Lance Armstrong

[Minder]

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/david-walsh-on-armstrong-and-usadas-charges

David Walsh on Armstrong and USADA's charges



David Walsh, the author of From Lance to Landis and LA Confidential has welcomed the news that Lance Armstrong will not contest USADA's charges relating to alleged doping offences during the Texan's cycling career. Armstrong looks set to be stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, although the UCI may appeal that decision to CAS.

"I'm pleased that it's come to this and that he's accepted the charges against him. I'm disappointed that it didn't go to arbitration because that would have given us the details as to why this process was so necessary," Walsh told Cyclingnews.

"For me it's a good day in at least that some guy who has been incredibly cynical has his just desserts. But the investigation should really be much deeper than Lance Armstrong. Who are the people who protected him? Are they still in cycling, are they still controlling cycling? Even the most neutral observer would say that cycling has been incredibly badly served by its leadership."

Walsh, who was sued by Armstrong in relation to his book LA Confidential, went on to explain that he feels no sense of vindication. Armstrong still denies doping during his career and despite a US court ruling otherwise, believes that the UCI should hold jurisdiction over the results management of sport. According to Armstrong, the actions of USADA amount to a 'witch hunt'.

"People have been saying to me for a number of years now, because it was perfectly clear to most intelligent people that Armstrong had been doping, and they asked if I felt vindication because I was accusing him for many years. I've never felt vindicated because I've never needed vindication in my life. I was never sure of anything more in my life than that this guy and his team were doping and that was form the very first Tour in 1999."

"It's just wrong that guys who were riding the race clean and never appeared in the top 20 were screwed by a corrupt system and in my view a system that couldn't not have remained corrupt without the complicity of the people who run the sport, the race organisers, the sponsors, the cycling journalists. Too many people turned a blind eye to something that was obviously wrong and they did it for all the wrong reasons."

Although Walsh has refrained from covering the Tour de France in recent years he was a permanent figure on the race circuit throughout the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. However, as his suspicions and stance became more and resolute he didn't just find enemies in Armstrong's camp, as even sections of the press corps turned their backs on him.

"In 2004 I was meant to travel in a car that had an American writer, a British writer and an Australian writer and I had travelled with them many times. I first travelled with the English journalist back in 1984, if memory serves me. They didn't want me in the car because Armstrong's team had made it known to them that they wouldn't get a lot of cooperation if I was in the car. And rather than stand by journalism they chose to do what was expedient but that's what people did. Pretty much every English speaking journalist on the Tour in those early Armstrong years was in one way or another trying to defend Armstrong."

"When you think of all the nonsense we had to listen to about Armstrong being faster than Pantani in '98. Armstrong goes and rides a faster Tour a year later and you have all these idiot journalists saying, well the roads and the bikes are better, it's logical. It was all completely illogical and if they were being honest they would have known this."

"You still see it today. There are still some journalists going out from England to cover the Tour who half believe that Armstrong is innocent, who have been defending him. Complete buffoons."

So what of the Tour de France and its murky history book? If Armstrong is finally stripped of his Tour victories it's unlikely that the sport will rejoice in handed down celebrations for Jan Ullrich, Alex Zülle, Andreas Klöden and Ivan Basso.

"The history of the Tour de France, over the last 20 years, since EPO and blood boosting drugs were big, the history of the Tour de France has been bunkum. It's hasn't been a story of triumph and great achievement, it's been a story of corruption and innocent people who rode the race clean being screwed. They were the people we always needed to stand up for. The spiritual leader of that peloton was Christophe Bassons and we all remember what happened to him in 1999."

[Hound]

Pity the poor fools who believed in the cheat, and there's plenty on this thread.

Some of the extreme fools will continue to defend him!

[All of a Sludden]

Pity the poor fools who believed in the cheat, and there's plenty on this thread.

Some of the extreme fools will continue to defend him!

Very few of the top athletes are clean, most of them just don't get caught.

