The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (20 page)

We end up in a conference room with 34-year-old Doug Ulman, Livestrong's $320,000-a-year CEO. Earnest and intense, he looks like he could be Lance's younger brother. Ulman was a sophomore soccer player at Brown University when he was diagnosed with a rare tumor and two types of melanoma. After successful treatment, he started his own foundation for young adults with cancer; Armstrong read about him in the Brown alumni magazine and sent an admiring email. They hit it off, and Ulman came aboard in 2001. At the time, Livestrong had four staffers and a budget of about $7 million. Now it has a staff of 88, and it took in $48 million in 2010.

Like his boss, Ulman is energized by adversity. Tacked to the wall of his cube is a photocopied quote from Ken Berger, the head of Charity Navigator, an influential ratings and watchdog group. “It is just going to devastate them,” he said in an Associated Press article.

“It” is the federal investigation against Armstrong, which Livestrong staffers have tried to compartmentalize. “We can't predict what's going to happen in the world of cycling,” Ulman says. “We have to stay focused on fulfilling our mission.”

 

That mission has evolved considerably. In the early years, Ulman says, the foundation awarded grants for research on both testicular cancer and cancer survivors. The grants were small, in the low six figures or less, and were aimed at scientists pursuing cutting-edge ideas.

“For a young researcher it was great,” says Julien Sage, a Stanford professor who received a total of $150,000 from 2004 to 2005. “I had no data, just an idea.” Small, speculative grants like his, he explains, are essential to young scientists who are developing the data they need to apply for more substantial government funding.

The main reason for the shift, Ulman says, was scale. The American Cancer Society raised $900 million last year. And the National Cancer Institute awards nearly $2 billion a year in research grants. Ulman says Livestrong was too small to make a difference in such a big pond. “We started to realize that there's literally billions of dollars in cancer research, and we asked, Is that the best use of the money we're raising?”

Point taken. It's worth noting, though, that the Michael J. Fox Foundation had about the same revenue as Livestrong in 2008—$40 million—and gave away $33 million of that in grants for Parkinson's research. The Susan G. Komen Foundation also does a huge amount of pink-ribbon “awareness” work, but it still dished out $145 million in breast-cancer research grants over the past two years. With Livestrong gone, there is no equivalent private funder for testicular-cancer research.

Sage says that the kind of contribution Livestrong was making is still needed. “It's a mistake to stop supporting basic research, because there are a lot of things we can learn,” he says. “There are still people who die from testicular cancer, and we need to look for better ways to treat them.”

Ulman doesn't see it that way. “We are all about people,” he says. “Most organizations are about the disease. They're about trying to solve a disease, and we are about trying to improve the lives of people that are battling the disease . . . What can we do
today
to improve their lives? As opposed to saying we'll fund research that in 15 years might help somebody live a little longer.”

McLane agrees. “If we applied the science we already have, we could cure almost everybody,” she says. “The search for a cure could have already been successful. It's removing the barriers to the treatment that can cause that cure that is the real problem for many people all over the world.”

 

After Armstrong retired from cycling, the only direction his foundation seemed to be moving was down. In 2005, the last year he won the Tour, revenues grew to $52 million, fueled largely by the famous $1 Nike Livestrong wristband. But when Armstrong left the spotlight, the wristband fad waned and foundation revenues sagged by $20 million the next year.

They stayed lower despite a notable success in 2007, perhaps Livestrong's greatest achievement. Armstrong spent much of that year campaigning for Proposition 15, a Texas ballot initiative to create a huge pool of public money for cancer research and prevention. He worked the Texas legislature and traveled the state by bus with then–state representative Patrick Rose, and the measure passed. “There is no chance that Prop 15 would have become a reality but for Lance's personal involvement,” Rose says today.

But it took Comeback 2.0 to put Livestrong on people's radar again. Armstrong announced his plans in a September 2008
Vanity Fair
interview, in which he said his return would be built around what he called a “global cancer summit.” The comeback was portrayed as a completely charitable mission. “I am essentially racing for free,” he told the magazine. “No salary. No bonus. This one's on the house.”

