 1993, 1998; Pronger, 1998), and to explore new modes of “being
cyborg” through interfacing with the technologies at their disposal. Cole
(1993, 1998, 2000) has also repeatedly called into question the practice of
“body policing” and the ongoing efforts by sporting bureaucracies to firmly
establish enforceable lines between “natural” competitors and the technological “other.” In addition, Butryn (2000, 2002) argued for a reconceptualization of elite athletes as always-already cyborgified competitors, whose
various lines of social identity and notions of corporeality have been irreversibly “polluted” through various degrees and methods of technologization. Finally, Rail and Lefebvre (2001) used a cyborg theoretical lens to
examine media portrayals of the Canadian rowing champion Silken
Laumann.
METHODOLOGY
In sport studies research, an important reorientation toward narrative inquiry has emerged, in part, with the rise of postmodernist thought. In
general, narrative research has been a powerful tool in examining the lives
of athletes (Denison, 1996; Denison & Rinehart, 2000; Duncan, 1998; Foley,
1992; McDonald & Birrell, 1999; Sparkes, 1999, 2000). By investigating the
stories that athletes tell about themselves, researchers have been better
able to understand the actions, motives, and conflicting identifications that
affect and form an athlete’s experience. Critical narrative approaches have
helped sport studies researchers begin to make sense of the implications of
“managing” multiple identifications against more traditional social
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expectations. Furthermore, narrative research that foregrounds the athlete’s perspective, interpretation, and evaluation of their own experiences
has helped to facilitate a reconsideration of seemingly commonsense ideas
about technology, masculinity, race, class, ability, and sexual orientation.
Following McDonald and Birrell (1999) and Birrell and McDonald
(2000), who argued for “reading” sport critically, we have interrogated a variety of media texts surrounding the life and bicycle-racing career of Lance
Armstrong. Although we evaluated several sources, including television
commercials, television appearances, magazine and newspaper articles, and
electronic media (including Armstrong’s own Web site), our analysis primarily focuses on Armstrong’s (2000) book (coauthored by Sally Jenkins), It’s
Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life.
By centering our investigation on Armstrong’s autobiography, we
acknowledge the agency and authority of his voice. However, as Hesford
(1999) noted, we recognize that
autobiographical acts (whether speech acts, written texts, visual forms or symbolic gestures that reference the autobiographical subject or body) do not
reflect unmediated subjectivities; rather, they are acts of self-representation
that are ideologically encoded with historical memories and principals of identity and truth. (p. xxiii)
Moreover, as Geertz (1972) noted, meaning does not necessarily reside in the
text but rather in the reader of that text. Currie (1998) also claimed that the
poststructuralist intervention in narratology shifted the locus of meaning
from the object to the subject. According to Currie, “narratology moved away
from the assumed transparency of the narratological analysis towards a recognition that the reader, however objective and scientific, constructed its
object” (pp. 2-3). Thus, the subjective interpretation of narratives can be paramount to the meaning-making framework that one constructs via those
interpretations. Furthermore, as Nilges (2001) suggested, “Knowledge . . . is
not only historically and contextually bound but constructed through a process of reflexive mediation where the world that is studied is created, in part
by the authors experience and how the text is written” (p. 234). In other
words, not only are researchers bound by social and historical contingency,
thereby necessarily removing the veil of objectivity, they actually create
meaning by reading and writing about the world that they are studying
(Sparks, 2002). By recognizing the negotiation of meaning both within and
beyond the text, and the contestation surrounding authorial authenticity,
we are suggesting that our cyborgian counternarrative, informed by the theoretical intersection of cultural studies, autobiographical discourse, cyborg
theory, and critical sport studies, represents but one of a myriad and multiplicity of interpretations. Indeed, Stuart Hall’s suggestion that a (hybrid)
narrative discourse informed by cultural studies could help to bridge the
theoretical chasm created in the wake of postmodernism is helpful here.
Hall argued that the so-called discursive turn takes seriously the notion
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that “no practice is ultimately understandable outside of the context of its
meaning” (Drew, 1998, p. 223). Bearing this in mind, we are not simply advocating a close reading and textual analysis of Armstrong’s story but rather a
more complex understanding of the material antecedents and consequences
(including marked and unmarked technologization) of these readings for
the agents themselves.
As an example of the fractured and hybrid underpinning of the discursive process itself, it is important to note that even our research partnership
has been highly technologized and fragmented. In this project, the researchers have used various forms of electronic communication to “virtually” collaborate and construct this counternarrative. The project itself has been a
bricolage of ideas, images, electronic messages, word processing, and cutting
and pasting all mediated within the “confines” of cyberspace. With this in
mind, the remainder of the article represents a recounting of our work to
this point. Far from presenting an objective conclusion, we simply hope to
illuminate the contours of a cyborgian-influenced interpretation of
Armstrong’s narrative, thereby (further) blurring the boundaries of sports
studies projects.
