The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (21 page)

Nike is the best example of this symbiotic relationship: Armstrong's longtime sponsor produces a complete line of Livestrong apparel, from shorts and backpacks to running shoes and T-shirts, all of which it pays Armstrong to wear. Under a five-year deal negotiated in early 2010—before the Landis allegations broke—Nike agreed to pay Livestrong a minimum of $7.5 million per year from its merchandise profits.

Nike's commitment goes well beyond selling merchandise and sponsorship to producing ads that promote Livestrong, Armstrong, and the Nike brand all at once. In one particularly memorable spot from 2009, Armstrong verbally took on his critics. “They say I'm arrogant . . . a doper . . . washed up . . . a fraud,” he said over scenes of himself on his bike intercut with shots of cancer patients getting chemo treatments, crawling out of bed, and unsteadily lifting weights. “I'm not back on my bike for
them
.”

 

It was clear which side RadioShack wanted to be on. Not long after the Nike ad aired, during the 2009 Tour, the electronics retailer stepped up to sponsor a 2010 squad built around Armstrong, paying him a reported $10 million to be team leader. The deal was negotiated by L.A.-based superagent Casey Wasserman, who donated $1 million to Livestrong via his family foundation. The RadioShack deal was brilliant in its own way. Not only would the company support Lance and his team, but it also made a major commitment to support Livestrong. The cancer charity, in fact, was the key to the whole thing. “We wouldn't have done it without Livestrong,” says Lee Applbaum, RadioShack's chief marketing officer.

But rather than simply donating money outright, RadioShack got its customers to pony up $1 or more at the checkout counter. So far, the Shack's customers have kicked in more than $10 million, according to company spokesman Eric Bruner. (Sometimes without knowing it: early on, a few customers complained that the $1 donation had been accidentally added to their bill.)

Not all the money goes where Livestrong says it goes, however. In January 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Armstrong made a personal video statement: to help earthquake victims, Livestrong would give $125,000 each to the charitable organizations Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health, which it subsequently did. RadioShack also hopped on board, soliciting $538,000 in customer donations for the Haitian cause. According to Livestrong, it gave $413,000 of the RadioShack money to Partners in Health. And the foundation's 2010 tax form shows a $458,000 donation to the group. But $333,000 of that had been previously allocated to a separate hospital project in Haiti that “had nothing to do with the earthquake,” says a spokesperson for Partners in Health. That means Livestrong used the RadioShack earthquake donations to cover its prior hospital pledge.

 

In one case, Armstrong himself stood to profit from the sale of a major Livestrong asset: its name. Most people are unaware that there are two Livestrong websites.
Livestrong.org
is the site for the nonprofit Lance Armstrong Foundation, while
Livestrong.com
is a somewhat similar-looking page that features the same Livestrong logo and design but is actually a for-profit content farm owned by Demand Media.

In 2008, the foundation licensed the Livestrong brand name to Demand, the online media company behind eHow and
Cracked.com
, among other properties.
Livestrong.com
was positioned as a “health, fitness, and wellness community,” offering an online calorie counter, exercise and yoga videos, and articles about such topics as “What Are the Signs and Symptoms of Rejecting Belly Button Rings?”

As compensation for the use of its name, the foundation received about 183,000 shares of stock, which it sold for $3.1 million when the company went public in January 2011. Armstrong also received 156,000 shares of his own as part of a spokesperson agreement. (His agents, Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs, also received shares.) After the deal was criticized in the media, Armstrong donated his initial sale proceeds—roughly $1.2 million—to the foundation and said he planned to donate the rest too.

Livestrong executives describe the deal as good for everyone, a way to spread their message of healthy lifestyles to a wider audience. Under the agreement, Armstrong provided blog entries, videos, and other content to
Livestrong.com
. “I actually have to do work for them,” he told me in an interview.

Adds Ulman: “They guaranteed us certain levels of traffic. They said, ‘We will build a site, and we will ultimately send people to the foundation.'” But traffic to the for-profit Demand Media site has surged, in part thanks to Lance's promotional work, while the foundation's traffic has remained essentially flat. And it was the foundation that paid to defend their joint trademark against the Barkstrong dog-collar salesman.

