AzTallRider

Generalize and stereotype much? All Germans thought the same? Might want to apply some facts and rational thought...

Shimagnolo

UCI suspends legal action against Kimmage: https://www.irishtimes.com/sports/oth...325777481.html

mprelaw

And just as an FYI--even UCI gives him credit for only being tested 52 times. About a tenth of the "500" (or was it "600"?) he claims to have passed.

Traces of EPO in his stored B samples from 1999.

Two "suspicious" (though not "positive") tests in 2001.

A sudden spike, mid-Tour, in his HCT values from 2009, when the blood passport was being used (something they didn't have from 1999-2005). Highly indicative of getting a transfusion mid-race. The only two ways that blood doping can be detected are via a sudden spike in HCT values in the blood passport, and by finding microscopic plastic particles in a blood sample, that can only come from an IV bag.

All of this is detailed in USADA's report, if anyone cares to read the whole thing.

Daspydyr 

For me, a telling and disappointing life story for Lance Armstrong is the Sheryl Crow "distraction." He went from his first wife to MS Crow and then refused to have kids with her. Then they split up and Lance marries a "kid" age wise and has a kid. This screams cheater and controlling dominator to me. Of course those attributes are a big part of a competitive champion. But in real life they also scream-JERK!

Shimagnolo

I'd never heard that about LA & Crow before.
Something I did read recently was that LA was more mellow and reasonable when he was dating Crow, than before or after.

woodway

LA can never admit he has doped, too much money is at stake. Some are already considering going after him for return of prize or endorsement money. If Lance makes an admission he'll be buried under an avalanche of lawsuits.

Juggler2

My gosh, you don't actually believe that load of road apples do you?

lhbernhardt

Just a small digression here, but as much as I enjoy watching le Tour, the thing that characterizes the typical stage these days is the daily routine of allowing a small break of insignificant riders to go up the road early in the stage, a break that scoops all the Green Jersey points so the Green Jersey wearer doesn't have to worry about it, gaining a maximum gap of one minute per every ten kilometers left to race, then being chased down by the pack with enough time for a field sprint, or for the prospective Yellow Jersey contenders to attack the last five (or fewer) uphill kilometers of the race. It works out this way most of the time, resulting in a somewhat predictable and often boring race.

Just saying.

Luis

lhbernhardt

It would be nice to see the cabal self-destruct in a tangle of twisted fingerpointing. I would have expected the UCI to hang in there with Lance, because if the allegations of UCI corruption and complicity in the 1999 and 2001 doping issues were true, and McQuaid & Verbruggen start vilifying Lance, then it might be in LA's best interest to disclose what those $25k and $100k contributions to the UCI were really about. Interesting to note that Verbruggen is still silent and has to my knowledge said nothing critical of Lance. Could there be a reason?

I hope a full disclosure, however sordid, comes out in the independent inquiry of the UCI's handling of doping during the Armstrong years. I've always suspected that this went much further than LA. And I hope the commission is both independent and aggressive. But you never know, what with Verbruggen and his "Bavarian Illuminati."

Luis

Rowan

There might not be that much money left by the time he gets through this. The UCI has tried to get the vehicle back on the road, with its management committee announcing this:

"The committee also called on Armstrong and all other 'affected' riders to return the prize money they had received.''

https://www.news.com.au/sport/more-sp...-1226504328991

genec

No winner for 1999-2005 Tours, says UCI
https://sports.yahoo.com/news/no-tour...3976--spt.html

BluesDawg

The prize money from the races, while significant, is small potatoes compared to the bonuses, endorsements and speaking fees LA has collected over the years. Most of that will dry up now and some are looking to get back what they paid him. While some of those benefactors will surely seek reparations and some will to some extent succeed, it is unlikely that Lance will come out of this anything but a very wealthy man.

https://tinyurl.com/8g6nf2f

Rowan

Unknown into the future is whether organisations such as ASO and the UCI themselves might seek restitution for the damage Armstrong has done to the sport of cycling. I am not saying this would happen, but it's a possibility... especially if Armstrong resists having to repay the prize winnings.