[seafoid]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/aug/25/lance-armstrong-cycling-richard-williams

Lance Armstrong saga must reveal all, then cycling can press on

Conspiracy charges hanging over Lance Armstrong's colleagues mean this affair is far from over yet, but it is to be hoped for cycling's sake we will learn the full truth
Richard Williams



Think this is over? Think again. Lance Armstrong may want closure, but the charges of conspiracy involving four others, including his former team manager Johan Bruyneel and his trainer Dr Michele Ferrari, will continue to keep the Texan in the headlines as the evidence is revealed. And then there is the business of all the millions of dollars he won during his years of triumph, and whether anyone will be wanting it back.

The debate over what to do about the seven Tours de France from which Armstrong's name has been unilaterally erased by the US Anti-Doping Agency should be laid to rest immediately. Nobody won those Tours. There can be no winner. Except, now, a sport that can finally get to grips with its own tainted history.

Any attempt to promote the men who finished beneath Armstrong in the years between 1999 and 2005 must be resisted. Who would want to entertain the pretence that such riders as Jan Ullrich, Alex Zulle and Ivan Basso deserve to be awarded a retrospective yellow jersey? There was a measure of sensible sporting realpolitik behind Ullrich's claim, made in the wake of Friday's announcement, that he has always been happy with his second places.

The years of Armstrong's Tour victories constitute a blown-up version of the 1988 Olympic 100m final – "the dirtiest race in history", in the title of Richard Moore's recent book. Best to write those years off. Not to ignore them, of course, but to accept the reality of the EPO era and learn its lessons.

By choosing to drop his defence against the charges so doggedly pieced together by the Usada, who picked up the leads gathered by the US federal investigator Jeff Novitzky, Armstrong finally demolished the last lingering illusions of those for whom, in the words of a friend of mine, admiration of his feat in conquering cancer had exceeded suspicion of the means by which he subsequently achieved his unprecedented run of Tour successes.

A man who once looked capable of mounting a run for his country's highest office will henceforth find himself addressing only a rump – albeit a sizeable one – of those who continue to believe in the myth he erected around himself. As a public figure, the once-great Texan is finished.

On Saturday his long-time associate Bruyneel called it a bad day for cycling. The contrary is true, and great credit for that is due to the journalists David Walsh, Pierre Ballester and Paul Kimmage and to Travis Tygart of the Usada, who confronted Armstrong and refused to be intimidated into halting their investigations, to the soigneuse Emma O'Reilly, who gave damaging early testimony, and to the sometime Armstrong team-mates Frankie Andreu, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis, who were persuaded to testify against their former leader. Without their efforts and admissions he might still be operating under the protection of an unsullied reputation.

Tantamount (although he will continue to deny it) to an admission of guilt, his decision to decline his day in court may make it harder for the world to learn the full extent of the evidence held by the Usada. It is to be hoped that everything will be revealed, in order to help heal the wound caused by the years when scientific doping ruled the sport.

Belief in his integrity persisted long after the accumulation of circumstantial evidence had reached critical mass, and could be found in some quarters whose authority was hard to question. "I love him," Bradley Wiggins said only two years ago, during the last days of Armstrong's final appearance in the Tour. "I think he's great. He's transformed the sport in so many ways. Every person in cycling has benefited from Lance Armstrong, perhaps not financially but in some sense. I don't think this sport will ever realise what he's brought it or how big he's made it.

"Cycling was in the dark ages before he came along, in many ways. You only have to look at the support along the roads, compared to what it was 20 years ago. The majority of that is because of Lance Armstrong. Obviously he has his enemies and people among the fans who don't like him, but they've all benefited from him and his existence on the Tour."

Wiggins is more entitled than most to his view, but he need not feel that anyone but himself was responsible for inspiring the crowds who flocked to watch his triumphs in France and England this summer. The Armstrong effect was most deeply felt in his homeland. In Europe it seems more likely that the present boom would have happened anyway, and that its momentum has increased despite the doping scandals of the past decade.

