Freakonomics Radio - 662. If You’re Not Cheating, You’re Not Trying

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

In sports, the rules are meant to be sacrosanct. But when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, the slope is super-slippery. (Part one of a two-part series.) SOURCES:April Henning, associate professor of international sport management at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.Aron D'Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games.Floyd Landis, former professional cyclist, founder of Floyd's of Leadville.Louisa Thomas, staff writer at The New Yorker. RESOURCES:Doping: A Sporting History, by April Henning and Paul Dimeo (2022)."The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong," by Matt Hart (The Atlantic, 2018).Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong, by Juliet Macur (2014).Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France, by Floyd Landis (2007).Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (1865). EXTRAS:"Has Lance Armstrong Finally Come Clean?" by Freakonomics Radio (2018). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There are a lot of explanations going around for why our political moment feels more chaotic than many of us have ever experienced. Let me offer up one more explanation. It has to do with rules. My belief is that many people, in many different circumstances, have come to think that the rules we live by are stupid, so stupid that the only sensible thing to do is break them. And if you get away with it, then you've got the confidence to just keep going. And now you've got different people playing the game of life by totally different rules. How do we think that's going to work out? All this got me thinking about one place where rules are still followed, for the most part, at least.

And that's what we're going to talk about today. Can I take you on a really weird digression? I would love a weird digression. Okay, down a rabbit hole? Sure. Have you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Not in approximately 45 years, but yeah. I read it when I was a sophomore in college.

I was one of those annoyingly good students who took notes in the margins, and I wrote all my papers on time. Anyway, so my daughter was five or six. I picked up the book again, and I started reading it to her. This is Louisa Thomas. She writes the sporting scene column for the New Yorker magazine, and she happens to be married to a former NFL player. Okay, back to Allison Wonderland. I picked up the same copy I had had in college. It was filled with these meticulous notes.

All the words were defined, the logic puzzles were solved, discussions in the back pages about the Victorian era and the creation of leisure and, like, the category of childhood. Then I started reading to her, and I realized I'd completely miss the point of this book. In this book, Alice is just always too small or too big. She was just like my five-year-old daughter. You know, she's caught between infancy and adulthood. The way in which she experiences this is that the rules of this Wonderland are completely arbitrary. And they change. Exactly.

They're subject to the whims of the authority figure. But what she's doing over the course of the book is developing a moral sensibility, which is not the same as moralizing. There's actually a character, the Duchess, who does all the moralizing, and she's a buffoon. Basically, it's a story about a person growing up in gaining confidence to question the irrationality of these orders and rules that don't make any sense and are changing all the time. And where does this come to a head? It comes to a head in a croquet game. There are no rules.

in this croquet game. It's completely lawless. The queen is going off with her head. It's horrible. And that's where Alice just loses her mind. But she's learning a couple things. One is that the rules need to be fair. They need to be consistent.

What would a proper proké game look like? You would not use hedgehogs as balls. Yeah, exactly. The thing is that life is more like the croquet game with the flamingo as a mallet and the hedgehog is a ball. We have to figure out some way of making our words. way through this totally arbitrary and capricious world. Sports are really fun, but to me, they're a place where we basically learn to live with arbitrary rules. They teach us how to tolerate

these injustices and give us a framework for working them out and let us practice dealing with disappointment or experiencing success or working together. What you're describing are the virtues of sport, which is you're going to play this game, you're going to play by these rules. And if not, then you might be judged and policed or penalized or something. Theoretically, what you're describing is also supposed to apply to society generally, yes? Yeah, but I mean, that's, I think that sports are, like, when done well, are practice for society. Practice or just done better? Maybe done better.

Maybe it's just a way of living, a way of being in the world. It doesn't have to be a simulacrum, right? it can just actually just be life. What people care about changes over time as society changes. A lot of things that we used to care about we know are freighted with hypocrisy or are complicated in some way. Sports reflect and to some extent either anticipate or lead society and where it's going. What do you think about Louisa Thomas's argument? Can sport really provide that kind of clarity?

Does it really hold a mirror up to society? and what changes when the rules in sport change? For instance, it used to be that if a professional athlete used cannabis, it could end his career. Something that I found was beneficial to me and help me perform and make everyone money and make everyone happy. It was something that I hid. It's like I turned into like a criminal and a drug addict.

But today, around 75% of Americans live in a place where cannabis is legal, and the major sports leagues pretty much ignore cannabis. Some people want to bring other drugs into the arena. My goal is to bring about the 10th age of mankind, the enhanced age, where everyone has the opportunity to become enhanced. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will talk to athletes and academics, rule breakers, and the new rule makers about what exactly constitutes cheating. People like to call it cheating.