“It's definitely questionable,” says Mark Zimbelman, the Brigham Young University professor behind Fraudbytes. “Imagine if the American Red Cross sold its name to
Americanredcross.com
, and you can go there and buy vitamins. You think you're donating or helping the American Red Cross, but you're really not. It's unheard of.”

 

Armstrong benefits from his foundation in another, less tangible way: everything he does in connection with Livestrong gets him good press, diluting the flow of scandal stories. In September, he made a splash at a UN meeting on noncommunicable diseases, appearing at several forums to, as the foundation put it, “represent the 28 million people around the world living with cancer.” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a million-dollar donor, threw a lavish party that featured a Livestrong-produced documentary on young cancer patients in Rwanda and Jordan. Nike put up a three-story billboard near Madison Square Garden with Livestrong's latest slogan,
FIGHT LIKE HELL
.

That might as well be Lance's legal motto, since all signs point to a scorched-earth battle in his near future. At press time, Novitzky had been investigating Armstrong for more than 18 months, with still no indictments coming out of the Los Angeles grand jury. Whether that's good news or bad news for Armstrong remains to be seen, but most observers think an indictment is coming.

The feds aren't his only worry. Waiting in the wings is the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which has been conducting its own investigation since it received Floyd Landis's accusatory emails in May 2010. And while it remains true that Armstrong has never tested positive, at least officially, nowadays you don't need to flunk a lab test to be sanctioned for performance-enhancing drugs.

For the past several years, USADA has been handing down non-analytical positives—sanctioning athletes based on evidence, including testimony from teammates, other than direct positive tests. In 2008, the agency banned the cyclist Kayle Leogrande for EPO use based almost entirely on the testimony of a soigneur and a team administrator. Armstrong now has at least two former teammates, Landis and Hamilton, who say they witnessed him using banned drugs—and there may be more if, as
60 Minutes
reported, George Hincapie and others told similar stories to the grand jury.

That means Armstrong could be looking at a doping sanction, possibly a lifetime ban, and the loss of at least two of his Tour titles. (The statute of limitations for doping offenses is eight years.)

And while the foundation takes care to distance itself from the doping drama—McLane calls it “issues in the cycling world”—the potential fallout is considerable. If Armstrong turns out to have used drugs, then
It's Not About the Bike
—Livestrong's creation myth—will ring just as false as
Three Cups of Tea
.

“It's going to have a huge impact,” says Michael Birdsong, a former Livestrong supporter, now disillusioned, who estimates that he has given $50,000 to Livestrong over the years. “Who wants to support a foundation that was founded by a cheater? Not only a cheater, but a person who lied about it.”

The foundation says that its 2011 donations are up, year over year. But more than a third of the foundation's support comes from corporate sources and cross-marketing deals with Armstrong's sponsors, starting with that $7.5 million from Nike. If he is sanctioned for doping, then that money, and revenue from his other sponsors, becomes vulnerable. While Nike and RadioShack say they are sticking by Armstrong, that can always change: when Marion Jones was busted for doping, Nike dropped her.

More tellingly, the Livestrong Challenge ride and run events—which depend on people asking friends and neighbors for donations—are bringing in much less money these days. The rides raised only $6.3 million in 2011, before expenses, versus more than $11 million the previous year, according to the foundation's 2010 annual report. “It was a lot more difficult to raise $250 for Livestrong this year,” says one longtime foundation fund-raiser. “People asked a lot more questions.”

For his part, Armstrong is staying the course: he's innocent, he says, and the public backing that he and Livestrong need will always be there. “I can only tell you what people come up and say with regard to that,” he told me. “The support might even go to a place where they say, ‘I don't fucking know, and I don't care. I know what Livestrong means to myself and my family. That's what I care about.'”