CYBORGS IN THE PELOTON: THE TECHNOLOGY OF
ELITE ROAD CYCLING AND THE ETHOS OF “TWEAKING”
Although Armstrong articulates an intimate coexistence with various
technologies, from a sporting perspective, it is important to situate his experiences within the always and already high-tech world of professional road
cycling. Bicycle racing has a long history of embracing technology in the pursuit of results. As much as any sport, in fact, cycling has been at the forefront
of technological innovation. The sport of cycling has seamlessly integrated
many of the technological advancements that have developed over the past
30 years, including the utilization of composite aerospace materials, temperature-adjusting clothing, and sophisticated electronic communication
devices (Seip, 1994). One need only reflect back on Greg LeMond’s victory
over an inconsolable Laurent Fignon in the final time trial of the 1989 Tour
de France to recognize the dramatic impact of technologization on the sport
and the often unidirectional nature of technological “progress.” Using stateof-the-art aerodynamic equipment, including a tear-drop-shaped helmet,
LeMond defeated a bare-headed Fignon to win the tour by the smallest margin in its 90-odd year history, ushering in the era of high-tech bicycle racing.
More recently, Armstrong’s former team, the U.S.-based electronics company Motorola, instituted the widespread use of two-way radios in the
peloton (“Radio ga-ga?” 2001). Now, team directors, while looking at the live
television feed on a laptop computer, can communicate with their riders
through tiny transmitters called “earbuds” and direct tactics from several
miles away.
Like LeMond before him, Armstrong has recognized and adopted the
latest technological developments in equipment; however, Armstrong’s
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cyborgification has moved well beyond the bike to the body itself. As he
explained,
I did computer calculations that balanced my body weight and my equipment
weight with the potential velocity of the bike in various stages, trying to find
the equation that would get me to the finish line faster than anybody else. I
kept careful computer graphs of my training rides, calibrating the distances,
wattages, and thresholds. Even eating became mathematical. (p. 224)
Similarly, he claimed,
Cyclists are computer slaves, we hover over precise calculations of cadence,
efficiency, force, and wattage. I was constantly sitting on a stationary bike with
electrodes all over my body, looking for different positions on a bike that might
gain mere seconds or a piece of equipment that might be a little bit more aerodynamic. (p. 65)
Thus, Armstrong sees himself both biologically and as an instrument to be
measured and tweaked. Furthermore, the metaphors that Armstrong used
to describe himself illustrates Ihde’s (1993) notion that members of
advanced technocultural communities have become increasingly “technologically textured” with respect to identity. Indeed, as Haraway (1991)
noted, the language of technology has grafted itself onto metaphors, transforming not only our perceptions and experiences but also the way we
express and describe our lives.
Beyond Armstrong and his predecessors, the move toward a thoroughly technologized cycling subculture has had advocates at the highest
levels of the sport. Project ’96, for instance, was a program designed to up the
technological ante in road cycling, and as the coordinator stated, “We can’t
just rely on the athletes anymore to help us win medals. It takes technology,
training, and a team of people behind them” (quoted in Gray, 2001, p. 170).
Thus, the dominant ethos of the sport became tied with technological progress, and although individual athletes still claimed ownership of authentic
“natural” selves, the collective identification was anything but natural.
Ironically, though not surprisingly considering, among other things, the
increasing corporatization of professional cycling, the contemporary professional cyclist has become but one cog in the wheel of successful performance.
Furthermore, although the preceding quote by the head of Project ’96 pertained to legal technologies, it has become clear that the “team of people”
supporting elite cycling teams sometimes included doctors who helped monitor their doping practices. As Brewer (2002) stated, “Star riders demand the
services of ‘star’ doctors” (p. 295) to help manage athletes’ progress, and in
fact, many attribute the success of the United States’ 1984 Olympic cycling
team to a systematic, though at the time legal, blood-doping program
directed by the United States Cycling Federation (Pavelka, 1985; Shipley,
1999).1 In addition, some have suggested that many within the elite cycling
community rationalized doping by reframing the use of the synthetic
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oxygen-boosting drug, erythropoietin (EPO), as simply part of preparing for
the tour, and thus the “natural” self was preserved, unless one was caught, in
which case the “preparing” athlete was labeled as the cheat (Voet, 2001).
The tension between cyclists and drug-testing procedures that have,
at times, bordered on draconian has been a constant theme in international
cycling. The most disturbing attempt at preventing the use of performanceenhancing substances and thus maintaining the supposed athletic “purity”
of the sport occurred in the 1998 Tour de France, when police raided the
rooms of numerous participants in the middle of the night. The raids followed the seizure of blood-doping paraphernalia from a support crew affiliated with one of the tour’s most successful teams. The “Festina Affair,” as it
was called in the cycling press (named after the cycling team targeted in the
raids) left a bitter taste in the mouths of pro cyclists, many of whom quit the
1998 tour in protest of the Gestapo-like tactics of the French authorities
(Wieting, 2000). Ironically, as Wieting (2000) suggested, it was Armstrong’s
miraculous victory in the 1999 Tour de France that helped restore the purity
and integrity of the event in the eyes of many fans outside the inner sanctum
of professional cycling. Regardless of the brief respite from doping allegations imbued by Armstrong’s comeback victory, however, it did not take long
for the cycling press to hint at the possibility that Armstrong’s success in the
1999 tour (and subsequent Tours de France) was anything but pure, and
after one stage of the 2002 race, Armstrong complained about hearing the
chant, “Dopé, dopé!” from some of the fans as he ascended the mountain.2
CORPOREAL OWNERSHIP AND THE
POLITICS OF MEDICAL SURVEILLANCE
At the beginning of the book, Armstrong (2000) invoked the thirdperson voice and stated that “there are two Lance Armstrongs, pre-cancer,
and post” (p. 4), thus foreshadowing the multiplicity of selves he expresses
throughout the remainder of the book. Although this article reveals that
there are, in fact, many more than two versions of Lance Armstrong, there
has been one constant since he was a teenager. Throughout his initial successes, during his fight with cancer, and now in his postcancer life as a fourtime Tour de France winner, Armstrong has built a profoundly intimate
relationship with his body and the technologies used to maintain and heal it.