I'm not sure who was cheated, but that's just what it was. Winners and losers, sinners and saints, and the very thin line that separates all of them. That's over the next two episodes of Freakonomics Radio, and it starts now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. It's still relatively common for a professional athlete to get suspended for violating a banned substance policy. It just happened with Paul George of the Philadelphia 76ers and the NBA. This kind of thing may generate a headline or two, and then,

it fades away. But once in a while, a violation turns into a global scandal, complete with moral outrage and a public reckoning. Floyd, people get asked all the time, but with you, I really want to know, what was your first bicycle? Oh, man, it was a huffy. Ah, huffy. I don't even know if you can get those anymore. Floyd Landis used to be a professional cyclist. For three years, he was a key member of the U.S. Postal Service team, which was led by Lance Armstrong. Armstrong won the Tour de France all three years at Landis rode with him, and then Landis left to lead his own team, Phonac.

Phonac is a Swiss hearing aid company. And then Landis won the Tour de France. But the victory came with a huge asterisk, as we'll hear later. Landis grew up in rural Pennsylvania. He was the second eldest of six kids. I grew up Mennonite, which is really conservative, family-based. It's its own little community like the Amish. Professional sports to them is just frivolous.

It's not something that they would ever have encouraged me to get into. I was a teenager in the mid-late 90s. Mountain biking was a new fad, so I got a mountain bike, and I was so proud of that thing. And as a kid, it was a way to get around. And for me, it was an escape to try to just go think about life and be alone out in nature. It was good for me. When it was clear that I was a little more obsessed with riding my bike than they would otherwise have wanted. I wouldn't say they'd try to get in the way of it, but they just wanted to make it.

but they just wanted to make sure that that wasn't my focus in life. Would they drive you to races and things like that? They did sometimes, as much as they tried to encourage me not to make that the single thing that I was focused in on life, which is my personality. But they were always supportive in the sense that they came to see what I was doing and wanted to just try to understand it. If you could just talk about your path to professional cycling, I really just want to hear what it took to get there. there's got to be such a thing as natural talent, but there's also hard work, there's luck, later, there were chemicals. I would conflate the luck and the talent part together.

I was talented and lucky to be talented at riding a bicycle. Were you good at other sports? Not as much because to be good at cycling, it helps to be a smaller, skinnier kid. In any event, it became clear quickly as soon as I went to a few local bike races that I was really good at it. then it's fun, right? Like you win the race, then you think, okay, well, I'm just going to do this. But it's one thing to be good at junior sports, and then it's a whole other level to be good at the very high end of the professional athletics. And you don't really know how far you can get. There were times when I really committed to and said, this is what I'm going to do. And there were times when it felt like I'd made the wrong choice, but I didn't really have other alternative options.

And so I just kept going. How old were you when you became world class? I raced mountain bikes. I won the junior national championships in 1993 when I was 17. I raced professional mountain bikes for three or four years after that. And then I switched to road racing. And within a couple of years, ended up on the Postal Service team. That was luck, too, right?

Lance was winning, and it was an American team. And I happened to be an American with some talent. Right. Five years earlier, there wouldn't have been a big American team like that for you to be on, I guess. Yeah, that's right. A lot of these things are just chance. I got hired onto the team in 2002, and I was 26 years old at that point. It was a real memorable experience. At that point, Lance had already won the Tour de France three times. He was a superstar. I was never exposed to anything like this. The whole thing was a whirlwind. At one point, you know, I'm staying in Motel 6 racing. little towns across the country. And the next thing, you know, he's got a private jet. We got security around and we have our own hotel. I assume it was a lot of fun, but also complicated. Oh, it was great. It was almost like it was a movie. He kind of envisioned like, oh, I'm going to be a professional athlete, but you don't really know what it's going to be like when all of a sudden everyone's focused on you.

To the extent they were focused on me, it was because they're focused on Lance at that point, which was good, because I got to experience the whole pressure of the team winning, but it was really on him. that actually in the end helped me to be able to win the race on my own. But let's not undersell you. Like you were the key de mystique, the worker bee, that's always making sure he's got the path to victory. That's right. There were nine people on each team, and typically you have one guy who's capable of doing the best.

And so everybody supports that person. In this case, it was Lance. What was your relationship with Lance? You didn't know him much before you got on the team, did you? No, I didn't know him at all. I had met him one time at a racing in the U.S. But pretty quickly I became, I would say, friends with him. I ended up being among the best teammates that he had in the Tour de France.

You know, he took care of me. We went to San Maritz and trained for a couple weeks before the tour, just Lance and I. And so I got to know him pretty well, and he's a strange person. But to the extent that he has any friends, I was his friend at that point. What was the performance enhancing drug situation like then? What did you know? what didn't you know, then what were you asked or told to do? I had been around cycling long enough with people that had been on different levels of teams

that I understood that this was probably part of it, but I'd never been confronted with the idea of actually doing it. I didn't have any kind of access to it or wouldn't even have known where to look. So you'd been a totally clean rider up to that point? It just wasn't a decision I had to make up until June of 2002, the month before the tour. I talked to Johan Brunel, who was the team director a few months beforehand. He had brought it up. We had a doctor named McKellie Ferrari, who was really well-known cycling doctor.

To his credit, he was a smart guy. He wasn't just giving people drugs and hoping for the best. He understood that does come with some risk, and he wasn't just out there saying, let's just take whatever amounts of drugs you have to take to win. It was more like, let's be careful, and tried to help you understand what you were involved in. And this was mostly EPO you're taking, right? The synthetic version of the erythropoitan hormone. So there's a couple different things.