Only a naif would imagine that doping has been eradicated from the sport, but the good news is to be found in the statistics indicating a significant reduction in the speeds achieved in recent years. No one climbs the 21 hairpins of the Alpe d'Huez at the speed achieved by Armstrong or Marco Pantani during the EPO years. There are no epic breaks by riders suddenly displaying extraterrestrial powers. The sport may be less consistently dramatic as a result, but that is a price worth paying.

Armstrong's fall will be mourned by many who valued his existence as a worldwide symbol of hope to cancer sufferers and their families and friends. The two books in which he discussed the experience of his diagnosis, treatment and recovery brought light into the lives of those plunged into mortal darkness. The yellow wristband became an outward sign of that hope.

Eventually, however, it became impossible to escape the feeling that Armstrong was exploiting his standing as a fundraiser and hope-bringer to armour himself against the increasingly persistent attacks from those who questioned the validity of the achievements which had created the platform for his life as a public figure. His annexation of the colour yellow – the colour of the Tour leader's jersey – for his Livestrong charity seemed presumptuous: the colour belonged to the Tour, not to him. The teams of Livestrong workers who preceded the race's arrival by stencilling kilometres of road with the charity's logo and inspirational messages turned a traditional gesture of spontaneous enthusiasm into something rather chilling in its premeditation, however noble the cause.

All we can do is remember the time and emotion spent on deeds now devalued, and chalk it up to experience. Leave his name in the record books, maybe asterisked, as a reminder. The past is the past. The future, we must believe, will be better.

[haranguerer]

Fairly damning charges here in the official documents, I guess he knew the writing was on the wall.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/armstrongcharging0613.pdf

It will be interesting to see if they will finally be allowed to test all that blood again and prove the fact that he had the transfusion done.

For those that dont know, right now they cant re-test old blood with new technologies for testing against the transfusions.

One of the main reasons I always thought he was guilty is because they asked his permission (a few years ago) to retest his old blood samples to clear his name for once and for all, and he refused to allow them to do so (they require his permission to retest old samples).

It is funny how people will seek something to justify their original opinion, even when the evidence clearly disproves it. Does anyone seriously believe Lance just got sick of defending himself??! If you were accused of this, would you ever get sick of fighting such an injustice??

[Tony Baloney]

Fairly damning charges here in the official documents, I guess he knew the writing was on the wall.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/armstrongcharging0613.pdf

It will be interesting to see if they will finally be allowed to test all that blood again and prove the fact that he had the transfusion done.

For those that dont know, right now they cant re-test old blood with new technologies for testing against the transfusions.

One of the main reasons I always thought he was guilty is because they asked his permission (a few years ago) to retest his old blood samples to clear his name for once and for all, and he refused to allow them to do so (they require his permission to retest old samples).

It is funny how people will seek something to justify their original opinion, even when the evidence clearly disproves it. Does anyone seriously believe Lance just got sick of defending himself??! If you were accused of this, would you ever get sick of fighting such an injustice??

No. The chap fought cancer and embodied the never say die attitude. He simply didn't do giving up so the only possible conclusion is he didnt want any evidence against him in the public domain.

[bcarrier]

TDF Average Speed

http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/7661/why-arent-tour-de-france-riders-going-any-faster

[bennydorano]

Fairly damning charges here in the official documents, I guess he knew the writing was on the wall.
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/armstrongcharging0613.pdf

It will be interesting to see if they will finally be allowed to test all that blood again and prove the fact that he had the transfusion done.

For those that dont know, right now they cant re-test old blood with new technologies for testing against the transfusions.

One of the main reasons I always thought he was guilty is because they asked his permission (a few years ago) to retest his old blood samples to clear his name for once and for all, and he refused to allow them to do so (they require his permission to retest old samples).

It is funny how people will seek something to justify their original opinion, even when the evidence clearly disproves it. Does anyone seriously believe Lance just got sick of defending himself??! If you were accused of this, would you ever get sick of fighting such an injustice??

