Armstrong: The last great PR stunt of a tainted sport’s tainted champion

Lance Armstrong’s decision not to fight the USADA’s charges over doping have left a huge hole in cycling, in sport (particularly in the US), and leaves question marks over a legacy that extended so far beyond a single sport as to become a charity fundraising juggernaut, a beacon of defiance against cancer, a global movement of yellow wristbanded believers.

The concern is that Armstrong’s decision not to take this fight to arbitration, which would have been his final available option, is the last great PR stunt of a man who has lived and thrived on media attention as much as he has been devilled by it. For years struck by the contrast between European zeal to have him outed as a cheat – the Euro press never trusted his victories, their pride bruised by his total dominance over his (often drugged) French, Spanish and Italian rivals – and the hero worship he felt back home, finally the USADA pursuit of him has made him a villain in his own backyard too.

Armstrong always won for more than personal glory

By bowing out before the arbitration stage, Armstrong has said “enough is enough”. He can claim that this was a fight he was never going to win, with judge and jury dead set on finding him guilty. And he could well be right. There has been something horribly McCarthy-esque about the USADA’s pursuit of him, casting doubt on anything they say. But he has also removed the last chance of there being unequivocal resolution in either direction, choosing ambiguity over total vindication or disgrace.

This leaves cycling little chance of healing. With the prospect of losing all his titles – which will be in three cases passed to people who finished in third place or lower, given the later bans meted out to the second placed riders in several of his Tour victories – a swathe of history will be cast under a shadow, a question mark rather than a full stop punctuating the end of the affair.

Cycling still has an uneasy relationship with its own history. With the purges of the 1990s, the nadir of the Festina affair, and the amount of heroes brought down to earth with a shocking bump, the sport tried to draw a line under a spoiled decade. But it has so far refused to look backwards – to its heroes of the early 90s and 80s, who still commentate on races, run teams, and pass judgement on those unlucky enough to be born into a later generation where drug testing has just about caught up with the sophistication of the cheats.

If Armstrong was clean, and his hundreds of clean tests throughout his long career really are his vindication rather than a damning indictment on the testing process that let him stay so far ahead of them for so long, then he should have taken this fight all the way. Not just for himself, but for cycling, for US sport, and for the ongoing credibility of his phenomenal charitable work.

As it is, he chooses to cast himself as a wronged anti-hero, tired of the fight, willing to go down but only on his terms, trying all the while to undermine the court that accuses him. If he is guilty, it is the single most astonishing deception ever conceived in sport. It amounts to more than simply trying to win for personal glory – his wins always stood for more than just his own triumph. The sad thing is, there will never be a credible “guilty” or a resounding “innocent” – only more questions.