There's EPO, which increases your red blood cell count, which for endurance sports is a major limiting factor, delivering oxygen to your muscles while you're exercising. But there's also anabolic. There's testosterone and there's peptides, human growth hormone, things like that that also help you recover faster. I think that there's really not much else you could do that. You could get away with. amphetamines and things like that are just too easy to test for, so we didn't do anything like that. Describe how you got put on the program and how you're supposed to beat the drug testing. The way the tests had evolved in cycling, you couldn't just simply use as much EPO as you wanted,

so you would do blood transfusions. You would take some blood out and refrigerate it for a period of time. We would add a little bit of EPO to try to more quickly replace those red blood cells, and then we would have that blood to use during the race. Got it. And when is the testing window? For EPO, the testing window is like six to eight hours, so you could pretty much be sure you could get away with it. When you put the blood back in, you do that immediately before a race then?

A week into the race, you could add a half a liter of blood and still appear as though you hadn't really added it because they're also testing for the red blood cell parameters too, so you're trying to game that system. So you would put it back in during the race. What happens during the race is you don't use up red blood cells, but because you have so much extra stress, you have what effectively looks like less red blood cells because it diluted. There's more water in your blood and more plasma just because there's cortisol, another stress hormones, make it appear as if it's reduced. So a week into the race, you could add a half a liter of blood and still appear as though you hadn't really added it.

Looking back now, you know a lot more now than you knew then, but were pretty much all the top teams doing some version of this? Absolutely, not pretty much. It was openly talked about, you know, within the sport. What was it like for you, especially, you know, someone who grows up in rural religious America, and now you're on the superstar team and you're winning these Tour de France's and you're doping. Did you feel guilty, conflicted? When I was a kid and when I first got into this and was winning mountain bike races and just enjoying my life, this never crossed my mind that this was a decision that would be confronted with. To this day, there is no doubt in my mind that everybody involved knew and was in on it. I mean, people like to call it cheating.

You can call it that. I'm not sure who was cheated, but that's just what it was. By the time I got to being one of the lieutenants on the Postal Service team with Lance, I understood it to be part of what was. happening, I just came to accept that either I'm going to have to quit or I'm going to have to accept that this is just what it is. I don't know that I understood the magnitude of the risk, but I understood that people viewed it in different ways, depending on their perspective on the sport. If you're in the inside, it's one thing, and if you're on the outside, it's another. And I can't say it was a matter of guilt. I didn't really like it, but there wasn't anything

I could do about it. Were there physical repercussions? Were you concerned about long-term health, anything like that? No, in cycling, the amounts of these anabolics, which are usually the more risky drugs that you would take in sports, it's such a small amount because you don't want to gain muscle mass. You just want to recover from it. Okay, so in 2006, you moved to the Fonac team and you, Floyd Landis, not Lance, you win the Tour de France, but pretty much immediately after, you're charged with doping, correct? Yeah, it was a few days after. What were those few days like between winning and then being accused. Man, I haven't really thought about it too much since,

because so many things happened since then. But even if you win the race, you're extremely tired. You're not out partying. I mean, do you even want to stand up and walk around? Everything I've read about cycling, like all you guys would minimize even walking to the fridge. Yeah, it's pretty bad. I can't say that there was a time where I really got to celebrate the thing.

I was still in Europe. I was with the team management when they got. got this call from the UCI, which is the NFL of cycling. He came to my room, and then as soon as he told me, I mean, I knew that life was never going to be the same. And I was kind of in shock. I didn't really know what to do. As much as I had been on the team with Lance where he was a big star, I never had to actually

manage the PR side of things. I didn't have a team around me of people that could advise me. If I had another, you know, season of having won the tour, I would have had all of that. but I just didn't have anybody that could advise me on what to do. I don't know if anybody would have known what to do. We got this positive test. You're guilty. What are you going to say?

So you denied? Yeah, I didn't want to deny it. I didn't really want to admit it either. In the back of my mind, I knew that if you admit to it and spill the beans, then you don't come back. Like, you're never going to race again. In hindsight, I guess I probably should have just told the truth right up front. I don't know what would have happened. I might have been arrested. I was in France. It's actually a crime there. But if I tell the truth, it takes out a bunch of people who are my friends. I've just spent the last 10 years of my life with.

And then I'm going to put them in the same situation I'm in. So I just did the easy thing, which was just deny it, but it wasn't very good at it. Your denial was pretty robust. You wrote a book, right? Positively false, the real story of how I won the Tour de France, which was not a truthful account plainly. it's a lot of trouble to write a book that says that you didn't do what you knew you had done. Why did you take that step? I'm faced with this situation where I do want to race my bike again. I don't know why I didn't just accept that this was over. Like if I could take a step back and look at it from more clear frame of mind, I would have realized that they're never going to let me race my bike again.

