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Will Lance Armstrong Help or Hurt South Carolina Bicycling Charity?

Tom Klaus
October 24, 2014
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Armstrong

October 23, 2014; Bloomberg

It has been reported that Lance Armstrong plans to mount a bike in support of a friend’s charity in South Carolina on October 26th. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), however, may derail his effort if it rules that his banishment for life from the sport of bicycle racing makes him ineligible to participate in Gran Fondo Hincapie. Less clear is whether Armstrong’s presence will really be a benefit to the charity race.

In 2012, a USADA investigation found that Armstrong had consistently used substances to enhance his biking performance in seven of the cyclist’s record-setting Tour de France wins. In the same year, he was stripped of all seven of the Tour de France titles. To be sure, Lance Armstrong suffered personally and professionally from the findings of the USADA and the loss of the titles. One website has even ranked him as #2 among nine disgraced sports heroes. Armstrong and his tattered legacy is placed just after that of Joe Paterno and ahead of those of “Shoeless Joe Jackson,” Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, Pete Rose, Sammy Sosa & Mark McGwire, Brett Favre, and, strangely, professional wrestling icon Hulk Hogan.

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Since his fall, Armstrong has been trying to rebuild his brand and regain the trust of many sports fans, if not the whole of America. In January 2013, he appeared with Oprah Winfrey to make a full public confession. In August 2014, CNN reported he had reached out to some of his former friends, associates, and even competitors to make amends. Lance Armstrong’s efforts at redemption in his personal relationships have been successful in some cases and wholly inadequate in others. Another champion cyclist, Greg LeMond, with whom Armstrong has not successfully reconciled, has observed about Lance Armstrong that, “He doesn’t seem to be humbled at all and you want to see that from someone in his position. He’s acted almost as though he lost a bunch of time in the Tour de France and has to make it up and he can do the same thing he’s always done. It doesn’t work that way. People want to see his heart.”

Armstrong’s appearance in Saturday’s benefit race is a return favor to former teammate George Hincapie, who was on the 1999 U.S. Postal Service team that helped Armstrong with the Tour de France. Hincapie has worked on behalf of Camp Wapiyapi, a Colorado-based children’s cancer charity supported by Lance Armstrong. Hincapie was also one of 11 of Armstrong’s teammates who gave testimony in the USADA investigation.

Despite Armstrong’s career and reputation rehabilitation efforts, it remains unclear whether his presence will ultimately help or harm Hincapie’s charity work. Armstrong’s precipitous fall from the peak of sports stardom had clear consequences for his own charity work, including the Livestrong Foundation, which he originally started as the Lance Armstrong Foundation in 1997. In April 2014, the NPQ Newswire reported that both national and local contributors were discontinuing support of the foundation in the wake of the athlete’s fall from grace. In May 2014, the NBC affiliate KXAN in Austin, Texas, where the Livestrong Foundation is headquartered, reported donations had dropped 40 percent since 2010 when accusations of Armstrong’s doping began to gain credibility. The NPQ Newswire article reported foundation officials expected the falling contributions would result in cutting up to 17 of the organization’s programs in 2014. Undoubtedly, Hincapie is counting on Armstrong’s presence to have a better impact than this on his charity.—Tom Klaus

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About the author
Tom Klaus

Tom Klaus, PhD is a nonprofit consultant specializing in leadership, program, and organizational development as well as research and evaluation. His clients include local, statewide, regional, and national organizations. He has extensive experience with community engagement, intractable controversy management, nonprofit board development and strategy planning, and the management of government funded health and human services grants and projects that are national in scope. In addition to his consulting practice, he has also managed the creation, development and testing of the Roots to Fruit of Sustainable Community Change model (R2F) with a colleague from the University of Iowa. The R2F model integrates the Collective Impact Five Conditions with other salient theoretical frameworks to present a measurable approach to producing long-term community change. Tom Klaus is also an adjunct professor at Eastern University (Philadelphia) in the School of Leadership Development and Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership programs and a frequent keynote speaker and workshop leader. From 2005 to 2013 Tom was Director of Capacity Building & Sustainability at Advocates for Youth in Washington, DC. During that time he served as a project director and as a technical assistance (TA) provider for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded teen pregnancy prevention project. In the role of project director he managed the daily work of the project. As a lead TA provider he created and provided organizational and leadership development training, coaching, materials, and support to local, state, regional and national organizations on a variety of issues, including controversy management, project and organizational sustainability, collaborative partnerships, and organizational change. From 2010 to 2013 Tom led the development of an innovative community mobilization and sustainability framework that is being used by the CDC in its teen pregnancy prevention grantee sites across the United States. Tom Klaus came to Advocates for Youth in December, 2005, from his home state of Iowa, where he had been the executive director and a founding board member of Iowa’s statewide teen pregnancy prevention organization; a developer and master trainer of several teen pregnancy prevention programs that were replicated nationally; a writer of numerous articles and curricula; a youth worker and counselor; and had held local, state, regional, national, and international leadership positions in both religious and public service organizations. Tom has written award winning and award nominated books on adolescent issues for religious publishers. He has also traveled throughout the United States as a speaker in hundreds of schools, colleges, and conferences on topics related to teen pregnancy prevention, adolescent sexual health, male involvement in teen pregnancy prevention, and organizational leadership and change. Tom Klaus is an alumnus of the Greater Des Moines Leadership Institute and a trained facilitator in Appreciative Inquiry, an asset-based change and development model for organizations. He has also received training in the fundamentals of Dynamic Governance, a sociocratic approach to organizational leadership and management. Tom earned degrees in religion and English at William Penn University, a Master of Science degree in counseling from Drake University, and the Doctor of Philosophy in Organizational Leadership (Nonprofit Concentration) at Eastern University. In 2013 Tom began a consulting practice, Tom Klaus & Associates, which is focused on partnering with nonprofit leaders to build greater organizations and programs for good. He is also adjunct faculty in Eastern University's School of Leadership Development and Ph.D. in Organizational Leadership program. Tom's doctoral research examined leadership in an intractable conflict over sexuality education in public schools in the United States. Other recent research and consulting work has included community engagement, reflective leadership, program and organizational sustainability, intractable conflict management, leadership development and coaching, organizational analysis, and board development. Tom is currently working toward accreditation as a leadership and executive coach with MentorCoach LLC and certification by the International Coaching Federation. Tom Klaus is known by his colleagues and clients as an authentic transformational leader; an innovative and focused strategic thinker and planner; a creative problem-solver; a talented trainer, teacher, and motivational speaker; an award-winning writer of numerous books, popular press articles, and professional research publications; and an effective relationship builder with a warm and engaging personality, appreciative management style, and a keen, quirky sense of humor. Tom is also an avid (though not great) ballroom dancer; a frequent (though not often enough) dog walker to his miniature schnauzers; and a practicing (though not perfect) Quaker.

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