No. The chap fought cancer and embodied the never say die attitude. He simply didn't do giving up so the only possible conclusion is he didnt want any evidence against him in the public domain.

The 'evidence' will come out anyway, USADA have said as much, plus They didn't take it this far not to get their Day in the Sun.

[Eamonnca1]

TDF Average Speed

http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/7661/why-arent-tour-de-france-riders-going-any-faster

Bloody stupid article. Does the writer know anything about cycling? 

Speed is only one factor among many, power output is a more accurate measure and power meters didn't come into play for training until about 15 years ago. There might be more climbing depending on the route.  There might be more drafting depending on the tactics of each race as it unfolds. The strongest rider in the world might win a stage without riding the fastest race ever.  He might be in a two-man breakaway with a huge lead and the final mile might slow down and grind almost to a trackstand finish with each one waiting for the other to make the move. The overall leader might be resting in the bunch and taking it easy if there's no serious contenders for the overall win getting up the road. 

The only place where average speed matters in cycling is events on the track like the world hour record or on the road in time trials. The dynamics of racing against other riders in a pack is completely different.

[haranguerer]

I know next to nothing about cycling, but thats exactly what I was thinking - its not as though the lads just hop on their bikes and ride as hard as they can to the end.

[ONeill]

Pity the poor fools who believed in the cheat, and there's plenty on this thread.

Some of the extreme fools will continue to defend him!

I'm one of those fools.

I just can't understand why he wasn't caught like others?

[Wildweasel74]

i wan to believe the same of Carl Lewis, he was one of my sporting heroes, but rumours persist (true by all accounts) that Lewis did fail a few drug tests and was sweep under the carpet. Looking back now, when i think hard about it, it looks true , heroes are never what they seem to be, you expect so much but in reality outside the fame they are no different from the next man. Armstrong has not tested positive when tested but the alot of rumours about him from yrs ago doesn`t look good. When Michelle smith won the golds in the pool, the Irish people  wouldn't accept the obvious, though not testing positive the fiasco with the tampering was as good as! Maradona was such a disappointment too, he was special but his drug fulled life and unsavoury friends meant the worlds greatest soccer talent left the game in tatters. Like i said heroes you look up to are not what u want them to be!Outside of John Eales nobody`s perfect lol

[ONeill]

Maradona was different. What he did on the field was magical.

For Armstrong - I just don't understand why he hadn't been caught.

Is this all based on a reading before his TdF wins?

[All of a Sludden]

From the Sunday Times.

Greg LeMond, the three-time winner of the Tour de France, was at his home in Minneapolis late on Thursday when he heard something on television that turned his head.

Lance Armstrong, one of the most successful — and controversial — cyclists in the history of the sport, had announced that he would not contest doping charges against him and would be stripped of his seven Tour de France victories and receive a lifetime ban.

LeMond's scepticism about his fellow American dated to 2001 when Armstrong was about to win a third Tour de France, a miraculous achievement given that he had suffered life-threatening cancer five years earlier.

At the time, The Sunday Times ran a story that Armstrong was working with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor under investigation for doping. The following week LeMond, who had retired from professional cycling in 1994, gave an interview to this newspaper — because he believed we were the only ones asking the right questions about Armstrong.

On the matter of whether the public could believe in the integrity of his compatriot, LeMond chose his words carefully. "If this story is true," he said, "it is the greatest comeback in the history of sport. If it's not, it is the greatest fraud."

Last Thursday's news left LeMond feeling vindicated — but also surprised. "He [Armstrong] has got a very powerful network of people that have done a lot of amazing stuff on his behalf," he said. "I figured it was never going to come out. Then it does and I felt no joy because this should have happened a long time ago."

A few hundred miles to the east in Dearborn, Michigan, Betsy Andreu was tipped off about the news earlier that day by a friend closely connected to the investigation. Of all those who believed Armstrong to be a drug cheat, she was one of the most convinced and, without doubt, the most courageous.