Like this was too big of a scandal. But you hadn't quite comprehended that yet. Accepted probably is a better word. The minute you say that it makes sense. this is something you've done since you were a kid and you're great at it. You're not just going to stop. This is going to sound stupid out of context, but it just felt unfair. Like, I'm one of everyone else doing what we do.

Within the game we were playing, I was not breaking the rules. So I decided that, okay, I have to fight this thing, and I have to at least tell a story that is believable so that I can try to get back and race. I sound like an idiot. But that's what it felt like at the time. And it was wrong. Obviously, I was wrong, and it was not the right decision and one that I regret.

I feel for you because you're stuck in this impossible situation. I don't think anyone hearing you talk now would know what they would do other than try to lose yourself somehow. What was your life like then? Three weeks after the tour ended, I had my hip replaced. I had broken my hip in 2003 while I was on the Postal Cerell. team, and it had deteriorated over time. As part of that, I was prescribed viking to deal with it. I was going to sound bad to say, but that really helped having that. I just had that, and I drank way too much, and I just checked out. I couldn't face it. I knew that I shouldn't be denying it

and defending myself, but I wasn't willing to just give up on everything I had done in my life and just say, okay, well, that's it. Did you have people in your life that you could have this conversation with? Yeah, but nobody knew what to say. Once you understood the story, and how ridiculous it was, what was I going to do? That was already the fall guy, right? I'm just being crucified in the press. And what am I going to do? Turn on everyone else.

Then they're just going to say, oh, yeah, he's just saying that because he got caught. I mean, there was no way out. There just was no way out. After the break, Floyd Landis finds a way out, but not the one that anyone expected. At some point, it all added up to, I can't live like this. Why am I doing this? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakin'Ombner.

This is Freakonomics Radio. If you'd like to keep up with everything we do around here, you can sign up for our newsletter at Freakonomics.com or at Steven Dubner. Substack.com. We will be right back. Before the break, we heard the former pro cyclist Floyd Landis talk about getting caught for doping after his 2006 Tour de France victory. There is much more to that story, which we will get to. But first, I want to back up a bit because the story of performance enhancers in sport did not. and with Floyd Landis, and it certainly didn't start with him.

Historically, we know that this has been a pursuit of the many. The ancient Greeks and Romans were pursuing this. That is April Henning. I am an associate professor of international sport management at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. You're American? I am American, yes. How would you describe your research interests generally? I'm mostly interested in performance enhancement,

as well as the overlap of the performance world, with well-being culture, my main motivator is that I want to make sport better and safer for athletes. The foundational part of that is getting rid of binary black and white, good, bad thinking, and really looking at the reality of what athletes do and holding that up against the rules and policies that we've put in place to say, do these actually make sense. And how did you become interested in sports, policy doping, et cetera? So I'm a runner, and I was training for my first marathon while I was entering my PhD proposal stage. That sounds like a lot to do at one time.

Yes, maybe not the best set of things to do. But when I was training for that first marathon, I was running with this running group. It was these older men who were much more experienced at the marathon, and we were out on a long run. One of them handed me one of those little electrolyte gels and said, try this. It'll give you some energy. So I took it. And then 10 minutes later, just hurling my guts out on the side of the road, it turns out it did not agree with me. Afterwards, I was like, why the fuck would I have taken candy from a stranger?

I know better than this, but it got me thinking about what athletes do in their preparation and how they get interested in these things. What's the definition of a performance enhancing drug? How academic do you want me to be? Very. Performance enhancing drugs are a category of a broader set of drugs. known as human enhancement drugs. Generally speaking, performance enhancement drugs are those that are taken with the intent to enhance some aspect of human performance, whether physical, cognitive or social, some aspect of the human condition. What would you say have been the best performance enhancing drugs in history?

I mean, most effective and safest, let's say. You don't want to die. Stimulants are very effective, especially in the short term. And many of them can be used quite safely, as those of us who use a lot of caffeine know. Of course, anything has risks. But stimulants, in a lot of cases, could be used within reason to get a performance benefit and to have fairly benign side effects. I gather from your writing that there is a pretty long history of blaming bad outcomes on performance-enhancing drugs, even when there's not strong evidence. Is that the case? Yes, yes. There have been a couple of cases where an athlete has died, and there has been some evidence that they were using some form of performance enhancement, and the cause of death has been pinned by often the media on the substances rather than what the medical examiner has said.

And is that because journalism likes the most salacious story possible, or does that more reflect the way that our definition of performance enhancing is informed, you know, maybe less by science and more by cultural mores or politics? I think it could be a mix of the two. So in two cases, nude and Mark Jensen and Tommy Simpson, the evidence that it was actually the performance-enhancing drugs, that was the cause of death, was picked up by the media. These were cycling deaths, and what was missed is that they were both racing in conditions that were difficult,

often without what we would consider contemporary nutrition and hydration. Canude Annamarck Jensen, a 21-year-old Danish cyclist, died at the 1960 Rome Olympics during a race of 175 kilometers or around 109 miles. His death was immediately blamed on amphetamines, and the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, set out to create an anti-doping commission. Decades later, when Jensen's original autopsy report was recovered, it showed that no drugs had been found in his body. His death was more likely due to heat stroke. It was 104 degrees that day in Rome. The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, was founded in 1999. It maintains a list of over 300 banned substances, each of which only needs to meet two of three criteria. It poses a health risk, it enhances performance, or it violates, quote, the spirit of sport. April Henning,

along with her co-author Paul DeMaio, has written about all this in a book. called doping, a sporting history. There are lots of twists and turns. It wasn't always so straightforward, and that perhaps the initial reasons for pursuing anti-doping are maybe less fit for purpose today than what they were when this all started. What do you mean by that less fit for purpose today? When anti-doping first became something that was being pursued by the IOC, they were worried about stimulants.

