For those who may have read the following in the NYT:

Weber, Bruce, and Juliet Macur. 2010. A champion against cancer, under siege. The New York Times (August 21), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/sports/cycling/22armstrong.html

Jay Coakley

Hi _____,

Here's my official response--going to the authors of the article and others who are contacting me and forcing me to respond to maintain a 30-year reputation as a good scholar and careful thinker.

Jay Coakley, Ph.D.,
Professor Emeritus
Sociology Department
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

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Wow! I'd forgotten about that interview—an hour-long call that took me out of my brother’s room at a cancer treatment center where he deals with the ravages of late-stage melanoma, the same cancer that killed my 32-year old son 10 years ago. It was a call from Bruce Weber, a New York Times writer with whom I'd never talked. I didn't know him, but I looked him up later. He’s done obituaries for years (good ones, by the way), and also did a feature article on Armstrong back in 2005.We had a nice long talk, partly about cancer-related issues. My goal when talking with journalists, which I do dozens of times each year, is to help them see their story in a larger perspective informed by what might be called a sociological imagination—that is, an ability to connect the biographies of individuals with larger social and cultural factors when making sense of what people do.

I see my conversations with journalists as reciprocal teaching and learning opportunities, and nearly always, that is what they’ve been. That’s why I took nearly an hour away from my brother to talk with Weber. Too bad, he didn’t listen very carefully or chose not to represent the spirit of my comments when he attributed comments and quotes to me.

First, and most important, Weber writes, "[Coakley] said that he had no doubt that Mr. Armstrong was guilty of doping, but that it did not matter. For athletes, [Coakley] said, the line between performance enhancement and medical treatment has become so fuzzy that it is impossible to discern." What I did say to Weber was that I had no doubt that Armstrong, like all elite cyclists who are contenders in the Tour d' France and other major road races, is taking some substances, legal or otherwise, that enable him to recuperate and consistently perform at a high level in a grueling schedule of training and racing. I made a point of saying that he may not be taking anything that is banned by the cycling federation and that he probably knew more about the physiology of training and performance and the effects of performance enhancing substances, including various chemical compounds that are not officially classified as drugs, than most top athletes in history, due to his treatment experience when he had cancer. I noted that he undoubtedly used that knowledge to assist him when participating in 21-day 2100-mile races up and down mountains.

I also explained that in elite sports today, the line between using medicine to treat injuries and using it to maximize training effects and performance is all but gone. Today, I explained, many people in sport medicine are focused more on performance than treatment—or they make no significant distinction between the two.

The "morality comment" attributed to me is taken out of the context of our long conversation (I never considered it an "interview"). I said to Weber that in the current culture of elite sports, athletes use many different and often new and even experimentally untested technologies to train and perform at a high level, and that the use of various substances that aid training and performance is not viewed in moral terms in this culture. I did note that athletes don’t see this increasingly normal part of their training as a moral issue. Instead, they see it as what they must do to maintain their identity as an elite athlete, honor the sport to which they are dedicated without qualification, and meet the expectations of all those who depend on them to perform well, including their families, teammates, support staff, and sponsors. I emphasized that the athletes who take these substances often are the ones who work the hardest, even to the point of literally wearing out parts of their bodies.

Finally, I did not so flippantly say that if Armstrong had told the truth, he'd be gone along with all the money he's raised for cancer research. Again, I put my comments in the context of elite sports and said that we in American society have created unrealistic norms that lead us to demonize athletes who use performance enhancing substances, many of which are now regularly prescribed to 50+ year olds who use them, like athletes use them, to maintain their edge (and their identities) in business, medicine, law, other occupations, and even in the bedroom. In the face of these unreasonable and morally self-righteous expectations, athletes are forced to deny part of what they must do to maintain their bodies and perform as is expected by all those who want to be entertained by their superhuman feats. In this context, if Armstrong had told the truth about what he was taking at any point in time, even if it wasn't on the banned substance list (as Mark McGuire did with androstendione, which wasn’t on MLB’s banned list when he took it), his career would have been over—and this would have destroyed his ability to raise money for cancer research.

Finally, I even sent to Weber material on deviant overconformity as it is meticulously explained in my book, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (10th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2010). Additionally, I told him that research published in Europe (in French) shows that many of the substances traditionally and currently taken by athletes have been developed by researchers working for national defense departments and the military in various nations in an effort to maximize the performance of soldiers expected to push human limits in the course of performing their duties. I even made the case that athletes have been socialized to see themselves in terms very similar to how soldiers see themselves—representing their communities, schools, nations and families as they do what they have committed themselves to do. Unwisely, perhaps, I disclosed to Weber that I take a substance that prevents debilitating fatigue caused by multiple sclerosis.

My point was that this drug is banned for athletes (Marion Jones lied about taking it, among other things, and went to jail), but it was developed by researchers seeking to find a drug that would enable soldiers to maintain alertness during tedious hours of piloting long range bombers and jet fighters or enduring long stretches of guard duty for which alertness is a matter of life or death. I went so far as to say that if I was on a 20 hour trans-Pacific flight I hoped my pilot would take the same drug when experiencing severe drowsiness, or if I was rushed to the hospital for heart surgery in the middle of the night I hoped my surgeon would use the drug if he or she was dead tired.

Please note this is the first time I’ve been misrepresented by a journalist for the New York Times, a publication that has excellent sports journalists. When I’ve talked with them many times in the past, they’ve always been sensitive to the spirit and context in which my comments are made and then represented them very accurately. I learned the hard way many years ago that talking to journalists who only want provocative sound bites is never a good idea.