Lance Armstrong to lose Titles, Banned - Page 34

Also the UCI (International Cycling Union) disagrees with USADA, and it's only because of some very poorly-thought-out reciprocal agreements that this can even happen.
Basically WADA has agreements with the major sports bodies, but then ALSO gave all its "franchises" (each country's __ADA) its same powers, meaning that ANY franchisee in ANY country can start proceedings against anyone anywhere, regardless of their ability to defend themselves in that venue.

And yes, "franchise" is correct because this operation was run not by some officer of the law, but the CEO of USADA. Travis Tygart has had it in for Lance for a long time; when Floyd Landis was busted, Tygart offered him a sweet deal if he would dish dirt on Lance.

The Department of Justice actually ran a Grand Jury investigation for 2 years before dropping the case in February -- apparently, someone eventually realized that winning the first 6 tours in a row for the US Postal Service wasn't "defrauding" them of their sponsorship dollars. Some of the people called to testify are still active riders in the pro peloton, which are presumably in the "10+ witnesses" Tygart would call on, which means he didn't care about ACTIVE riders who were part of the same alleged doping ring; he just cared about trying to destroy public opinion about Lance, who was retired from cycling and last won in 2005.

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But USADA is now trying to ban the director of Lance's team, who ISN'T an admitted doper, solely because of his connection to Lance. Tygart wants to claim it was a conspiracy and the whole team was doped up, yet curiously is not trying to stop any of the OTHER ex-teammate riders he claims were cheating just like Lance, and who are still competing, presumably in exchange for their testimony.

This seemingly violates USADA's charter, as it is charged with stopping doping, yet is letting CURRENT riders continue on just to nail someone who RETIRED from cycling and last won 7 years ago.

Lance didn't have the option of a trial, only binding arbitration with a 3-person panel. Binding arbitration is bad enough for your cell phone contract, but imagine it applying to your job -- and not just to your current job, but a LIFETIME ban on working at all in your entire field.

And even if you win, it's not until after USADA has dragged your name through the mud, issues press releases about their allegations, makes false claims, and then publishes a report with all the allegations and dirt to further hurt your public image, and nothing prevents them from doing it all again later. (One of USADA's pieces of "evidence" was the biological passport values from the 2009-2010 comeback which fluctuated, which an expert in a Cycling News report already said could fluctuate from either doping OR natural causes; but USADA trumpeted that it automatically meant cheating. It's pre-trial by Press Release, without expert testimony.)

Besides the two expected witnesses who perjured themselves so badly that they would be completely unusable in an actual courtroom (Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton), another of the pieces of so-called "evidence" that Tygart wanted to use was 6 urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France, a case which had already been investigated by the UCI's own appointee, and it EXONERATED Lance. The investigator was the director of the Netherlands national anti-doping organization, and wrote in his exhaustive, 132-page report:
the failure of the underlying research to comply with any applicable standard and the deficiencies in the report render it completely irresponsible for anyone involved in doping control testing to even suggest that the analyses results that were reported constitute evidence of anything.
(p. 17) PDF link: http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/news/2006/jun06/vrijmanreport.pdf
It was an epic beatdown. WADA screamed bloody murder, even though under their own regulations, they had stored the samples under the agreement they would never be used for sanctions of any kind!
Since the samples were EXPLICITLY not to be used for sanctions, they didn't follow the chain-of-custody regulations, were NOT anonymous, and sat in a freezer for 6 years that was accessible like any other research materials to any number of people.
Chain of custody is ESSENTIAL to handling samples, and it is already established in every context that a broken chain of custody equals completely worthless non-evidence.

Moreover, the French national anti-doping lab in question regularly leaks its findings to the French paper L'Equipe, which has a notorious anti-Lance POV (they really didn't like him winning their tour every single year).
This would be something like if you went for a drug test for your job, and before anyone else got the official results, your worst enemy on Facebook posted the "results" given to him from his buddy at the lab that coincidentally showed you used certain substances that were also sitting in the lab research supplies. Let's see, people with a motive and a grudge who have access to your samples with no chain of custody and know exactly which samples are yours and suddenly find a "positive" years after the fact?

The whole process is the definition of a kangaroo court. The anti-doping agencies ONLY get clout and increase their budgets by busting people; if busts don't happen, people will begin wondering what the point of the doping agencies IS, exactly. There's no bigger fish than Lance, so CEO Tygart is probably counting on a big fat funding increase next year based on being able to abuse power like this

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Contrary to the assertion that Lance "accepted" USADA's decision, he instead refused to go into binding arbitration with Travis Tygart, refusing to acknowledge the CEO of USADA's personal vendetta as legitimate. Both Lance and the UCI agree that the UCI is the only legitimate party with jurisdiction, as the UCI has announced publicly.

On August 26 2012 15:12 akalarry wrote:
might as well ban usain bolt from ever competing in track ever again

On August 26 2012 09:32 NeMeSiS3 wrote:


In a sport full of drug abusers it seems that getting 7 TDF after battling cancer because you were on some drugs which boosted your red blood count (which 2 of 4 are legal, he just chose the illegal ones allegedly) it seems like he still has a lot to be proud of, bitch all you want but not many people can say "I doped and won 7 times" ^^

On August 26 2012 19:41 KingAce wrote:
This almost sounds like another EU vs NA thing. I don't really care about what happened in the past, just prove it in a court of law. If you can't, leave the man alone.

On August 26 2012 19:49 kwizach wrote:

The only reason they can't is Armstrong stopped fighting precisely to avoid going to court. The evidence is there.

On August 26 2012 21:16 snow2.0 wrote:
I don't understand cycling sports and their fans.

In all likelyhood, every single one of these "athletes" are doping. Maybe with the exception of the guys coming in last every race, but those might just as well simply have the worst talent and ability.

And then, every few months, somebody comes along with the great revelation that one guy or other dopes. ORLY! You don't say.


I say, just make all these legal for cycling, let them ruin their lives and we have a fair competition of everybody doping openly with all the same stuff available.