Lonely at the Top: Lance Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton

Going for the Moonshot. Despite claims made by sponsors and participants, many moonshots are not moonshots at all, but are incremental improvements on existing technologies. Also, Moonshots are not called “Freeshots,” and the potential financial, reputational, and other collateral damage from a failed moonshot should be considered. Lance Armstrong went for his Moonshot and devastated his own life, as well as the lives of many others.

Going for the Moonshot is one of the Seven Deadly Stupidities.

As a teenager, Lance Armstrong was a national champion at sprint-distance triathlon and then decided to focus only on cycling. Soon thereafter, as a professional cyclist, he won the World Road Race Championship. The sky was the limit for young Armstrong.

Not long after becoming a world champion (and he was clean at this time, no performance-enhancing drugs), Armstrong received a diagnosis of testicular cancer. His medical team gave him a close to zero percent chance of living through it. But he did. And he returned to cycling.

Let’s imagine that you were a world champion cyclist, defeated an impossible cancer, and then returned to competitive cycling. What would be your objective?  Obviously, to win more world championships and, most of all, the biggest race, the Tour de France. In other words, a moonshot.

Armstrong is a rare example of somebody who set out on a moonshot and was justified. Think about the training and sacrifice that went into winning that first world title before his cancer. Would he be satisfied coming back and just being an ordinary competitor, with an occasional win or third-place finish against athletes he had dominated a short time ago? No way.

Armstrong went on to win an unprecedented seven consecutive Tour de France titles.

We all know what happened that made those seven Tour de France wins possible. Armstrong was kicked out of the sport for doping and using performance-enhancing drugs. All his wins were vacated.

Was it Armstrong’s greed for more wins? His fear of not winning? Perhaps he had less conscious control of his actions than he realized. (I am not an Armstrong apologist.) 

Armstrong was a highly motivated individual. There are two basic types of motivation; intrinsic and extrinsic. If you are intrinsically motivated, you want to win the race because you really don’t know any other way to think about it. You don’t care about the medals or the prize money. If you are extrinsically motivated, you only care about the medals, prize money, and approval of others. Most of us lie somewhere in the middle. We are intrinsically motivated to succeed but won’t turn down the prize money.

What happened to Armstrong?

My theory is that in his early years, he was intrinsically motivated. He wanted to be the best. He tested clean for performance-enhancing drugs and was a young man taking the sport by storm. After reaching a level of success, and the fame and fortune that went along with it, he flipped to being extrinsically motivated and did whatever he could to stay on top, including the whole doping thing.

He was still driven to win, but the prospect of not being on top and the subsequent loss of the approval of millions of fans, the cycling world and, last but not least, the sponsors, was too much.

While we hear a lot about Armstrong, professional cycling is a team sport, so Armstrong’s moonshot affected many others. A cycling team consists of the team leader and the domestiques. The leader is the star of the team and the one that the domestiques support. (The word "domestique” is derived from the French word for servant.) The domestiques will form a circle around the leader to insulate him from the wind or they will chase down another team to conserve the energy of the leader.

Tyler Hamilton was one of the world’s top cyclists in the 1990s and 2000s. Although Armstrong was the U.S. Postal Service team leader and Hamilton a domestique on the team, many would say that Hamilton was as good or better than Armstrong. Hamilton was on several of the teams that drove Armstrong to all those victories in the Tour de France. Hamilton, on his own, won the 2004 Olympic gold medal.

After his Olympic win, Hamilton started failing drug tests and many of his wins were erased. Finally, in 2011, he came clean in a tell-all book titled The Secret Race. Hamilton admitted to doping and using banned substances throughout his career. The pressure to win was just too much for him.

Hamilton made a monumental decision to come clean. He implicated Armstrong and others with his book and pretty much brought down the cycling profession. He was a highly respected rider who had been inside the sport for a long time. He had significant credibility since he was blowing the whistle on himself as well.

What we should learn from Armstrong and Hamilton is that with any moonshot comes a great deal of risk. In the business world, it is mostly financial risk (witness the fictional conversation above between CFO Porat and scientist Teller of Alphabet in our episode on Google X). 

In sports, and in the rest of life, the risk is different. By taking the moonshot, we are trying to distinguish ourselves or rise above the competitors. Taking shortcuts or violating real or cultural rules comes with penalties. Remember, they are not called “freeshots.”  Risk cannot be discounted when thinking about a moonshot.