The tests that they were able to develop for those were straightforward. It was after that when substances that people were using became much more complex, much harder to test for directly, but also that could be taken and the benefit gotten months or weeks before the competition. So when you were testing them in a competition, there wasn't necessarily evidence that they had taken anything. This made the system much more complex because then there was this perceived need that then we have to test athletes outside of competition. the nature of doping because it is secretive because it's against the rules, because it has to be done underground on the quiet. The best substances are the ones that we don't know about.

How do you think about the spectrum between daily, let's just call it drug use, caffeine? From there to performance enhancers, I'm just curious how you think about what's a drug and what's not a drug. I think it's very fluid. You do have on the one end the sort of things that are very culturally, socially acceptable. And what's culturally or socially acceptable varies across time and space. One of the things that lots of people try to do is break down between natural and artificial. And I think that that's really a trap. I mean, I'm sitting in a room surrounded by electricity and LED lights and talking to you across an ocean. Is any of this natural? 50 years ago, no,

but now this seems totally normal. So when we think about performance enhancers, the difference between something that's very normal and something that we think of as being extreme, changes over time. So what was the difference between normal and extreme in early 2000s cycling? When Lance Armstrong kept winning the Tour de France, and then when Floyd Landis won his, today we know that most of the top tier cyclists back then were doping. But when Landis tested positive after his victory, it came as a shock. It was still relatively new at that point.

I was somewhat recognizable. Anytime I would interact with people, they would say, oh, I'm so sorry about what happened to you, and it was so unfair, and it made me feel awful. At some point, it all added up to, I can't live like this. I don't want to deal with this anymore. On the selfish side, there's nothing in this for me. Like, I'm never racing again.

Why am I doing this? So ultimately in 2010, you decided to blow the whistle. Walk me through that. Once I decided, okay, I need to tell this story somehow. How do I do it in a way? way that, number one, people will believe it because I've already lied about it. And number two, what are they going to think my motive is? At this point, all my motive was to just try to stay sane. But I also still had this real resentment towards USA cycling who was in on this whole thing.

Everybody there, the CEO of USA Cycling, everybody that was at the organization of cycling in the United States knew that this was what was happening. All of them acted like, I was the bad guy and washed their hands of it, like, well, we finally caught the bad guy. And at this point, Lance Armstrong's reputation is still sterling, yeah? Maybe not quite sterling. There were articles here and there, and if you piece them all together, you could be pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but he was able to navigate it all. He had a PR machine behind him.

So what I decided to do was send some emails to USA cycling, telling them information that I knew they already knew, but just getting it on the record. In April of 2010, four years after the Tour de France that Landis won, Landis wrote to the CEO of USA cycling, Steve Johnson. In the email, he described how Lance Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team had repeatedly used performance-enhancing drugs. The subject line of the email read, nobody is copied on this one, so it's up to you to demonstrate your true colors. They wouldn't do anything about it. So eventually, I reached out to the anti-doping agency as well. That was the United States Anti-Doping Agency, or USADA. It's CEO,

then and now is Travis Tigart. I can't say that I put them on much higher of a pedestal than USA cycling, but at the end of the day, I figured they would do something because Travis Tiger was all about self-promotion, and if he could take down Lance, that's really what they wanted. Why was there that hunger to get him? Because the guys that run these anti-doping agencies are former athletes themselves. Tiger ended up being in one of Time Magazine's People of the Year. That's what he wanted. He wanted to be famous.

We ran this characterization past Usada. A spokesperson told us that Floyd Landis's take was, quote, inaccurate. They added, many people were exposed and sanctioned for breaking the rules in addition to Lance Armstrong. Armstrong was given an opportunity to cooperate and chose not to. You write to Usada. What happened then? Within a matter of a couple weeks, Usada reached out and asked if I would meet with them, along with this guy, Jeff Novitsky. I'd heard his name because he was part of the Balco thing.

The Balco thing was a huge scandal around the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative. Federal agents, including Jeff Novitsky, had raided the lab in 2003. Balco was found to have been supplying designer steroids to elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Marion Jones. At this point, I just accepted the fact that I was committed. I'm just going to have to tell the story. So I said, yeah, I'll meet with you guys. And so I sat in a conference room with them in Marina del Rey. I can tell by your tone of voice now, it's a shi memory to think about, yeah?

