I guess ultimately there’s no real concept of due process or ex post facto guilt here.
My only problem with the way they’re doing him is that it seems to me that if you’re going to set an artificial hematocrit level and drug testing to weed out the drug users, then you kind of have to use those yardsticks.
What they’ve done to Armstrong seems rather witch-hunty to me- he didn’t fail the tests available while he was competing, and everything they’re doing is based on what seems like testimony and circumstantial evidence.
Put simply, if drug testing is your yardstick, then you have to measure everyone by that yardstick. You can’t (in good conscience) then throw all that out and crucify someone because you know they’re guilty without a failed drug test, regardless of how many people say he did it or whatever.
There is due process, or would have been. Lance opted out of it. He could have taken USADA to an arbitration hearing, and if he lost that he could have appealed to the CAS. Given the weight of the evidence he would have lost, and so he opted to not fight the case so that he could bullshit about how there was no due process.
And there’s nothing ex post facto about it. Using EPO was always against the rules, and everyone who was ever caught using it was subject to sanctions. Granted, most of the people caught using it have been caught not by testing but by being caught with their trunk full of vials of the stuff (the Festina affair) or by police investigations eliciting confessions and executing search warrants (Operacion Puerto). Lance & Co knew perfectly well they were breaking the rules, which is why they went to significant lengths to hide what they were doing.
Yeah, but how exactly did they actually catch him? They have a bunch of people saying he did it, but no real hard proof that anyone’s really come up with that.
Also, not fighting doesn’t necessarily equate to an admission of guilt either. It does make it easier for them to nail you to the wall.
I guess my point is kind of like BigT’s. If there’s a hard and fast limit on something, and testing systems in place, then THAT is the standard by which you’re judged. If you pass the drug tests and under the limit, then you pretty much have to be presumed clean. Anything else short of being caught injecting it or having it in your possession is pretty much hearsay.
I realize that it’s a sports governing body, and they don’t have to follow the rules of the legal system, but it does seem awfully capricious to me, especially considering the time lag between when he stopped competing and now.
Do you honestly think you wouldn’t be convicted in a court of law on the eyewitness testimony of over a dozen credible witnesses? Are you really suggesting that two dozen witness are systematically perjuring themselves? Do keep in mind that although they won’t end up on a witness stand in Armstrong’s case (though they didn’t know that when they agreed to talk) many of them are likely going to be on the witness stand when Bruyneel’s case goes to arbitration.
And “no real hard proof” isn’t very accurate either, as there are several positive tests. Those results are disputed by apologists, but they do exist. And the level of conspiracy theory you need to posit to discount the B sample EPO positives is ridiculous.
Your ‘opinion’ is stupid, out of touch, and betrays an unfamiliarity with the facts of the case and the rules of cycling as well as an eagerness to cling to the fiction of Armstrong as some sort of hero.
Armstrong most certainly did violate the rules as they were written at the time, and broke the laws of several countries to boot (or insisted that others do so on his behalf). What made the doping experts that you mention experts is not that they were so familiar with the rules (which are pretty simple, you don’t need an expert to understand them) but that they knew how to break them without getting caught. Armstrong did not take advantage of loopholes and ambiguities, he just downright broke the rules, and in collaboration with the team management, coerced others to do the same. The techniques they used were not so new that there were no rules on it yet, but they were designed and amplified so that they could not be detected.
The USADA report reaches its conclusion on the basis of tests of 2005 samples as well as financial documents, in addition to testimony. What makes you say there is no ‘hard proof’?
True - but the USADA is not treating Armstrong’s decision not to appeal as an admission of guilt, and it does not matter for the facts of the case whether he appeals or not. If he is being nailed to the wall, it’s the result of his own choices. He made those choices because he knows it can only get worse for him if he does fight, especially when sponsors start wanting their money back.
The rules form the standard, not the test. The rules that are being enforced today are the ones that were in place when Armstrong was riding and have not been changed. The only thing that has changed is the way in which evidence can be examined, which is better today than it was some years ago. As a result, we now know that Armstrong was not clean, in spite of tests done at the time and his vociferous, deceitful insistence that he was clean.
False, it’s testimony. Hearsay is when I testify that someone else (some third person) communicated information about the defendant committing a crime to me. The USADA case is not based on such evidence.
What’s capricious about it? What do you find suspicious about the time lag? In what sense would the legal system be all that different?