Moreover, he has viewed his body both subjectively and objectively, as something to be closely monitored and highly disciplined by both himself and by
others.
As the previous section illustrated, Armstrong views his body as a
playground for manipulation and his internal physiological markers as
variables to be monitored. Furthermore, as meticulous as Armstrong the
cyclist was (and still is) about his physiological markers, Armstrong the
patient was even more so, and he clearly recognized that his sport and his
chemo treatment shared one common element. As he put it,
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There was an odd commonality in the language of cancer and the language of
cycling. They were both about blood. In cycling, one way of cheating is to take a
drug that boosts your blood cell count. In fighting cancer, if my hemoglobin fell
below a certain level, the doctors would give me the very same drug, Epogen.
(p. 92)
Indeed, the irony of Armstrong’s current views of drug testing is that the
very chemicals often used “illegally” by competitive cyclists to boost
hematocrit levels and oxygen-carrying capacity (e.g., EPO) were used during his illness to survive. Before cancer, he kept track of his VO2max and
hematocrit level in a highly organized effort to improve performance. During his chemotherapy treatment, however, his self-surveillance efforts were
aimed at merely surviving. As a result, he learned about treatment protocols, technical names for tumors, and chemotherapy drugs. Armstrong
attempted to maintain some sense of agency, even as he felt helpless for the
first time in his life, by reframing his treatment as simply another project of
physiological manipulation:
When Latrice [his nurse] came in to give me the chemo, no matter how sick I
was, I would sit up and be as attentive as I could. “What are you putting in me?”
I’d ask. . . . By now I could read a chest X ray as well as any doctor could, and I
knew all the terms and anti-nausea dosages. (p. 136)
As an athlete, then as a cancer patient, and again as a champion
cyclist, Armstrong’s body has also been subject to omnipresent surveillance
by the medical profession. As Franklin (1996) noted, elite athletes are subject to the paradox of simultaneously feeling pressured to achieve higher
performance standards, while their means of doing so are regulated, most
often by bureaucratic agencies the athletes themselves have little voice in
creating. Shogan (1999) used the Foucauldian notion of panopticism to
describe the way that high-level athletes begin to police their own behaviors
and practices, thus becoming complicit in their own surveillance. This practice of corporeal self-surveillance, and the tenuous struggle for agency in the
process of body policing, has defined Armstrong and placed him on both
sides of the porous, constructed, yet passionately defended boundaries
between “clean” and “dirty,” and “sick” and “healthy.”
At times, Armstrong frames himself as fodder for the medical sciences,
both inside and outside of sport. Of his time spent training at the Olympic
Training Center at Colorado Springs, he states that the primary goal was to
correct his “critical weaknesses” through wind-tunnel testing and other
forms of biomechanic and biofeedback endeavors and that he spent much of
his time “plastered with electrodes while doctors jabbed me with pins for
blood tests” (p. 65). Furthermore, although he asserts that he did everything
he could to take control of his cancer treatment, he also frames himself, once
again, as a victim of the medical profession:
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One thing they don’t tell you about hospitals is how they violate you. It’s like
your body is no longer your own, it belongs to the nurses and the doctors, and
they are free to prod you and force things into your veins and various openings.
(p. 125)
In one sense, Armstrong’s body was never fully his own, for as an elite cyclist
under contract since he was a teenager, he had long been a high-priced commodity. In addition, whereas most people are not accustomed to routinely
having their bodies poked with needles, the irony of Armstrong’s relationship with the disciplinary technologies of the elite cycling and cancer treatment worlds is that, despite his protests, he was at home with viewing his
identity as a conglomeration of chemicals to be monitored and, again,
tweaked.
Armstrong’s harsh perceptions of invasive drug-testing procedures
also changed following his recovery. Although he saw the syringe-wielding
physicians as “vampires” before his treatment, because of accusations of
doping that followed him after his first successful mountain stage, he now
welcomes all forms of corporeal surveillance. In fact, Armstrong is wholly
complicit in his own policing, and he views doping tests as a technological
patron, employed to refute the claims of drug use by his detractors. Although
they are still accompanied by a circus of exploitation and humiliation, he
concedes that, “The drug tests became my best friend, because they proved I
was clean” (p. 247). This is not to say, however, that negative drug tests are in
any way indisputable proof of not having taken any banned substances. In
fact, there are numerous examples in cycling of athletes testing negative
only to be revealed later that they were indeed using banned performance
enhancers.3
In a cyborg culture obsessed with technological augmentations and
accessories and clinging onto the reigns of self-cyborgification even as we
become complicit in the creation of a society where surveillance of all kinds
has become routine (e.g., our blood, DNA, genes), Armstrong’s story is a
paradigmatic example of the transgressive, postmodern self and the tenuous state of agency in contemporary technocultures. Even still, Armstrong’s
transgressive potential remains in tension with the “policing of the body,” for
to openly blur certain boundaries would constitute becoming one of the
“dirty” cyborgs. So, although Armstrong has some agency over his
cyborgification project, forces within cycling (ICU, team directors, doping
police) exert a degree of influence on his ability to freely claim his cyborg
subjectivity. In this way, Armstrong’s almost limitless cyborgification is
hemmed in by external entities, thus mediating his perceived range of the
possible.