Yeah, I just didn't want to have to do it, but I decided this is what had to be done. And so I sat there for 12 hours and told him pretty much in detail whatever I could remember about how things worked. There was some risk in it. I didn't have a lawyer with me. He was a federal agent at the time, but I just laid it all out and left and said, do whatever you want with it at this point. I'm not looking for anything from this. I just want the truth to be out there. And I don't have a solution, but maybe you just.

do. What was their solution? Their solution was to take down Lance. They really didn't expose any of USA cycling. One of my good friends and teammates, Dave Zabriski, as part of what he told Novitsky and Travis Tiger was that he had initially gone to USA cycling when he was confronted with this and asked Steve Johnson why they aren't doing something about it. Like, I'm being asked to use drugs. And Steve told him, well, it's just the way it works. You're just going to have to deal with it. They just kept everything about USA cycling out of it. So unfortunately, all they really want, wanted was Lance. At the end of the day, if you can't face the fact that the organization that runs the whole thing is in on it, then you didn't fix anything. Where does that leave you, though?

When I first decided to do this, I thought, I'll lay this out there and see what happens. And then the Wall Street Journal, I'm not sure how they got them, but they printed a lot of the emails that I had sent. And of course, Lance, then he took his PR machine and just started attacking me. We reached out to USA Cycling and Steve Johnson and didn't hear back, but Johnson has previously denied these allegations. Floyd Landis responded to the campaign against him by filing suit under the Federal False Claims Act, alleging that Lance Armstrong had defrauded the U.S. Postal Service by accepting millions of dollars of sponsorship money while knowingly cheating in races. So I said to myself, I don't know how much power Lance has here and how much of this he can stop.

If I file this whistleblower complaint, then I have some control over actual depositions and getting information. I can force the issue because I need people to believe that this is true because if he can shut this down, then I'm from every direction. He's going to fight, so I have to deal with him on the level that he likes to fight. I filed

this whistleblower complaint, which of course used against me and said it's about money and it never was about money. It became a matter of public dispute at that point. It became Lance against disgruntled Floyd. In 2018, Lance Armstrong, a

agreed to pay the U.S. government $5 million to settle the claims. Floyd Landis got a whistleblower award of a little over a million dollars and another $1.65 million to cover his legal fees. By then, Armstrong had gone on a confessional tour. It started in 2013 with Oprah Winfrey. Let's start with the questions that people around the world have been waiting for you to answer. And for now, I'd just like a yes or no. Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling?

performance. Yes. Yes or no. In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope? Yes. In your opinion, was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping seven times in a row? Not in my opinion. I also interviewed Armstrong in 2018, Freakonomics Radio episode 342, if you want to hear it, We called it, has Lance Armstrong finally come clean? So, Floyd, when is the last time you spoke with Lance?

Oh, man, it's got to be 18 years. The last time I saw him was in a mediation for the whistle lowercase, but he didn't speak to me. What do you think it would be like to sit down with him? I'm just curious if a part of you would like to reconcile or at least have a conversation? I know based on things that he said about me that he's just not interested in talking to me.

I don't really care one way or the other. I don't feel like it would be somehow soul cleansing to talk to him. He took it a little far. I did too. I wrote a book and lied, and I did things that don't really make sense if you step back and say, was this person being objective.

He's in the same position. I empathize with him on how badly he's been beaten down, and it sucks. It's awful. And he's a human in the end. I don't wish any harm on him. I don't foresee us ever talking again. I don't feel like we need to, but I don't have any aversion to it.

Let's talk about your life now. What are you doing? I have a brand of nutritional products. Some of it's hemp-based, some of its CBD, but nutritional products called Floyds of Leadville. We have a marijuana dispensary in Leadville as well. It's good. It's something for me to focus on. I don't know if you can tell.

As much as I've come to accept all this, when I have to sit and talk about it for a little while, it still causes me some anxiety. And I'm sure that's probably never going to go away. But one thing that I didn't have for many years was something positive and completely unrelated to focus on. There was so much litigation and also just so much just regret and wishing that I could still race my bike that I didn't really move on. Do you happen to remember John Wooden, the basketball coach UCLA? Yeah, yeah. Long time ago, he won all those titles.

He once said something I wanted to run past you. He once said, be more concerned with your character than your reputation because your character is what you really are. while your reputation is merely what others think you are. I wonder how that idea lands with you, how you think about the difference between your reputation and your character. It took me a long time to really make the distinction between the two. If you have the drive and the obsession with being a professional athlete, you kind of do care what people think.

Your reputation does matter in the real world because that's how people are going to treat you based on what they perceive you to be. And so I've learned the hard way that it does matter. But at the end of the day, when you lay down at night and go to sleep, it's just you. I regret a lot of these things, and I wish they hadn't happened. You can sit here and say, what would you change? I'd change all kinds of things, but I have to deal with it. I have to accept the fact that that reputation is gone. What does really matter?