His reboot was a smashing success: huge crowds and adoring headlines greeted Armstrong's return to racing at the Tour Down Under in Australia. In Sacramento, fans lined the prologue course of the Tour of California waving yellow signs with the Lance face and the slogan
HOPE RIDES AGAIN
. He ended up with a podium finish at the 2009 Tour de France, and Livestrong revenue surged back over the $40 million mark.

But the comeback also saw Livestrong's final evolution from a research nonprofit into something that looks more like a hip marketing agency. Rather than funding test-tube projects, it was deploying buzzwords like
leverage, partnering
, and
message
.

One way to spread the message is to slap Livestrong's name on just about everything, from Livestrong Survivorship Centers of Excellence (there are eight at major hospitals nationwide) to Oakley sunglasses to, at one point, a Livestrong Build-a-Bear (complete with yellow cycling outfit). The Livestrong label is so appealing that the owners of the Major League Soccer franchise Sporting KC decided to donate the naming rights for its new stadium, guaranteeing the foundation $7.5 million over six years. Normally, a corporation would pay to have its name put on such a venue, but team owners are betting that Livestrong Sporting Park will attract more business and goodwill than, say, AT&T Arena would. (Lance even has his own seat: Box 1, Seat 007.)

Did the doping allegations bother them? “We asked the foundation about that,” says team co-owner Robb Heineman. “They said he's the most tested athlete in the history of sports, and he maintains he's never done it.”

 

Livestrong prides itself on the fact that—on paper anyway—it spends 81 percent of every dollar on programs. This is a big improvement over 2005, when the American Institute of Philanthropy took Livestrong to task for spending 45 cents of every dollar on fund-raising. Now AIP gives Livestrong an A-minus, while Charity Navigator rates it three stars out of four.

But the foundation's financial reports from 2009 and 2010 show that Livestrong's resources pay for a very large amount of marketing and PR. During those years, the foundation raised $84 million and spent just over $60 million. (The rest went into a reserve of cash and assets that now tops $100 million.)

A surprising $4.2 million of that went straight to advertising, including large expenditures for banner ads and optimal search-engine placement. Outsourcing is the order of the day: $14 million of total spending, or more than 20 percent, went to outside consultants and professionals. That figure includes $2 million for construction, but much of the money went to independent organizations that actually run Livestrong programs. For example, Livestrong paid $1 million to a Boston-based public-health consulting firm to manage its campaigns in Mexico and South Africa against cancer stigma—the perception that cancer is contagious or invariably fatal.

Livestrong touts its stigma programs, but it spent more than triple that, $3.5 million in 2010 alone, for merchandise giveaways and order fulfillment. Curiously, on Livestrong's tax return most of those merchandise costs were categorized as “program” expenses. CFO Greg Lee says donating the wristbands counts as a program because “it raises awareness.”

This kind of spending dwarfs Livestrong's outlays for its direct services and patient-focused programs like Livestrong at the YMCA, an exercise routine tailored to cancer survivors available at YMCAs nationwide ($424,000 in 2010). There's also a Livestrong at School program, offered in conjunction with
Scholastic
magazine ($630,000 in 2010). “Explain to students that Lance was very sick with cancer but that he was treated and got better,” begins one sample lesson plan for grades three through six.

Livestrong spends as much on legal bills as on these two programs combined: $1.8 million in 2009–2010, mainly to protect its trademarks. In one memorable case, its lawyers shut down a man in Oklahoma who was selling Barkstrong dog collars. Meanwhile, “benefits to donors” (also merchandise, as well as travel expenses for Livestrong Challenge fund-raisers) accounted for another $1.4 million in spending in 2010.

There's still a research department, but now it focuses on things like quality-of-life surveys of cancer survivors. During my visit, I was plied with glossy reports and brochures, which are cranked out by the truckload. The foundation's 2010 copying-and-printing bill came to almost $1.5 million.

But Livestrong's largest single project in 2009—indeed, the main focus of Armstrong's comeback—was the Livestrong Global Cancer Summit, held in Dublin in August. The summit ate up close to 20 percent of the foundation's $30 million in program spending that year.