Her husband Frankie had ridden for eight years on the US Postal team that Armstrong led and for a long time they were the closest of friends. Everything changed when she and Frankie visited Armstrong at Indiana University hospital in late October 1996 when he was fighting cancer. "We heard Lance tell doctors he had used performance-enhancing drugs before his cancer," she says.

Three years later Armstrong won his first Tour de France. Watching the television coverage at her Dearborn home, Andreu heard her husband praised for the work he did in setting the tempo in the early part of the climb to the Italian ski resort of Sestriere.

She, however, was convinced that her husband could not have ridden that strongly in the mountains without performance-enhancing drugs — and confronted him when she travelled to France for the final week of the race.

After an initial denial, he admitted he had, indeed, doped to help Armstrong but agreed not to do so again. At the end of the following year, there was no place for Frankie Andreu on the US Postal team.

From conversations with her husband, Andreu knew doping was endemic within the team and for years worked to have the truth exposed, helping any person or agency that wanted to know what was going on.

Thursday's news did not affect her in the way she imagined. "I felt strangely anti-climactic," she said. "I wanted him [Armstrong] to fight the charges before an independent panel. I would have liked the opportunity to prove the truth of what I heard in that hospital room 16 years ago."

Her 13-year pursuit has taken a toll, with Armstrong and those around him describing her in highly derogatory terms. "What's the upside been going up against Lance?" she asks rhetorically. "To be publicly portrayed as an ugly, obese, jealous, obsessed, hateful, crazed bitch."

The origins of Armstrong's downfall date to 2001 and Floyd Landis, who that year joined the US Postal team, aged 26. It was a dream move. US Postal were the most successful team in cycling.

What Landis knew about Armstrong was based on watching him win the 1999 Tour de France and reading his bestselling book, It's Not About the Bike. Landis believed his hero was clean and thought the book inspirational. In the first stage of his integration into the team, Landis was invited to Armstrong's home city of Austin, Texas, for a training camp.

One evening Armstrong, Landis and other Postal riders packed into a black Chevrolet Suburban for a night on the town. Their first call was to a strip club, The Yellow Rose, where they were ushered to a booth and joined by dancers.

If that evening proved to Landis that all was not as it seemed in the world of Armstrong, the realisation that a well-organised system of doping underpinned the success came as less of a surprise.

Landis sensed that the top riders and the most successful teams were doping and began to waver from the strict moral code inculcated into him growing up in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania's Amish community.

He then told Johan Bruyneel, director of US Postal, he was ready to do whatever was necessary to be one of the eight riders selected to help Armstrong win the 2002 Tour de France. According to Landis, Bruyneel said when the time came they would figure it out.

In the weeks preceding that summer's Tour, Landis's participation in the race was confirmed by Bruyneel, who told him he would be given illegal testosterone patches by Armstrong and would have blood extracted from his body to be re-infused during the race.

Landis says Armstrong gave him the patches and Ferrari extracted his blood at the team leader's flat in St Moritz. For a time, Landis did not look back. He helped Armstrong win the next three Tours before leaving to become leader of the rival Phonak team.

Armstrong retired after winning his seventh Tour in 2005. Although the suspicion of doping remained, he continued to maintain his innocence and had sued this paper in 2004 over further allegations. The long and costly legal battle ended in an out-of-court settlement — the terms of which are likely to be reviewed in the light of last week's decision.

Landis won the 2006 Tour de France but tested positive for testosterone and lost his title, his reputation and all his money fighting his case. After a two-year suspension, he tried to return to the sport in 2009 but was not wanted. That was the year that Armstrong, after a three-year absence, made his own much heralded comeback.

Disillusioned and burdened by his failure to tell the truth in the aftermath of his doping violation, Landis went to the United States Anti-Doping Agency. "I said, 'Here's what happened, here's how we did it. What do you think I should do?'," he recalled. "They didn't have the first clue about the magnitude of it and that's when I was relatively convinced that at least they weren't on the inside."

