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Lance Armstrong And Steroid

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The eight hour a day conditioning, the five a.m. workouts, the strict diet, the intense focus, the missing out on important life milestones. These are all apart of the life of a professional athlete. These careers take many years of impossible training and dedication, but what if a pill could reduce the amount of time spent in the gym. Throughout their careers, Lance Armstrong, Jose Canseco, and Marion Jones all used personal enhancement devices to try and achieve the American Dream of personal wealth and success, but ultimately lost all of their accomplishments due to laws cracking down on steroid use. Steroids are often used to treat tissue damage or inflammation, but they are also used illegally in professional sports. Sometimes the …show more content…

He began as “an eighteen-year-old cycling prodigy when he moved to Austin not long after graduating from high school, in 1989” (Hall). Soon after winning many major races, Armstrong began to receive sponsorships from many major brands including Nike, Budweiser, and Trek (major cycling brand). In total these sponsorships were worth about 50 million dollars. About seven years later, at what was expected to be the top of his career, “Lance was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which had spread to his lungs” (Hall). His cancer diagnosis was extremely grim with only a fifty percent chance of survival. At this time, Nike began to make the yellow Livestrong bracelets that would soon become a hit phenomenon all around the world. After surviving the disease, Armstrong turned his cancer story into the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The goal of the foundation is to focus on the probability of success instead of the probability of the patient’s death. This turned the organization into a way of life for many survivors with Ride for Roses, a bike race that made cancer survivors “get their old bikes out of the garage and ride with their hero” (Hall). After his battle with cancer, Armstrong went on to win “Tour after Tour, and as he morphed into a mega brand” he began to get nationwide publicity (Hall). Throughout the years, Armstrong appeared on Wheaties boxes, twenty-four hour fitness gyms, and even the extremely popular Austin …show more content…

During the investigation of Armstrong, the “USADA released its one-thousand-page report, with affidavits from eleven former teammates who said that they and Lance had used performance-enhancing drugs” (Hall). These affidavits proved that during the multiple Tour De Frances that Armstrong and the US Postal Team won, most everyone on the team had used some kind of steroid. During his interview with Oprah, Armstrong admitted that as “the leader of the team, and the leader leads by example” in respect to the drug use (Lance Armstrong on Oprah Part 1). By being the leader of the team, many individuals looked up to Armstrong and when he decided to use the drugs, they either did them with him or turned a blind eye. After the series of affidavits, Lance “was stripped of all seven Tour de France titles and banned for life from elite competition” (Lance Armstrong on Oprah Part 1). By losing the Tour de France titles, he lost a part of his American Dream which was the personal success. In addition, Armstrong also lost all of his sponsorships from many companies including Nike, Nissan, and finally after several months Oakley also dropped him. By losing his sponsorships, Armstrong also lost a projected 150 million dollars in possible earnings. Currently Armstrong lives in Austin with his three

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