Of course, the cruelest irony of elite athletes’ self-surveillance and
their policing by doping agencies is that, regardless of the intimate relationship with their internal physiology, they are still able to deny the most obvious signs that something might be wrong with their own body. In
Armstrong’s case, one of the reasons for the late detection of his cancer was
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his own failure to recognize that the swelling in his testicles needed immediate attention. This, too, relates to his sense of traditional and rigid conceptions of masculinity that prohibit open displays of vulnerability and that
often prompt men to resist seeking medical treatment.
ARMSTRONG ON THE DEFENSE: CORPOREAL
TRANSFORMATION, HARD WORK, AND THE DIVINE
In the final pages of his autobiography, Armstrong addresses the rampant speculations of drug use that have followed him ever since his first
strong showing in the 1999 tour. The size of the chip on Armstrong’s shoulder was, and perhaps still is, immense, and he continues to frame the naysayers who continually call into question his performances as part of some
sort of conspiracy, a force that has been out to get him for years. For
Armstrong, there is always someone trying to deface you. For example, since
1999, Armstrong has had an ongoing feud with the French cycling press,
who have insinuated that “only a person on performance enhancing drugs
could have overcome the physiological barriers of cancer treatment and
recovery” (Wieting 2000, pp. 349-351). Armstrong discredits the notion that
he was given any mysterious performance-enhancing drug during his recovery and notes that he was tested dozens of times over the subsequent 3 years,
never failing a single test. Nonetheless, Armstrong accepts the slings and
arrows of speculation as well as the incessant medical testing, going so far as
to say that he would also be suspicious of an athlete who had demonstrated
such dominance (Rose & Vega, 2001).
Aside from his clean test results, Armstrong defends his performance
in two ways. The first relates to the “scientific” relationship between body
type, physiology, and performance, whereas the second relies on the notion of
hard work and the possibility of (some sort of) divine intervention. Regarding his body type, Armstrong states that his current body type is far better
suited to the mountains, although he adamantly rejects any notion that his
cancer treatments aided him directly. Prior to being treated for cancer,
Armstrong was a bulky rider with absolutely no hope of winning the tour
because his large muscles and the additional weight they included were too
much of a detriment in the mountain stages. By the time he was in recovery
and riding again, however, he was 15 pounds lighter. As he describes it,
There was one unforeseen benefit of cancer: it had completely reshaped my
body. . . . In old pictures, I looked like a football player with my thick neck and
big upper body. . . . Now I was almost gaunt, and the result was a lightness I’d
never felt on the bike before. . . . I became very good in the mountains. (p. 224)
Although he had lost weight, however, he still maintained a significant
degree of his ability to generate power, measured in watts, on the bike and
thus was actually using less energy in the alpine roads even as he rode faster
up the slopes than he had before cancer. Armstrong’s personal coach, Chris
Carmichael, has continued to use the media as a forum to explain how
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Armstrong’s performance has benefited from the weight loss, and at the
time of his victory in the 2001 tour, Carmichael was still pointing to the laws
of physics and exercise physiology to deflect Armstrong’s critics. As a daily
correspondent for the Outdoor Life Network that televised the 2001 tour,
Carmichael posted the following online entries:
As I was looking back through information I have on Lance from his earlier
years, I realized that at his pre-cancer weight of 79 kilograms Lance would
have burned 3145 calories during just the 48.7 kilometers of climbing in Stage
13. That excludes all the energy he burned for the other 145 kilometers. At his
current weight of 71 kilograms, though, he only burned approximately 2610
calories. . . . His low body weight helps Lance save energy on climbs because he
is propelling less mass against gravity than he was in 1995, before his cancer.
Since his body can store roughly the same amount of energy as it could before,
he essentially has a larger fuel tank than he did before cancer, relatively speaking. (July 22, 2001, http://www.olntv.com)
Thus, Armstrong’s first line of defense against accusations of “illegal
cyborgification” via doping relies on the positivist notion that modern science provides a single, measurable, and ultimately logical truth. Carmichael
went on to state, “All things being equal, Lance would have finished fifth
instead of capturing one of the most coveted victories in cycling” (July 17,
2001).