It's just, can I just say to myself today, I was a good person, and I didn't make any decisions like that again. How do you feel about yourself? I don't mean to overemphasize the religious background, but a lot of people grow up religious and then move away from it. But when you grow up in a religious household, you have values instilled in you whether you know it or not. Then, you know, if your life goes a slightly different direction and you do some things that you know that your family would have frowned upon,

you know, everybody has a different way of dealing with that. You can just say, well, screw them, I'm me, they're them, they're old-fashioned, whatever. But I'm just curious how you're feeling about yourself. One thing that made a real difference for me is that my parents are just, I mean, I have wonderful parents. as much as I left the Mennonite church, I can't say a bad thing about them and they're loving and they're forgiving.

In some ways, I made it harder. I can't even put into words the amount of shame I felt over this whole thing. They just forgave me and that's all they would ever do, but the shame that I felt just prevented any kind of reflection on what my character might need to be

or what I need to change. It was more like I just can't even believe I got myself into this situation. As much as I had lived it, I still just couldn't believe. it. People's reputations can change and the context can change. The world becomes a different place now. It's a whole different place than it was 20 years ago. That's for sure. Just how different is the world now when it comes to performance enhancing drugs?

The enhanced games are a new version of the Olympics, but we allow performance enhancing drugs. It's coming up. After the break, I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio. Nearly 20 years ago, Floyd Landis was stripped of his Tour de France victory because he, like most of his peers had used performance-enhancing drugs. This May, a sporting event is scheduled in Las Vegas that will celebrate the use of performance-enhancing drugs. My name is Dr. Aaron D'Souza. I'm the president and founder of the Enhanced Games. Just for the record, D'Souza has a doctorate in law, not medicine. The enhanced games are a new version of the Olympics, but we allow performance enhancing drugs and we pay all athletes. We spoke with D'Souza a few months ago. This is a pretty

typical timeline for Freakonomics Radio. These episodes take a while to put together. Back then, DeSuzza was speaking with a lot of people. I've probably done over 2,000 interviews in the last three years. I'm sitting here in your studio as a very successful businessman today, but when this started, it was just me. This started with just one tweet. That was in 2023. Our very first tweet, got nine million views in 24 hours. Then Peter Thiel came to me and he said, oh, this is something very interesting. Peter Thiel is the venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He is a major backer of what are sometimes called transhumanist projects, life extension, human, machine integration, things like that. And he had a history with DeSuzza going back to 2009.

It was DeSuzza who came up with a plan to sue the gossip website Gawker, which had outed Teal as gay. The plan worked. Gawker was put out of business. DeSouza went on to work for a couple of finance startups and then started working on an idea he'd been thinking about since he was an undergraduate. I always say it's not my idea. It's been talked about in pubs and bars for, it seems, time in memorial. Many eminent scholars have written about the idea of an enhanced version of the Olympics. Most notably, Professor Julian Seville Rescue at Oxford University. I had read some of Professor Sevalescu's papers, and about three years ago, I decided to make it a reality.

My theory of social change is very simple. Change only happens when someone puts a suit on and goes to work every day trying to solve a problem. Despite lots of people being interested in performance enhancements, no one had ever made it their job to make it a reality. So DeSuzza made it his job. We're building a purpose-built arena on the campus for resorts world, Las Vegas. Three sports track, swimming, and weightlifting, all sprint events. And the objective there is to break all of the major world records. Athletes have three avenues of competition.

First, they could be natural athletes, which a lot of journalists forget about. You can be a fully natural athlete and compete at the enhanced games. You can be self-enhanced. Some athletes have a doctor they like to work with and a system that they work through. Or you can be enhanced through a clinical research project, which is fully supervised by an independent institutional review board and authorized by regulators. This clinical research project will be administered by the United Arab Emirates Department of Health. As of this recording, 45 athletes from around the world have signed up to compete in these enhanced games.

The total purse for each event is $500,000, with half going to the first place finisher. A new world record in the 50-meter swim or the 100-meter sprint will earn another $1 million. Among the financial backers of this project are Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm, 1789 Capital. Aaron DeSouza sees the enhanced games as using science and technology to expand the boundaries of athletic achievement. The Old Guard, not surprisingly, is horrified. The International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency issued a joint statement calling the enhanced games irresponsible and immoral. They warned that some performance-enhancing drugs can lead to serious long-term health consequences, even death. DeSouza says there are safeguards against that.

There's pre-care and aftercare. Before any athlete competes, they have to take a full system health checkup, MRIs, echocardiograms, blood work. After the event, particularly if they've chosen to be part of the clinical research trial, we will monitor them for five years. But DeSuzes' goals extend far beyond the athletic competition. My goal is to bring about the 10th age of mankind, the enhanced age, where everyone has the opportunity. to become enhanced. The use of enhancements is actually pretty commonplace now. Cosmetic medicine is very accepted. You can walk into a doctor here in New York City on Park Avenue and say I would like breast augmentation or remove wrinkles. Those are non-therapeutic procedures, not treating a disease.