Still, in a 2006 deposition in another court case, even Armstrong sounded worried about how a scandal could affect his sponsors and followers. “If you have a doping offense or you test positive, it goes without saying that you're fired, from all of your contracts,” he said. “It's not about money for me. It's all about the faith that people have put in me over the years. All of that would be erased. So I don't need it to say in a contract, You're fired if you test positive. That's not as important as losing the support of hundreds of millions of people.”

NICOLE PASULKA

FROM THE BELIEVER

 

I. Occupy Frommer's

 

T
HE HAWAIIAN HISTORY
that plays through headsets on the buses that shuttle tourists between the shops, hotels, restaurants, and beaches on Oahu is predictably bland, defanged, and heavy with half-truths. During the winter of 2011, I wrote such toothless audio tours for a popular tourism company. A typical paragraph might begin:

 

Even hula has its heroes. Early missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands discouraged the dance for being too sexy, but, lucky for us, the fun-loving last king of Hawaii, King David Kalâkaua, kept the hula alive in secret. In addition to preserving the hula, King Kalâkaua took a trip around the world, and wrote “Hawai‘i Pono‘ī” (“Hawaii's Own”), which later became the state song. But Kalâkaua's most visible achievement was the construction of the stunning ‘Iolani Palace on our left—the only royal palace built on U.S. soil. Flanked by palm trees, this shining example of Hawaiian renaissance architecture was built at the astronomical (for 1882) cost of $300,000. Don't miss a stop at the regal coronation pavilion, located on the palace grounds. King Kalâkaua ordered the palace's furniture from Boston, and Princess Lili‘uokalani, King David's sister and heir, was the last Hawaiian monarch to live here.

 

There's more to Kalâkaua and Princess Lili‘uokalani's story than most tours imply. A group of white businessmen and descendants of missionaries deposed the monarch in 1893, leading to the United States' annexation of Hawaii. These businessmen later imprisoned the princess in the palace, claiming she was behind a counterrevolutionary plot that would have restored her to power.

“Too controversial,” my project manager wrote in the comments. “Let's just say she
lived
here.”

I soon learned that paying my rent by writing for Hawaii's tourists meant each story had to be carefully finessed to minimize any controversy or potentially depressing details. According to the history we produced, nothing bad had ever really happened in Hawaii—except possibly for Pearl Harbor, though we even tiptoed around that; after all, in 2010, 1.2 million Japanese tourists spent nearly $2 billion in Hawaii. The standard tourist narrative downplays or disregards disease epidemics, violence against native Hawaiians, and movements for native sovereignty. Because who wants to be reminded they're taking a holiday on illegally annexed land?

The whitewashed versions of local history celebrating the welcoming Hawaiian culture, ethnic diversity, and natural beauty don't simply dominate the tourism industry. They've been accepted chronicles of the islands in film and on TV, and were taught in local and mainland schools for much of the twentieth century. Today, a movie like
The Descendants
at least acknowledges the complicated history that left a few people in control of most of Hawaii's land, and many popular guidebooks describe the collapse of indigenous rule as a result of certain monarchs' poor choices and American colonialism. Hawaiian schools and universities teach rich ethnic-studies curricula of local history, mythology, culture, politics, and art. However, the fact remains that of the seven million tourists who visit the islands each year, a huge number will experience Hawaii as a Polynesian Disneyland, a place staffed and populated by smiling hula girls ready with leis and hollowed-out pineapples filled with rum.

For around a thousand years, Hawaiian kings and chiefs—known as
ali'i
—controlled the land, and access was determined by social order. As the Hawaiian monarchy adopted a constitution and began to democratize in the 1830s and '40s, a series of landownership laws called “the Great Mahele” made it possible for private citizens to own property on the islands for the first time. The Great Mahele was intended to provide a substantial amount of land for Hawaiian commoners, but the concept of property ownership was alien to Hawaiians, and only about 1 percent of native Hawaiians ended up being able to take advantage of the law. American entrepreneurs and industrialists managed to acquire land that would become hugely lucrative sugar, pineapple, and coffee plantations, and 70 percent of native Hawaiians found themselves landless by the end of the nineteenth century.