Armstrong’s other mode of defense against doping accusations is the
modernist notion of meritocracy in sport, and throughout his autobiography
he asserts that his success is due to the fact that he simply worked harder
than his rivals. Writing about the months prior to the 1999 tour, for example,
he states,
I rode when no one else would ride, sometimes not even my teammates. . . . I
steered my bike into the Alps, with Johan [his manager] following in a car. By
now it was sleeting and 32 degrees. I didn’t care. We stood at the roadside and
looked at the view and the weather, and Johan suggested that we skip it. I said,
“No. Let’s do it.” I rode for seven straight hours, alone. To win the tour I had to be
willing to ride when no one else would ride. (p. 227)
His self-described work ethic even borders on martyrdom at times. As he
describes his talent for pain tolerance, “What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without
complaint. . . . If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it” (p. 24). Armstrong
paints himself as a glutton for punishment and as someone so hardy that in
any contest of attrition, on a bike or on a hospital bed, he could be the only
survivor. Furthermore, although he admits that riding was challenging, he
is quick to assert that it paled in comparison to the drama of chemotherapy:
“To race and suffer, that’s hard. But it’s not being laid out in a hospital bed
with a catheter hanging out of your chest, platinum burning in your veins,
throwing up for 24 hours straight, five days a week” (p. 243).
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He invokes the meritocratic mantra that all athletic celebrities,
regardless of their level of technologization, must repeat to preserve the
veneer of naturalness for the world and, in Armstrong’s case, help repair the
tarnished image of the sport of cycling. As Simon (1994) noted, the supposedly pure, “original I” is still important to both athletes and fans.
Finally, in a quote that perfectly captures the ambiguity of agency in
the cyborg age, as well as Armstrong’s struggle with his own fractured identities, he wonders, “The question that lingers is, how much was I a factor in
my own survival, and how much was science, and how much miracle?” (p. 271).
Reflecting on the meaning of his accomplishments to others, Armstrong
adds that, “Maybe, as my friend [Nike president] Phil Knight says, I am
hope” (p. 265). These and other quotes referencing his own inspiring qualities (Montville, 1999), his aforementioned pride in his own ability to suffer,
and the references by himself and others to miracles, all further remove
Armstrong from the realm of explicit cyborgification and into that of the
mythical or supernatural. His very existence, not to mention that of his son,
is ultimately not to be viewed as technological but as a sign of something
larger, a symbol of, as Knight phrased it, hope. In fact, the foundation created
by Armstrong after his battle with cancer is called, The Cycle of Hope.4 Thus,
Armstrong makes competing and simultaneous claims to the mortal (e.g.,
work ethic) and immortality (miracle). With respect to the latter, this selfdeification works to subvert his potentially transgressive project of
cyborgification as well, and in the end Armstrong’s overarching claim to
“humanness” is what the reader, the devoted cycling fan, and certainly the
cancer community are left with. Any aspect of his technological identity that
might be construed as problematic becomes peripheralized, whereas the
notion of “pure” athletic performance remains central, despite his reliance
on all things technological.
Finally, despite his often tense relationship with the European press,
it is important not to overlook Armstrong’s unacknowledged power with
respect to his response to the critics. As McDonald and Andrews (2001)
stated, “in a hyperreal media-saturated culture, power is exercised through
the means of representation, as those who have greatest access to the media
set particular agendas while having the ability to frame what counts as real
and significant” (p. 23). As a member of the highly visible and influential
Nike stable of athletes, and thus partly a corporatized and constructed persona, Armstrong answers his accusers outside the confines of his book via a
striking television advertisement. As the commercial opens, Armstrong is
shown having blood drawn as media cameras flash in the background, his
voiceover proclaiming that, “This is my body. I can do what I want to it.” The
ad then shows Armstrong in various states of training, including wind-tunnel
testing, biofeedback, and rest, and ends with the image of him riding up his
driveway in a rainstorm while the voiceover continues, “People want to know
what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day.
What are you on?” The advertisement illustrates the complex but unmarked
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relationship between “natural” and “artificial,” for although we are aweinspired by Armstrong’s dedication and ability to suffer through a grueling
training regimen, the viewer is not meant to infer that doing anything
Armstrong wants to his body includes either an intimate relationship with
(expensive and invasive) technologization or the utilization of performanceenhancing drugs. And yet, Armstrong also plays on his cyborgified identity
at other times. In a spot for ESPN, for example, a Sportcenter host opens the
door to the studio’s power supply room in the basement, where he finds
Armstrong on his bike, ostensibly generating electricity for the building as
he pedals. Thus, Armstrong-as-turbine conflicts with, but never really
undermines, his image of purity, for no “natural” athlete or mere human
could conceivably act as a one-man power plant. Nonetheless, it is
Armstrong who controls these competing portraits of his identity.
THE TECHNO-BABY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION
OF TECHNOLOGIZED MASCULINITY
One thread that runs throughout Armstrong’s story, and that relates
directly to his cyborgification, is his sense of heterosexual masculinity and
his desire to play the traditional male role in relationships. If Lance was
anything, he was a bundle of testosterone, and throughout the early chapters of the book he asserts his heterosexuality and masculinity numerous
times, confiding in the reader that he was a ladies’ man and had dated “beautiful co-eds” on a regular basis. He also admits that because his childhood
was characterized by a lack of a stable father figure, having a child was an
important part of his sense of masculinity. As he explains, “When I was sick,
fatherhood was something obscured around the next bend, perhaps impossible, a lost chance” (p. 208). Without in-vitro fertilization (IVF), there would
be no little Luke Armstrong, no little cyborg offspring with whom to pose in
advertisements of cancer drugs, advertisements so seemingly foreign for a
major sports hero to endorse. Regarding conception, he writes that, “The
process would be almost as medically intricate as a cancer treatment: it
would require as much research and planning, and a raft of syringes, drugs,
and two surgeries” (p. 208). Like Armstrong-as-cyclist and Armstrong-aspatient, the sperm that would eventually help create Luke Armstrong was
tweaked and manipulated to ensure its survival and eventual development.