The other unknown cards at this time are Bruyneel's position and his case that is supposed to go to arbitration. That could turn out even worse for Armstrong, or Armstrong may need to pay a huge amount of money to Bruyneel to get him to shut up.

Plus, if USPS gets involved in the recovery process, that could get ugly. And that little point about depositions is a major hurdle that Armstrong has to get over if he is to avoid going to jail for perjury (if he isn't already facing that prospect).

And what about the riders whose careers have been damaged beyond repair because they were on Armstrong's teams and were, basically, directed to dope? Landis' action might only be the tip of the iceberg there.

There are journalists and others who might claim to have been defamed and had their reputations harmed through Armstrong's intimidatory behaviour. A lot of these sorts of actions will be aimed at the man, not the corporation, Tailwind. It has the taste of a class action.

Of course, with the inter-corporate jockeying for damages, Armstrong need only bankrupt Tailwind and that would be it. Although, if he was or is a director of Tailwind, he may well be more liable than some are letting on.

This will go on for a long time. It might fade far into the background, much to the relief of Armstrong's army of supporters who will ensure Armstrong won't end up in tattered kit on a street corner panhandling with a beat-up BD bike leaned up against the wall behind him.

But in emotional terms, one wonders whether Armstrong is already bankrupt.

mprelaw

ASO has already demanded that he return his TdF prize money, which they say is 2.90 million Euros.

Lightingguy

The NY Times article today commented that LA's net worth was somewhere around $125 million. Paying back prize earnings won't exactly bankrupt him. As well, all the prize earnings were shared among the team, so big question as to how to recover money from riders on all the teams LA rode with especially as many of the riders are not exactly rich.

Pretty much all the corporate endorsement money is his to keep, as it's doubtful any or few of the companies want the bad publicity of a court fight, which isn't cheap to begin with. Typically, companies do not attempt a recovery.

The legal issues LA faces, are many though.

Doohickie

cheater.

Six jours

Random thoughts, from a guy who actually was a pro (albeit a lousy one, and track rather than road...)

If you're surprised Lance (or any other pro) doped, you're a naif. Doping has been prevalent in the sport from the outset. Professional six-day racers invented the speedball (a mixture of cocaine and morphine) in the 19th century. The great Tour champion Charles Pelissier gave a scandalous interview about the pills he took to complete the race - in 1924. Many champions across the generations have tacitly admitted to doping - Anquetil, Riviere, Hinault... And of course we should all be familiar with the case of poor Tom Simpson. So all the talk of the "recent" affair of doping is nonsense.

The next reasonable question, then, is "Why has doping become such an issue in the last 20 years?" The answer is simple: because it has been made an issue. Doping wasn't even against the rules prior to the 1960s, and the sport went along just fine. I won't go into why the change has happened, because most of it would be opinion and conjecture, but it's important to understand that the obsession with catching dopers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Perhaps the sport was better back when A) spectators realized that bike racing was entertainment, and/or B) the sport paid mere lip service to drug testing without ever really catching anyone, or at least without ever doing anything significant about people who did get caught.

At any rate, regarding Lance specifically: I knew him before he was famous. He was an A-hole. I have no reason to believe that's changed. And I have no doubt that he doped. (The only surprise, to me, is the extent of the doping. He and his team apparently brought the science to dazzling new heights.) But I do think it was a mistake to pursue him to such an extent: not only because it was "unfair" to single him out, but also because it does the sport great harm to focus again and again and again on doping. The doping police could hardly have caused more damage if doing damage had been their goal from the outset. And of course, personalities aside, it appears that Lance has done great things for cancer research, which is far more important than bike racing in general, let alone the little subset of bike racing represented by doping.

So short version: everyone dopes. Everyone always has. Everyone probably always will. Lance is a jerk, who's probably done more good for mankind than any other bike racer ever has. And the doping Nazis are a scourge who have done nothing but harm to the sport.

Bikey Mikey

My personal feeling is that a good majority of the cyclists in all the races that LA won were doping and that if all of them were to repeat the races without any doping at the same age and physical condition, LA may still have won a good many of the races. Who knows.

