Somehow, the Lance Armstrong story has turned into a dark, inverted version of “Miracle on 34th Street”: in the end, the plot all comes down to the legal status of the Post Office. “Miracle on 34th Street,” as those who have left the television on around Christmas may remember, is a movie about the legal problems that befall a man who claims to be an idol. A last-minute replacement for the Santa Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade becomes the best Santa the store ever had and then disconcerts his co-workers by explaining that he is the real thing. They begin to believe—he’s just so good—but then a bitter guy in Macy’s H.R. department has him sent to Bellevue for tests, which he fails, setting up a commitment hearing that is one of the best courtroom scenes on film. (I’m talking about the 1947 version; avoid the remakes.) “He claims that he’s Santy Claus and the D.A. claims that he’s nuts,” in the words of one character—a postal worker, as it happens, who is about to save the day by sending all the mail that’s come for Santa Claus to the courthouse, allowing his defense lawyer to argue that the federal government has recognized him as the one true Santa.
Armstrong used to be a sort of postal worker himself. He won the Tour de France with the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, the one that, as the Times reported and his former teammates have confirmed, was run as a doping ring, with Armstrong as the chief bullying elf. The team took more than thirty million dollars of sponsorship money from the Post Office. An idle question that has come to mind over the years, as the evidence against Armstrong piled up, was whether he could somehow be booked for mail fraud, or for interfering with the mail, or for one of those other crimes described in fading notices on bulletin boards in post offices. As it turns out, he can be, more or less.
Armstrong has dozens of potential claims against him, many resulting from his own counterattacks on doping charges, like the libel suit he filed against the Sunday Times, of London, which is now trying to get the money back. There are also the lies he has told under oath in various depositions. But his potential problems with the Postal Service are in a class of their own. The law that he needs to worry about most is the False Claims Act. One of his former teammates, Floyd Landis, has filed suit under its provisions, which allow members of the public to go to court and make a case that the federal government has been cheated—in this case, because Armstrong and his business partners professed, in sponsorship agreements, that there was no doping. (The whistleblower also gets a cut of any money that’s recovered.) The Justice Department has the option of joining the suit, which would make it stronger, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the D.O.J. plans to do just that. It does not seem coincidental that the government’s deadline for filing is Thursday, the day that Armstrong’s full interview with Oprah will be broadcast. CBS reported this morning that his lawyers have been talking about a deal in which he would return some of the money. Under the False Claims Act, the potential penalty is triple damages, or close to a hundred million dollars.
At this juncture, it might seem delusional of the Postal Service to have ever sponsored the team at all—delusional about itself as much as about Armstrong. Doesn’t it know that it is an obsolete legacy, a lugging bureaucracy? In “Miracle on 34th Street,” after Kris Kringle’s lawyer reels off statistics about how profitable the Post Office is, the judge replies, “We’re all gratified to know the Post Office is doing nicely.” That line may be the second-most anachronistic-sounding thing in the movie (after the notion that, for a single, working mother and her child living in a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park West, real-estate salvation comes in the form of a small Cape Cod house on Long Island).
Just hating the Postal Service is unfair, though. Its standing in the government has changed since the forties, in some ways that require it to act like a business, and in others that constrain it from doing so. The result is an enterprise that feels the need to advertise by sponsoring cycling teams, while at the same time being prevented by Congress from exploring other business opportunities. The Post Office is also required, bizarrely, to pre-pay its future pension obligations; no private enterprises have to do that. (Felix Salmon has a good summary.) The result has been that it has defaulted more than once on its obligations, and is now in a state of manufactured crisis, which seems to suit the Republicans in Congress just fine. Small-government advocates might like to assume that the Post Office is the doped-up delivery service, the one with the cheating advantage; it isn’t.
But Armstrong certainly was—a cheater, a thief, the kind of guy who could look any number of cancer survivors or even Oprah in the eyes and not care if he was lying. Lance is no Santa Claus, even if his fans kept up the suspension of disbelief much longer than the average child. He was no embodiment of an athletic miracle, and he never really delivered.
Photograph by Peter Dejong/AP.