So, as Armstrong’s sperm was launched into its own receptacle to be frozen,
his son’s journey into life would, fittingly, begin as a product of
technoscience. Both Armstrong’s survival and the conception and birth of
his child were by-products of the “medical industrial complex,” which is
characterized, in part, by both increased patient agency and personal choice
regarding treatment options for those with adequate access (Schmidt &
Moore, 1998).
Armstrong’s desire to tell the personal story of his wife, Kristin’s, pregnancy is characteristic of the way in which he asserts his changing sense of
heterosexual masculinity throughout his book. He also seems to understand
the importance of the democratization of the cyborgification process. “We
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137
want them [other couples dealing with infertility] to hear the specifics of
IVF,” he states, “so they understand what’s ahead of them” (p. 209). That
said, there is certainly no indication that Armstrong recognizes that infertile heterosexual couples are not the only people in the market for cyborg
babies via assisted reproductive technologies, as gay and lesbian couples
and prospective single mothers can attest. Furthermore, that Armstrong
views his own sperm as a valuable commodity is revealed when he describes,
in a tone he wants to be humorous, how his wife must be assured that “her”
vial is labeled with the initials “LA.” Once again, because Armstrong-aselite-athlete has long been a commodity, this is, from his perspective, quite
unproblematic. In addition, Schmidt and Moore (1998) pointed out that the
discourse on semen banking has yet to fully address how this practice may
contribute to the construction of new hierarchies among men and the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity.
Armstrong also expresses he and “Kik’s” (Armstrong’s nickname for
his wife) desire to have a “pristine” child, and so she gave up coffee for the
duration of her “pregnancy project” (p. 210). Like the father, the mother in
this cyborg baby conception also subjected herself to invasive tests and
administered her own Lupron (to prevent ovulation) and Gonal-F (to stimulate egg production) shots nightly. Weeks later, the egg harvest occurred,
aided by more chemicals, and then the thawed eggs were injected with one
healthy sperm each. Three “perfect” specimens were implanted back into
Kristin, and the rest were stored and would later produce twin girls. Eventually, a sonogram revealed one healthy baby—healthy but certainly anything but pristine or natural. Furthermore, although not present in
Armstrong’s account, it is important to note that, as Davis-Floyd and Dumit
(1998) stated, “the manipulation of nature for reproductive ends is a cultural game that is played almost entirely within the boundaries of the
wealthier classes” (p. 7). Indeed, despite Armstrong’s difficulties in procuring insurance at the beginning of his ordeal, it is unlikely that someone in
his position of gender, class, and race privilege would have eventually been
unable to fund the aggressive cancer treatment and the costly procedures
leading up to the eventual birth of his and Kristin’s first child.
LANCE ARMSTRONG AS CYBORG HERO?
It is clear that Armstrong’s story, when interrogated through the lens
of cyborg theory, reveals a complicated matrix of technology, corporeality,
masculinity, and athletic identity. Armstrong’s story has been inspirational
on a number of different levels, and he is often branded as “heroic,” not only
for overcoming cancer despite grim odds but also for helping to temporarily
restore the dignity of the disgraced sport of cycling through his improbable
victory in the Tour de France following the Festina Affair of 1998 (Wieting,
2000). Furthermore, as Joseph Campbell (1988) suggested, heroes are people who have given their lives, at least in part, to something bigger than
their own personal pursuits. Through his survivorship, Armstrong’s appeal
has transcended sport, and his advocacy for cancer research has made him a
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bona fide hero (and celebrity) to cancer patients worldwide.5 His heroic
ascension has been, as we have detailed, ensconced in and reliant on technology at each moment, and thus his status as cyborg hero becomes evident
in not only his technologization but also his representation of varied and
often competing identifications. However, Armstrong’s status as hero
becomes interrupted once one interrogates this notion as both contested and
constructed.
There is no doubt that Armstrong was, and continues to be, an inspiration to both cancer patients and athletes alike, as well as a hero to many
Americans, who made his book a bestseller for several weeks. Furthermore,
evidence of his hero status includes the fact that he was awarded one of the
most coveted (and corporate) honors when his image appeared on a
Wheaties cereal box, and most recently, he was named the 2002 Athlete of
the Year by Sports Illustrated.
In a sense, though, we would argue that Armstrong is ironically
emblematic of the modernist anti-hero, precisely because his story, as constructed by both himself and the media, is decidedly modernist in nature. As
we have previously discussed, Armstrong’s dominant narrative is one of the
modernist hero, the hard-working, underdog, son of a single mother, who
became ill and then fought through adversity to claim the title of Tour de
France champion. However, an alternative read of Armstrong’s story positions him as a cyborg figure who signifies important notions of postmodern
identity, eschewing any conception of core self throughout his book, and who
articulates simultaneous and often competing lines of identification: cancer
patient, professional athlete, father, quasi-scientist, and even self-asformula, all of which are thoroughly infused with various cyborg processes.