Gerryattrick

Six Jours,

So are you saying doping is a perception problem rather than a real one?

I find this a very depressing, cynical response which implies that things were running along OK as long as doping wasn't pursued too vigorously and nobody rocked the boat.

If this is a typical view of a professional ( which I don't believe ), it would show that sport is too important to be run by professional sportsmen who appear to have little interest in the wider perspective outside their narrow field of expertise.

Rowan

All the other riders who doped didn't enlist the support of administrators and politicians and law makers to cover up the extent of this in his teams. And this under the guise of being a good guy.

I would have hoped some people would have been able to differentiate between a drug lord with connections to the highest places, supplying a huge network with cocaine or amphetamines, and a small-time pot dealer in clubs and pubs.

The difference between Armstrong and the other part-time dopers outside his team is that he was highly organised, paid a lot to keep people quiet, instituted unwarranted legal action against those who challenged him, and used political clout (including that fronted by Livestong) to hide what he was doing. And he destroyed other people's livelihoods along he way.

The evidence is all there, if you bother to research it.

Rowan

Yep.

gear

Once a rule was made against doping, it became cheating. Cheating should not be tolerated. It's irrelivent what others did before the rule was established. The rules against doping needed to be put in place before science in it's escalating development of new drugs turned the sport into a freak show. Just for a moment try and imagine what professional cycling would look like in 2030 if rules in doping weren't put in place.

asgelle

Again with the "single him out" lunacy. How can you say Armstrong was singled out when the charging document covered six individuals?
O.K. I get it. You're just following the talking points. Armstrong and his organization have done nothing for cancer research.

Mobile 155

When I first got the Books on the TDF by McGann and his wife I was shocked at how the TDF was created and what was expected of the riders. The Story of the Giro was no less shocking to me a non racer. When I realized that Henri Desgrange wanted an event that would test a rider up to and maybe even past the point of survival.

In my opinion we have tried to put American values on a European sport. The people that ran the TDF were willing to give lip service to wanting a drug free sport but lets face it they hadn't done more than slap a wrist until the US got involved. Remember it was the teams and the IOC that looked the other way in Lances case. If Lance was the drug lord, as some have indicated, the mafia collecting from him were the teams and the IOC. (Just as an observation or opinion.) Do I agree doping is bad for a person? Yep. Do I believe were are are being hypocritical about it? Yep. ( If many in the US were in charge of SUMO wrestling they would all have to go on a diet and conform to the new rules on soda only being sold in less the 20 ounce cups.) As we push for equality we set benchmarks saying that a VO-2 max should be such and such until we find someone who naturally meets a new max and then the VO-2 max has to be reset. But what have we done? In truth we are saying that people can dope up to that benchmark and as long as you don't go over you past the test. We have said you can take a prescription and have some drugs in you system for some reasons and not for others. If we really were interested in a clean "sport" shouldn't we say you can't participate till your prescription runs out? But that is just details and adds nothing.

If the question is do I think athletes should be all natural the answer would be yes. Do I think Pro athletes will ever be all natural the answer is no. Do I believe it is a moving target in our society. Many banned drugs are even over the counter supplements for non athletes like DHEA, Cortisone, Caffeine to name a few.Like I have said before I believe the day will come when different nations "breed" athletes beyound simply taking kids away from parents at an early age and training them for sports till they reach competive age. Sports in this day and age is simply nothing more than a business and the Athletes are nothing more than employees. We as a society have even changed some of the rules of sports so they look better for TV. That would indicate to me the love of the sport is pretty far down on the list of reasons people participate. Multi million dollar contracts or the Athlete will play for another team may be another reason to believe sports are not the prime goal but as stated before, entertainment.

I guess I have said all of that only to say I would be more impressed witht the effort to clean up sports if they started at the top and worked down than when they start at the bottom and leave the top where it is.

asgelle

I don't know who this "we" are you're referring to, but cycling through the UCI signed on to the WADA charter. I don't see where the American values come in for the Union Cycliste Internationale or World Anti-Doping Agency. Perhaps you might have been alluding to USADA, but they are controlled by WADA and so there is no place to insert American values there.