Band of Gold

Hi, I am Emily McCullar. I’m a writer with Texas Monthly Magazine, and during my time there I have covered a lot of subjects: politicians, musicians, bodybuilders, drag queens, Bucky. I even once got to rank all the different shapes of ice. Because I get to write about whatever I want, I have to come up with the ideas. And there was a day last year that that was kind of hard. So I decided just to search for anything that was going to have an anniversary. I looked at what happened in 2014, in cultural event 2009, but it wasn’t until I went back to 2004 that I struck what you might describe as gold, the Livestrong bracelet. You remember it, probably couldn’t forget it if you tried. It was a staple of early aughts fashion right there with the skinny little scarves and the trucker hats. You remember it.

So it was a joint project between Nike and the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which was an Austin-based cancer nonprofit, started by a guy I probably do not have to introduce. In 2004, he was near the peak of his popularity. He’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer in the late ’90s, and then he’d not only survived, he’d gone on to win five consecutive Tours de France. He was a bonafide celebrity with Robin Williams, Jake Gyllenhaal and Matthew McConaughey were his friends, and he was dating Sheryl Crow. The silicon Wristband has gone on to be quite ubiquitous, but the story of this first yellow one is actually kind of random.

So 2003, the Lance Armstrong Foundation is working on a database for cancer survivors. They’re calling it Livestrong, the branding is all orange. At the same time, a Nike rep was meditating on the color yellow. Yellow was strongly associated with Lance because yellow is what the lead writer wears in every stage of the tour. Nike had also been handing out these baller bands, these silicone wristband versions of the rubber bands that basketball players used to wear in street games and snap to get their head back in the game. So Nike knew that they wanted to have something yellow to sell by the time Lance was racing in his sixth tour, but they didn’t have enough time to design like a shoe, so they decided just to do a yellow wristband.

They cost 30 cents to make. They sold for about a dollar. All the proceeds were to go to the foundation. Nike paid to have the first five million manufactured, and they donated them to the foundation who was in charge of distribution. The very first run had Nike Swooshes on them and Livestrong. Those were handed out actually at a gala in April 2004, right in Austin. They became collector’s items. Nike thought they would sell. Not everybody was sure. Lance said something like, “What are we going to do with the 4.9 million we don’t sell?” But he couldn’t have been more wrong. They came out of May of that year. They were on the wrists of celebrities. They sold out of that first five million by the time he was racing in the tour in July of 2004. So two months, and they were back-ordered for the rest of the year.

It was this small organization. Livestrong had like two dozen employees in an office off of Mopac, and suddenly they’re selling the most popular piece of jewelry of the era. So as a writer, this is exactly the sort of story I look for, something everybody thinks they know because they watched it happen, but they actually have no idea. So as soon as I found it, I Slacked my editor and we were both very excited about the possibilities. We didn’t know how the story would go. We thought web story for sure, maybe a voicey essay about the first virtue signal. Maybe just make fun of the aughts. Tried and true. But in my gut, I wanted an oral history. Who better to tell the story of the Livestrong bracelet than the people who were actually there?

In 2004, it had been all about Lance. I wanted to hear from everybody else. I didn’t know if people would talk to me. Since Lance had come clean about doping that entire time, everything around Livestrong was a little bit sticky. People might not want to revisit that. Luckily for me, they were game. By a few weeks in, I had probably 10 sources, and by the end, by publication I had at least 18. The only reason that number wasn’t bigger is because I literally ran out of time. So our little web story soon became a long-form feature, and then eventually, as John said, it was the cover of the July issue of this magazine.

I came to the story a little cynically. I was a teenager in 2004. I didn’t wear a wristband. I knew cancer well, my mom had died of breast cancer when I was 10, but I was way too cool to do something that trendy. You can laugh at this if you want. I also didn’t need a reminder of what cancer had taken from me. And if the bracelet wasn’t going to bring my mom back, I was kind of like, what’s the point? When I started on the story, I thought I’d probably just be making fun of it. And that changed pretty quickly. The first person I talked to was on the marketing team that had come up with the name Livestrong, and he told me about a guy, a cancer survivor, who had actually gotten the logo tattooed on his arm before the bracelets even came out. That’s how moved he was by the experience. That’s how connected he felt.

And at the same time as I’m reporting this story, I’m watching another loved one fight cancer. We’re spending a lot of time in doctors’ waiting rooms. We are in infusion centers. I’m seeing up close the way that chemo absolutely destroys a body. I’m acutely aware of our emotional pain, my sense of helplessness, and how intoxicating any little bit of hope was. Sometimes the infusion room would feel like the happiest place on earth because even though it was awful in there, and it is awful, it was a room full of people with hope, hope in medicine, hope in the fight, hope in each other. The Livestrong wristband was the physical manifestation of that little bit of hope. It was a bright eye-catching reminder that no one is alone in the fight against cancer, which unfortunately touches us all, sometimes more than once throughout our lifetimes.

I didn’t think I needed that connection and that reminder as a teen, but in 2024, I damn sure did, and I had a feeling I’d probably need it again. So, yes, the Livestrong Wristband was the first sort of virtue signal. It was a little douchey, but it without question lessened the suffering of millions of people, even if only in small ways. The foundation, I heard so many stories about this, their phone was ringing off the hook. I got to talk to a now 24-year-old Spencer who was fighting leukemia in 2004, and he said straight up that the foundation and Lance saved his life. Which brings me back to the ickiness.

When Lance came clean in 2012, after years of being accused, everything kind of fell apart. He resigned from Livestrong. Well, they changed the name from the LAF to Livestrong officially as fast as they could. But the damage was done. Everything he touched has been tainted. And since Lance was the wristband’s story, the wristbands were covered in a patina of douchebaggery as well. A lot of the sources that I talked to struggled with this legacy. One guy told me about his 2014 decision to finally take the wristband off after a full decade, and he said he was tired of, he didn’t want to be associated with Lance anymore.

And it became hard to explain to people that the wristband was always supposed to be bigger than Lance. And what I loved about working on this story was that it was bigger than Lance. His cancer survival story is absolutely crucial to the wristband’s success, but its massive popularity is a result of our connection to cancer, not just his. So we should look back on that without cringing. Now, I’m still not going to wear a Livestrong wristband, but I guarantee you if I see one out in the wild, I will enthusiastically stop the person wearing it. I will ask them about their connection to cancer, and I will probably tell them mine. Thanks.