The night before the final, with the Average Joe's team set to face Globo Gym for the championship, Peter gets an unexpected visit from his nemesis, White. Rather than leaving things to chance, White offers to buy Average Joe's from Peter for the tidy sum of $100,000. Peter, disheartened over Patches' death earlier in the film, accepts the deal and cuts and runs, leaving without telling anyone on his team. As fate would have it, he runs into seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong in the airport and learns the cycling champion is a fan who's been watching the tournament. When Peter tells a confused Lance he's quit the tournament, he responds that he, too, was once thinking of quitting: when he was diagnosed with brain, lung, and testicular cancer. "Well, I guess if a person never quit when the going got tough, they wouldn't have anything to regret for the rest of their life," Lance says, before telling Peter he's sure his decision won't haunt him forever.
Make no mistake, the scene is hilarious when considered in a vacuum and no one could ever deny that Lance Armstrong's survival story is truly inspiring. But he'd been plagued by doping allegations for years before his appearance in the 2004 film and years after it came out, the United States Anti-Doping Agency opened an investigation, charging Armstrong with using performance enhancing drugs. He was eventually stripped of his Tour de France wins and banned for life from competing in any sport that complies with the World Anti-Doping Code. Armstrong has candidly detailed his use of PEDs in an ESPN "30 for 30" program. As for "Dodgeball," a film with themes of sportsmanship and fair play, let's just say having someone who would later admit to cheating serving as the lead character's inspiration to get back in the game doesn't exactly send the right message.
