IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK A Cyborg Counternarrative of Lance Armstrong 10.1177/0193732503252176
Transcription
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK A Cyborg Counternarrative of Lance Armstrong 10.1177/0193732503252176
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 125 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 126 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 127 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 128 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 129 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 130 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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, IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 131 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: 132 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 133 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 134 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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). IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 135 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 136 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 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 138 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 139 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. 140 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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 IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BOOK 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 142 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / May 2003 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. 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