Different agencies - the case against him was dropped by the Dept of Justice, but he was charged by the USADA - “the official anti-doping agency for Olympic, Pan American and Paralympic sport in the United States” - which I believe can strip his titles, ban him from future competition, etc.
This whole thing is getting old. Nobody in the history of athletics has been tested more than Lance has throughout his career and not once could they make anything stick. The only thing that pushes this is the idea that because he beat so many known cheaters he must have been cheating himself.
I can’t wait for the long line of butthurt riders and people facing jail time for administering dope to get up on the stand and accuse him of cheating. No, they don’t have any reason to see him fall, nosiree, they’re just being good people and couldn’t live with this terrible thing gnawing at their consciences. And now my tax dollars are giving them a forum to air their butthurt, and for what? So they can try to pin something on a demonstrably clean guy?
When he is acquitted, as he will be, will they try yet again?
The notification letter seems conspicuously devoid of any mention of actual positive tests. Instead we hear about witnesses and test results that are “consistent with” banned practices.
I don’t know anything about this agency’s reputation, but it seems to me like it’s going to be immensely difficult for these new charges to change anyone’s mind.
Frankly, if Floyd Landis can be proven to have doped… nothing will surprise me at this point.
I honestly didn’t believe that Landis had done anything too terribly wrong - I mean, this guy was raised a Mennonite, had an iron work ethic - right up until he came out and publicly admitted that indeed, he’d been continuously doping. I think there’s always going to be a level of “let’s do the kind of doping that we can get away with because it’s not illegal (yet) or there’s no test for this one (yet)” amongst high level athletes in certain sports.
If Landis did, then Armstrong probably did too.
Just let them dope, who cares.
Agreed. Armstrong’s response is here. I’m surprised that USADA is still beating this dead horse, what, 7 years after he last won the TdF?
Aside, how many professional cyclist contemporaries of LA who admitted using using PEDs or got caught with them, were caught by testing versus having their team/doctors get caught with them or having their name on an invoice? Floyd Landis, obviously, and there was Contador’s ‘tainted beef’, but I’m drawing a blank on others. Riis, Ullrich, Pantani: all of them, AIUI, were dirty as hell, but none of them ever tested positive.
All that said, IMHO, the USADA needs to either show some evidence—positive test results, video of LA sticking a syringe in his butt, etc—or let the matter go already. I just thought it was weird for them to come out with these allegations after the USA’s office decided not to prosecute.
When Secretariat died they autopsied him and found his heart was just ridiculously, bizarrely huge. There was nothing deformed or wrong with it. It was just more than twice as big as a horse’s heart is supposed to be. It went a long way towards explaining how the animal could just run “like a tremendous machine.”
Maybe Armstrong is the human version of Secretariat. Maybe he’s just a genetic fluke. It happens.
If Armstrong, even considering that he only did ToF, was clean* when EVERYBODY ELSE was doping like it was going out of fashion, then LA has a mask-and-cape and figths crime at night.
- = meaning no test found anything, not that he wasn’t using anything.
“Fully consistent with doping” means nothing. What would be significant would be if they found results that were not consistent with a lack of doping.
And RickJay, my position is that we already know that Armstrong is a genetic fluke, an extreme outlier of some sort. We have the choice of believing that he’s a genetic fluke, or believing that he’s a genetic fluke and that he’s been doping and that he’s done a better job of avoiding getting caught than all the other dopers. The former model is the simpler one, and so, lacking evidence to the contrary, should be accepted. Maybe this is a wrong assumption, I don’t know. But it’s still the best assumption we can make.
I don’t know anything about the specifics of the case, but I know someone who has a college friend (although to be clear, this is someone who I have never met personally) who got to know Lance Armstrong a bit several years back in his hometown of Austin, and apparently according to this guy, Armstrong is an amazingly egotistical douche-bag who has an incredible arrogance and sense of entitlement, someone who won’t say something pleasantly if they can come up with a way to say the same thing in as rude and as condescending a manner as humanly possible…
I have no idea about the Doping, but it sounds to me like his personality is pretty consistent with the kind of person who would lie, cheat and steal to get ahead.
ETA—I think the FOAF knew L.A. before he really became big-time, so I suppose it’s possible that he has changed, but apparently in the past, he was a true asshole.