Landis then wrote down the details of US Postal's doping programme and sent them in long emails to cycling and anti-doping bodies. He was contacted by Jeff Novitzky, a federal officer with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They spoke and then, in May 2010, it was reported that the FDA was investigating Armstrong's team for multiple violations of America's drug laws.

Novitzky's involvement would prove critical. He and fellow officers had the power to bring witnesses before a grand jury and warn them that if they lied they would be sent to prison, as the sprinter Marion Jones had been. Professional cycling had never seen an investigation like it.

Asked if they got the riders to tell the truth, one investigator replied: "The problem hasn't been getting them to talk but stopping them crying so they could continue talking."

Although much incriminating evidence had been gathered against Armstrong and his team, the FDA case was dropped last February when the eyes of America were fixed on another sport — the Super Bowl. The anti-doping agency said it would carry out its own investigation. After telling the truth in the federal investigation, the former US Postal riders did not dare give a different account to the anti-doping agency and it soon had sufficient evidence to charge Armstrong and five former associates with perhaps the most serious doping violations in the history of sport.

In its 15-page letter to the accused, the agency said 10 former teammates had testified to witnessing Armstrong's doping.

He denied the charges and took his claim that the agency should have no jurisdiction over him to a court in Austin. The case was dismissed and Armstrong ordered to pay the agency's costs.

Armstrong then had to choose between having his case considered by an independent panel of arbitrators or accepting the charges against him. On Thursday he accepted the charges.

The next day the agency imposed the ban, saying that worldwide guidelines on anti-doping allowed it to strip him of his Tour de France titles and every every other result he had achieved since 1998.

Explaining his refusal to have his case adjudicated by an independent panel, Armstrong hinted at a sense of resignation. "There comes a point in every man's life when he has to say, 'Enough is enough.' For me, that time is now."

He has been brought to his knees by his own countrymen: Novitzky and his fellow investigators at the FDA, the anti-doping agency's chief executive, Travis Tygart, and his colleagues at the agency.

In the past, Armstrong would point a finger at European accusers, especially the French, and say they were "anti-American". This time, he could only accuse Tygart of conducting "a witch-hunt".

The extent to which Armstrong was protected by his own sport may emerge as UCI, the world cycling body, has asked to see the detail behind the agency's decision.

It will have this in two weeks and then decide if it wishes to fight Armstrong's corner at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. When I first interviewed Armstrong in 1993, two days into his first Tour de France, he was 21 and spoke passionately about the role his single mother, Linda, had played in his life.

"She taught that if you give up, you give in," he said. "I never give up."

Until last week.



How The Sunday Times took on Armstrong

On the Sunday in 1999 that Lance Armstrong first rode down the Champs Elysées in the yellow jersey of the Tour de France champion, The Sunday Times advised fans to reserve judgment until the true nature of his "victory" was understood. David Walsh, our chief sports writer, wrote about suspicions that Armstrong was doping and insisted that important questions needed to be asked before his win could be celebrated.

Two years later we broke the story that Armstrong was working closely with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor who once said the banned blood booster EPO was "no more dangerous than 10 litres of orange juice",  and was being investigated on suspicion of doping. The question was simple: why would a clean rider work with a dirty doctor?

This newspaper interviewed his former teammate, Stephen Swart, who claimed Armstrong advocated the use of EPO in the Motorola team in 1994 and 1995, a year before he succumbed to testicular cancer. We also told the story of Emma O'Reilly, Armstrong's masseuse for the 1999 and 2000 Tour de France victories, who believed he and teammates doped.

Armstrong sued this paper in 2004. After  a protracted and costly legal battle, The Sunday Times and Armstrong reached an out-of-court settlement. Its terms are likely to be reviewed in the light of the US anti-doping agency's decision.

[ONeill]

OK, but still don't understand why it never showed up in tests.