And yet, although his overarching claim to “human beingness” is
undermined by his own admission of intimate engagements with various
forms of technology, he places himself among the “clean” cyborgs. As DavisFloyd and Dumit (1998) pointed out, cyborgs have quite different meanings
and implications depending on one’s perspective. For example, Armstrong
can be read as the “good’ cyborg, a sign of technoscientific progress and a key
figure in the movement toward a thoroughly plugged-in athlete capable of
incredible performances. Furthermore, his use of technology during his battle with cancer, and in the process of conceiving a child, are both representative of an instrumentalist conceptualization of medical technologies as
benevolent tools (Feenberg, 1999).
Moreover, whatever technological augmentations he had used, his
cyborgian hero status is only possible because he did test negative for all
forms of doping, regardless of the actual validity of the results. For although
we accept the “good” cyborg stories of cancer survival and cycling victories,
the popular discourse, as well as some in the international cycling community, still construct some forms of self-technologization (i.e., doping) as deviant. In fact, Armstrong expresses mixed feelings toward those athletes
caught using EPO in the scandal-beleaguered 1998 Tour de France. Although
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he believes that many riders and teams feel like they must take performance-enhancing substances to remain competitive, he removes himself
from the ranks of the doping and states, without a hint of irony, that, “After
chemo the idea of putting anything foreign into my body was especially
repulsive” (p. 205).
In contrast, Armstrong can be read as the “bad” cyborg, who openly
defies the hallowed notions of both the pure and natural athlete and the traditional biological father. What is more, speculations about the possible use
of doping technologies have, in the eyes of some, brought him dangerously
close to the bad cyborg already. Indeed, although Americans have generally
embraced his accomplishments, the French government has only recently
closed its investigation of Armstrong and his U.S. Postal team on accusations that team assistants dumped “suspicious materials” miles away from
the 2001 Tour de France racecourse. Last, even the previous American
cycling hero, Greg LeMond, has distanced himself somewhat from
Armstrong, and thus, Armstrong’s cyborg hero status is contingent on what
sort of cyborg he ultimately emerges as in the public forum.6
As Gray (2001) noted, “Technoscience is constantly deconstructing the
idea of the impossible. The only set impossibility is making nostalgia real”
(p. 194). Indeed, although Armstrong, and, one would presume, most of his
admirers cling to some notion of pure and untainted elite athletes, a more
critical read of his story reveals a counternarrative that suggests that he
already sees the “promise of monsters,” privileged though they may be. For
Armstrong, tweaking is an art form, and on his cyborg body-as-canvas, his
multiple lines of identity intersect with his engagements with various technologies to construct a sense of self that, unlike many sport heroes who seem
to view themselves as monoliths of modernity, is overtly fractured and
postmodern. So, although he makes a final claim in his autobiography to an
overarching identification of humanness, we contend that a cyborgian read
of his story reveals that even Armstrong himself must define the notion of
human in terms of multiple and oftentimes competing identifications.
Armstrong is the manifestation of impurity and artificiality characteristic
of modern technocultures, and a cyborg interpretation of his narrative
exposes the hopelessly ridiculous and hypocritical attempts by doping agencies, both international and national, to police elite athletic bodies as if there
existed uncontestable boundaries between the natural and unnatural.
Finally, as the would-be postmodern hero, not only does Armstrong assimilate the seeming incommensurability of his competing identifications, he
also makes clear that his success is predicated on that very (contested)
hybridity. To come full circle and reexamine the implications of Armstrong’s
own articulation of multiple identifications, expressed on the book jacket of
his autobiography (Winner of the Tour De France, Cancer Survivor, Husband, Father, Son, and Human Being), it is clear that blurring of the boundaries of self, whether tentatively expressed or openly claimed, are inextricably bound up in the processes of cyborgification.
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CONCLUSION
To conclude, we briefly return to the taken-for-granted notion of Lance
Armstrong as hero. As previously noted, it is not difficult to detail how
Armstrong’s accomplishments on his bike might qualify him as a hero to
many, but, from a sport studies perspective, it is certainly compelling to
draw a parallel between his athletic and medical “accomplishments” and
problematize his hero status through an examination of how it intersects
with his cyborgification process.
Ingham, Howell, and Swetman (1993) suggested that the work on
heroes and heroines points to an individual who is “a resistant or
transformative type” and who is “fantastic, defiant, [and] an exemplar of a
better way” (p. 198). Again, using these criteria, Armstrong seems to classify
as a hero, and he does so in and through his strategic engagements and identifications with various technologies, as well as his strategic disengagements from other technologies. However, the notion that Armstrong’s
cyborgification project is representative of a “better way” is questionable for
several reasons. First, despite Armstrong’s repeated mention of his lowermiddle-class childhood throughout his book, as well as his experience of having his insurance benefits revoked by his former team, Armstrong’s current
engagements with technology are only possible because of the class privilege
he now possesses. Thus, Armstrong’s survivorship cannot be completely
extricated from the fact that, as a sporting celebrity (albeit in a “minor”
sport), he has access to numerous health care professionals and practices
that others do not. Also, viewing Armstrong as a cyborg hero is problematic
to the extent that it associates technological progress with social and, in this
case perhaps, moral progress. Although he owes both his sporting accomplishments and survivorship partly to various technological innovations,
there is nothing inherently noble in any given cyborg practice. In other
words, there are ample examples, whether in sport or the medical establishment, in which projects of corporeal technologization (e.g., genetic engineering) might be labeled not as heroic but as morally and ethically suspect.