It’s also consistent with someone who’s just naturally that much better than anyone he goes up against.
Cite about the amount of testing? IIRC, some of Armstrong’s years racing were when there was no testing out of competition. I doubt Armstrong could tell you how many times he was tested and he certainly doesn’t know how many times other athletes were tested. How can anyone make that claim without there ever having been any actual numbers posted about the number of times he and other athletes were tested?
He tested positive in 1999 and the only reason he wasn’t punished was because he got a back-dated Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) after the test caught him. That wouldn’t fly these days but the powers-that-be certainly let it slide back then.
Every guy he raced against was a genetic fluke, too. How is that a defense, particularly when you just say it with no numbers? Even with numbers, does that mean they are all naturally flukes or just doped to the gills? (By the way, Armstrong’s numbers for common tests like VO2 max, other measurements like watts/kilo at FTP, were good, even amazing, but not the best. Many had better numbers.)
The answer is that they were all genetic freaks plus doped to the gills.
Can I, rather egotistically, ask that those who decide to post in this revitalised thread don’t just start reading from about here and go back and read the page including, in particular, my posts?
Because this thread contains so much BS it just isn’t funny. The title for a start is dead wrong.
There are many people (primarily, let’s face it, Americans) who don’t follow cycling, don’t know anything about 99.9% of the history of doping in the European tour, have no clue about the technical details of doping and testing, and frankly just don’t have anything close to the full picture but who are prepared to opine on LA because he’s the one guy they’ve heard of (because he’s American).
And consequently in the eyes of someone who does actually follow the European tour avidly, you just end up sounding silly.
The simplest explanation is that he has been doping. Racing in a time when pretty much all the top guys were (and have since been caught) It seems vanishingly unlikely that he didn’t cheat as well. He may have been the best anyway but it is naive to think he is clean just because he hasn’t been caught. The sport was so dirty for so long that every top cyclist of that era has the automatic assumption that they cheated unless proven otherwise. Unfair I know but in my circle of sporting contacts, that is the accepted position.
Rather like Flo-Jo in sprinting or Jarmila Kratochvilova in the 400. Never tested positive but pretty much accepted that they doped.
I read a joking comment the other day asking the question: if LA was to be stripped of his TdF titles (or some of them) who the hell would they be able to give the title/s to? I’m not (quite) so obsessive as to go back and work out exactly which of the also-rans in the TdF during LA’s years haven’t since been determined to have been doping, but I think if this occurred you’d end up having to announce that the winner was someone outside the top ten, in some or even many cases.
This isn’t exactly a secret.
Unless I’m thinking of something else, the sample was from 1999, but the positive result wasn’t obtained until 2005. He tested positive for EPO, which is a pretty common form of blood doping among cyclists. It’s also probably what the USADA refers to when they say his recent samples are characteristic of “blood manipulation.” Either way, when Lance says he’s never tested positive for anything in 500 tests, he’s lying. I think he doped and, no, it’s no secret that he’s a complete asshole. I have heard that from a few sources, as well.
No you are conflating two things. The incident theR relates is separate from the back-testing of LA’s in competition samples by a lab in 2005 which found EPO.
Whether LA is lying if he says he’s never tested positive is a debateable point. He would no doubt say that he is referring to a “positive” test in the sense of a test that is found “positive” in a manner sufficient to trigger legal sanction.
There is no doubt however that if LA is not lying he is being deliberately misleading. He knows that it is substantially meaningless that he has never tested positive, because he knows that there were no available effective tests for the doping methods he is widely accused of using, at the time he is accused of using them. He also knows that most people who don’t follow the issue don’t know this, and that they assume that it means something that LA has not failed tests. It means nothing except that he wasn’t silly enough to use testable doping methods. His public relations strategy is to very cynically pull the wool over the eyes of people who don’t know enough to know they are being deliberately mislead.
Honestly, I don’t see how this will end well for the USADA. At best, if they win they have destroyed the one person who makes America gives a crap about cycling and wil have destroyed any commercial value that cycling has in America. In addition, they expose themselves as fools since everyone and thier mother has been able to beat them at the doping game for years.
If they lose, they make themselves look like vindictive asses who got played by a bunch of people with axes to grind and nooses to loosen from thier own necks.
We already know that cycling is a dirty as a mudpit sport, where is the benefit of rubbing it into the fans faces yet again?