To kick things off, Livestrong hired Ogilvy, the famous advertising firm, to create a global cancer-awareness campaign leading up to the summit. Cost: $3.8 million. It spent another $1.2 million to hire a New York City production company to stage the three-day event. Then it paid more than $1 million to fly 600 cancer survivors and advocates to Dublin from all over the world—the United States, Russia, Bangladesh, and 60 other countries. The former president of Nigeria even showed up.

Often, the main output at gatherings like this is verbiage, and so it was at the summit. Participants declared cancer a “global health crisis.” A report was produced titled “A World Without Cancer.” And delegates called on every country to develop a national cancer plan to deal with the disease. At the end of the summit, 97 percent of participants answering a Livestrong survey said they had “developed a deeper level of understanding about the issues related to cancer.”

“You wonder,” AIP's Borochoff says. “If they just gave the money to cancer research, would it generate as much great publicity for Lance Armstrong?”

 

The foundation considers this money well spent, but if I were a Livestrong supporter I'd also ask: What's the product here? If not research, then what do I get for my $100 donation?

“I think the product is hope,” says Mark McKinnon, the renowned GOP political consultant and a Livestrong board member. Armstrong's team approached McKinnon in 2001, seeking advice on positioning Lance for a post-cycling career. McKinnon, a media strategist for President George W. Bush, introduced Armstrong to another client, Bono. The two hit it off, and soon Armstrong seemed to be aiming toward a Bono-like role as a global cancer statesman.

“His goal was to change the way people look at cancer and the way people deal with cancer,” says McKinnon. “In typical Lance fashion, he wanted to have a fundamental impact on the disease: how it's perceived, how it's dealt with.”

Done. Thanks largely to Armstrong, we don't talk about cancer “victims” anymore; they're cancer
survivors
. And they don't “suffer” from the disease; they want to “Kick. Its. Ass”—as ESPN anchor and cancer patient Stuart Scott urged a crowd of high-level Livestrong fund-raisers and donors at a dinner before the Philadelphia Livestrong Challenge last August.

Sitting beside me at that event, a man named Scott Joy nodded fervently as he listened. In 2003, Joy was diagnosed with testicular cancer and found his way to Armstrong's book. “It told me I would get through this,” he said. “I needed to hear that.”

Joy is now a Livestrong Leader, part of an elite corps of fund-raisers and organizers. This year he raised more than $42,000 for Livestrong, but perhaps more important, he's been fiercely defending Lance and the foundation on Twitter and in the comments sections of online articles. Joy is one of many Livestrong Army members who remain passionate about their cause and their hero.

Nobody can doubt Armstrong's empathy for cancer patients or his power to inspire. In certain instances, though, he has leveraged this charitable appeal for personal gain. During his comeback, the lines between Cancer Lance and Business Lance became especially blurry.

Although Armstrong had told
Vanity Fair
he would be racing for free, he actually pocketed appearance fees in the high six figures from the organizers of both the Tour Down Under and the Giro d'Italia. An Australian government official told reporters that the money was a charitable donation, but Lance himself admitted to the
New York Times
that he was treating it as personal income.

It's a tricky thing. Armstrong is in demand not just as a cyclist but also as a cancer survivor and inspirational figure—in other words, because of the Livestrong Effect—yet he's never been shy about monetizing this appeal for personal gain. For example, when he spoke at the inaugural Pelotonia cancer ride in Columbus, Ohio, in August 2009, he charged the start-up charity his usual $200,000 speaking fee, including $100,000 worth of NetJets time, courtesy of Pelotonia sponsor and NetJets founder Rich Santulli. Pelotonia executive director Tom Lennox considers it worth the expense: the 2011 edition of the ride pulled in more than $11 million—all of which will be spent on cancer research, by the way.

In a sense, Livestrong and Lance are like conjoined twins, each depending on the other for survival. Separating them—or even figuring out where one ends and the other begins—is no small task. The foundation is a major reason why sponsors are attracted to Armstrong; as his agent Bill Stapleton put it in 2001, his survivor story “broadened and deepened the brand . . . and then everybody wanted him.” But the reverse is also true: without Lance, Livestrong would be just another cancer charity scrapping for funds.