Finally, following Ingham and colleagues, we also recognize the limits of
Armstrong’s transformative potential both within and outside of sport. For
example, rather than use his “unnaturalness” to exploit the hypocrisy and
inequity of surveillance in his sport, he is ultimately complicit in the maintenance of modernist notions of the body and athletic success, not to mention
traditional notions of masculinity and reproduction. Similarly, Armstrong
has become an advocate for cancer survivors worldwide, and yet he still
maintains close alliances to corporate structures associated with, in Nike’s
case at least, global exploitation of and unsanitary conditions for workers
(Sage, 1999).
In post–September 11 America, sport heroes are not revered as highly,
or at least in the same way, as they once were, for attributes like sacrifice
have been placed in a larger context of international conflict and “real-life”
human tragedy. For many, perceptions of truly “heroic” acts now preclude
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141
mere athletic achievements and journeys within the arena of sport (Tinley,
2002). So, Armstrong survives as a hero precisely because he has confronted
life-and-death experiences. His struggles both within and outside the realm
of sport seemingly transcend the ordinary, and in an era where, as Harris
(1994) noted, “hero” is being replaced by “celebrity,” Armstrong’s
survivorship has enhanced both his hero status and his worth as a commodity to be consumed by the masses. Armstrong remains embroiled in ongoing
doping allegations leveled, ironically given the damage to its reputation
since the Festina Affair, by the French cycling press. Be that as it may, in
June 2002, Armstrong angrily addressed his critics in a statement posted on
his Web site (http://www.lancearmstrong.com):
I do not condone the use of banned substances and certainly understand how
problematic this issue has become in sport. In my case, it’s unfortunate that
some people, including a few in the French Judicial System, are seemingly
unable to acknowledge that intense and calculated training [italics added], not
drugs, has been the key to my success on a bicycle.
From our perspective, whether Armstrong used any performance-enhancing
drugs while he competed is secondary to the larger question of why sporting
bureaucracies are intent on rigorously policing the borders, which are suspect at best, between “calculated training” and cyborg corporeality, even as
the postmodern conditions render their attempts futile and absurd. Sport
fans have come to accept elite performances that are largely recognized as
having been aided by technology, and yet the “natural” classification
remains the chosen mantra of elite sport. It is this question that deserves
the further attention of scholars from within and beyond the sport studies
community.
NOTES
1. According to a U.S. cycling team physician, several members of the 1984 Olympic
cycling squad used blood doping prior to the games, and although it was not
banned at the time, the U.S. Cycling Federation, along with the International
Olympic Committee, did ban its use the following year, despite the absence of a
viable testing method (Todd & Todd, 2001).
2. It should be noted that, from Armstrong’s perspective, sportive nationalism was
intimately tied to subjective appraisals of “objective” data such as test results.
Indeed, Armstrong’s cyborg project may be read more benevolently by ardent
American fans, as well as the mass media, who have generally framed Armstrong
as the victim of some French plot to “fry him” (e.g., Reilly, 2002).
3. Former Festina star (and current Domo-Farm Frites rider) Richard Virenque
comes immediately to mind here. After finally admitting his drug use and serving
a suspension, Virenque is back riding at the highest level of the sport winning the
coveted Mont Ventoux stage of the 2002 Tour de France. For a detailed look at performance-enhancing drugs in the peloton, and specifically details of the “Festina
Affair,” see former Festina staff member Willie Voet’s 2001 book, Breaking the
Chain: Drugs and Cycling—The True Story.
4. LeMond made critical statements regarding Armstrong’s involvement with Dr.
Michele Ferrari, the controversial Italian doctor who is currently under
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investigation by Italian authorities for administering EPO to several professional cyclists. LeMond subsequently retracted these statements, saying that he
did not mean to imply that Armstrong had actually taken illegal performanceenhancing drugs.
5. Armstrong’s popularity reaches far past the cancer community, and numerous
celebrities have publicly praised his accomplishments. Of the more notable examples, comedian Robin Williams incorporated Armstrong into his latest HBO
standup production, and Bono, the lead singer of U2, stated that Armstrong
“awakens in America the idea of the impossible made possible” (Reilly, 2002, p.
71).
6. Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsman of the Year” issue has used this notion, stating
that Armstrong has “become a kind of hope machine” (Reilly, 2002, p. 71).
AUTHORS
Ted M. Butryn is an assistant professor of sport sociology and sport
psychology at San Jose State University. His main interests are the application of cyborg theory to sport and the intersection of cultural studies and
applied sport psychology. He is presently working on a book tentatively titled,
The Extinction of the “Natural” Athlete: Sport and the Body in the Cyborg
Age. Matthew A. Masucci is an interdisciplinary lecturer at San Jose State
University. He is currently completing his dissertation (in cultural studies at
the University of Tennessee) on sporting narratives and moral choice, and he
also does work in the area of service learning.
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