And they carry great risk, particularly surgical interventions. Yet if you walk into that same doctor and say, I'd like to run faster, jump higher, I'd like to be stronger or younger for longer. Somehow this is ethically complex in medicine. I don't believe that that's correct. The moral question is not to say some substances are good or some substances are bad, but rather to say some interventions are productive and some are not. DeSuzza sees the enhanced games as both a sporting event and a biotech play. The enhanced website shows three testosterone products that they say will be available to order in March.

the end conclusion of the enhanced games is not a sporting event but it's actually curing aging because we can create the market structure by which performance enhancements can come to market. We think there's a very large market for this as proven by Ozempic and other products. Right now

biotechnology companies will not invest in building new performance enhancing drugs because they can't be used by athletes in their core context. Now that they can be used at the enhanced games and then sold to the wider public, only one of them needs to succeed. It will be worth a trillion dollars. All that money will then be reinvested into R&D. New startups will come out of that, which will sell their products on the enhanced games platform. And then suddenly we're in a world where we have literal superpowers.

So what does success look like for DeSouza? Success looks like breaking all the major world records, building a sustainable, publicly listed company that pays athletes extraordinarily well. I can't foresee what would stop us. Like, are we going to say, oh, you know, what, we will limit ourselves to being humans 1.0 and never try and progress? The Enhanced games are inevitable. If I walk out this door today and get hit by a bus, this will succeed. There are a few updates to report here.

Enhanced is indeed trying to go public and is currently in regulatory review, but they will be doing it without Aaron D'Souza. He told us it was, quote, the right time to install corporate management. He has been replaced by Maximilian Martin as CEO. Enhanced gave us a statement saying that they were grateful for DeSuzza's vision, but that, quote, the viewpoints expressed by DeSuza during this interview should be considered personal opinions and do not in any way reflect those of Enhanced. So we will just have to wait and see what happens in May. I thought that the big sports betting sites or prediction markets might have contracts written

on whether any world records will be broken at the enhanced games, but I haven't seen any yet. I was also curious to know what someone like Floyd Landis thought about this idea. Oh, man. I haven't looked it up at a while. I was fascinated by the idea that the Olympic Committee was somehow opposed to it. I don't know what possible power they would have to say you can't have enhanced games. Like, do whatever you want. This has nothing to do with the Olympics.

You think they're worried that no records will be broken, which would indicate that everybody in the Olympics is already doping? Yeah, I mean, that's what will happen. I can tell you right now. That's what will happen. No records will be broken. Then they have a dilemma. There's two possible options. Either the drugs don't work or the real option, which is everybody's already on them.

And they don't want to face that. Okay, so that's Landis's take. I also went back to April Henning, the scholar of sports doping. What I consider to be the biggest victory of anti-doping has been the cultural acceptance of doping as being a thing that is off limits as being a thing that if you do, you are a bad person. That sort of moralization. This has become so taboo. But if you test positive for something, we don't even want to hear your explanation. So the founder of the enhanced games would probably argue that that's about to change.

What do you make of that new competition? The enhanced games are an interesting idea. I think it's important to distinguish between the broad strokes philosophical or principled view of these things aren't necessarily bad and sport isn't necessarily pure from the distinct thing that is the enhanced games. There are things that are prohibited in sport that could potentially be used in ways that are less risky or lower harm that might actually benefit a lot of people. Lots of things that are prohibited in sport are used as medications for very specific purposes. But sport has told us that these are very bad things. Sports sets up a moral framework for how we should be. It's a phenomenon bound by rules.

Rules are what make it what it is. And if those rules aren't consistently applied, then the sport ceases to make any sense. A foul in basketball is a foul in basketball no matter where you're playing it. 100 meters is 100 meters, no matter which track or swimming pool or anything else that you're competing in. That's what makes it sport. We want everything to be very black and white. We want it to be clear-cut. It's why we get upset when somebody cheats. If somebody gets away with something, if they get away with a foul, if they get away with doing something dishonest, because that's not what sport is meant to be. This is why doping caught the public imagination and why it's been so easily painted in moralistic terms. We talk about sport in terms of being clean sport or dirty sport. We talk about clean athletes and dirty athletes. That is very, very polarizing moralistic language. But we've also extrapolated this to wider life. We use athletes as role models. We use what they do, how they prepare, how they live, as an example for how we want to be. Everybody wants to be like Mike, right? There's a reason athletes are on the Wheaties box. We want to be like them. It's this collision of culture with rules, with morality, with doing things the right way, with sporting success, that we hold up as the ideal. And that's why we're so let down when we find out that athletes have been doping or that they've broken a rule or that they've done one of these things that we consider to be immoral. But what happens when the rules of society are changing more quickly than the rules of sports?

We will get into that part of the conversation in our next episode. We'll hear from Ricky Williams, the former NFL running back, who paid an enormous price for his cannabis use. That feeling of everyone knowing, oh, I thought my life was over. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs with help from Dalvin Abouaji. It was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Augusta Chubes. Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Alaria Montenicourt, and Zach Lipinski.

Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening. So I don't drink alcohol. Why? Because I don't think it's a productive intervention in my body. Versus, I'd be very happy to have a brain computer interface implanted, because I think that would be a very productive use of technology. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The Hidden Side of Everything. Stitcher.