Lance Armstrong: Print the Legend
I’ll start with the same sentiment that ends this Grantland article, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”, a quote from the 1962 movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”. This line sort of postulates celebrity as the ultimate network effect. Our perception of celebrities can be so influenced by their public image that it supplants the reality. The article addresses a recent, very complicated example, Lance Armstrong. There is a tangible person named Lance Armstrong. He is probably the most famous, and now infamous, American cyclist. Over his career he won the Tour de France, easily the first cycling event any American would think of, an astonishing seven consecutive times. But, Armstrong was recently exposed to have been at the center of a large doping operation, and has subsequently been banned from cycling and had his titles stripped. However, if this was all there was to Lance Armstrong, he would be no more in the public eye now than fellow disgraced Tour de France champion Floyd Landis (whose name I had to look up).
The fact is there is Lance Armstrong, the guy who cheated at sports, and Lance Armstrong the cancer survivor, the man who founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The first is just a person, while the second is more of an idea. However, the two are inexorably linked. Lance the idea would not have been possible without you and me, which is to say network effects. Plenty of people have tried to raise cancer awareness, but Lance was able to leverage his cycling fame and inspiring story to really push his foundation over a tipping point, at which point it gained inertia and continued to grow beyond what a successful cyclist could ever achieve on his own. As the article points out, the number of people who actually watched Lance Armstrong race is “basically a rounding error compared to the number of people who watch NFL games”, and yet the yellow “livestrong” wrist bands are ubiquitous. This is an example of how a product’s value can be directly increased by the number of people using it. It is reasonable to assume that many individuals have a desire to donate to charities that raise cancer awareness, but will only do so if they believe that the organization they are donating to will actually have an effect. Furthermore, there are plenty of potential charities that, in a vacuum, probably look relatively the same to a potential donor. However, if all of a sudden one charity suddenly gains a large number of donors, then it will seem more impactful and be more appealing. This will cause it to gain even more donors and start a cascade. Armstrong’s inspiring story and cycling success were enough to get that initial bump.
This cascade made Armstrong’s influence pervasive, and dramatically affected the current conversation that we are having about him. The existence of this article is proof of the powerful affect that our network has on our perceptions. There have been many athletes exposed as cheats over the past decade, and almost uniformly they have been universally denounced. But, we can’t quite do the same with Armstrong. Even though his success was illegitimate, what he did with it had great value to society. Without doping, the Lance Armstrong foundation would have never taken off. This is a difficult situation for us, an immoral action led to a positive result. Are we hypocrites if we applaud the good and denounce the necessary evil that went into it? That’s a big question, and not really what I’m after. The point is that network effects created this new side to Lance Armstrong, one that is a direct effect of the person Lance Armstrong but also of the social network in which he exists. Because his personal actions, which turned out to be ignominious, led directly to a beneficial cascade of donations and awareness we can’t quite decouple Lance the person and Lance the idea.