Should Lance Armstrong Still Be a Hero to Cancer Patients?

Armstrong has already been banned for life from cycling and lost his Tour de France titles due to overwhelming evidence that he cheated during those years by using performance enhancing drugs, including anabolic "body-building" steroids.

His comeback win in the Tour de France after diagnosis and treatment of metastatic testicular cancer was lionized, and he went on to found the Livestrong foundation for cancer survivors.

At 28 years old at the time of his diagnosis, he would not have been unusually young for it.  Testicular cancer is the most common malignancy in men of the 20-34 year age range.  On the other hand, using anabolic steroids with an undiagnosed testicular cancer would enhance its growth and spread in the same way that a woman on hormone replacement would fuel the growth of an undiagnosed ovarian or breast cancer.  Whether the steroid abuse could even outright cause a testicular cancer is not well known, but certainly it has been linked to pituitary gland, prostate gland and liver cancers.

As this article points out, using blood-doping agents and blood transfusion was not a common or particularly available practice early in Armstrong's career.  This leads to a real question of whether Armstrong's use of steroids caused or stimulated his testicular cancer.  I'd agree that anyone who can come out the other side of metastatic cancer has had to use some incredible internal resources.  On the other hand, I'm not so sure it's a good message to send cancer patients and young athletes to have Armstrong continuing to be so visibly involved in Livestrong at this  point.