4 ms·

Lance Armstrong's Statement

21 points by eliajf 14y ago

vimota 14y ago
It's ridiculous that the government pursue these charges as criminal. Any such issues should be dealt by the sport's own committee and not by a government body.
- soperj 14y ago
  meh, if it's true he made a lot of money from it. Fraud?
  - warmwaffles 14y ago
    I don't think it constitutes as fraud.
    - soperj 14y ago
      maybe not, still makes him a phony.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) isn't the government, and nobody's pursuing criminal charges. (There was a criminal investigation into his case, but it ended in February. The AP story has background: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CYC_ARMSTRONG_DOPING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-08-23-21-52-08 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CYC_ARMSTRONG_DOPING?...) The proposed punishment is stripping Armstrong of his cycling titles and barring him from participating from the sport in the future.
prezjordan 14y ago
What a shame for the sport and community as a whole that this happened. EDIT: HNers might enjoy this [0] relevant Wikipedia article [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling#1886 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling...
- warmwaffles 14y ago
  This would have dragged on for months and the witch hunt would have found something. Remember the Barry Bonds case took AGES to complete and his case was easy.
timmyd 14y ago
"The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of controls I have passed with flying colors. I made myself available around the clock and around the world. In-competition. Out of competition. Blood. Urine. Whatever they asked for I provided. What is the point of all this testing if, in the end, USADA will not stand by it?" I assume the USADA is stating that all these tests we wrong ? Or that his 'doping' technique was too advanced ? Seems a pretty long stretch of the bow in my mind.
- kamaal 14y ago
  That claim would be ridiculous. Basically because those tests are firstly numbered in 'hundreds'. Secondly the sheer count of its numbers in occasions, places, people, labs, qualification of testers all turning out to be false negatives over the years is impossible.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  Armstrong's claim of passing "hundreds of controls" obscures the actual issue in this case. It's true that Armstrong passed many drug tests over the course of his career, but the USADA charges that he was engaged in "blood doping" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping), a technique generally associated with a substance called EPO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin). A new process made EPO widely available in the late 1980s. But because EPO is chemically similar to substances the body produces naturally, nobody was able to come up with a way to test athletes for EPO usage at all until the year 2000 (http://www.wada-ama.org/en/Resources/Q-and-A/EPO-Detection/ http://www.wada-ama.org/en/Resources/Q-and-A/EPO-Detection/), and it took a few more years after that for anti-doping agencies to have confidence in the accuracy of the test. So there was a 10 to 15 year window of time where athletes could use EPO with a degree of confidence that no contemporary test would be able to definitively prove they did so. The result was that many of the results of cycling's top races during the 1990s and 2000s had to be re-examined when it finally became clear that many of the contenders had been blood doping during that period (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#Doping_histories_of_Top-10_finishers.2C_1998_-_2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#Do... for examples from the Tour de France). So the "hundreds of controls" defense is a bit weasel-wordy. It doesn't mean so much to pass hundreds of tests if those tests were given at a time when the testers didn't know how to catch the thing you're accused of doing.
kamaal 14y ago
>>The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of controls I have passed with flying colors. I made myself available around the clock and around the world. In-competition. Out of competition. Blood. Urine. Whatever they asked for I provided. What is the point of all this testing if, in the end, USADA will not stand by it? And. >>Tygart and the antidoping agency were basing their case not on a positive drug test but rather on other supporting evidence. (From http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/sports/cycling/lance-armstrong-ends-fight-against-doping-charges-losing-his-7-tour-de-france-titles.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/sports/cycling/lance-armst...) Well I don't know the complete story of what tests and when he passed them. But what are the odds of 'hundreds' of tests turning out out to be false negatives? And I suppose these tests are carried out all round the world in various competitions in various countries, in various labs, by hundreds of people over the years? Its like their only evidence is he-said and she-said rumors over the years combined with the perceived impossibility of a cancer survivor making it through that high levels of endurance required to make it where Armstrong has made it. >>The idea that athletes can be convicted today without positive A and B samples, under the same rules and procedures that apply to athletes with positive tests, perverts the system and creates a process where any begrudged ex-teammate can open a USADA case out of spite or for personal gain or a cheating cyclist can cut a sweetheart deal for themselves. It’s an unfair approach, applied selectively, in opposition to all the rules. It’s just not right. If what I'm reading is true. This is something like a murder happens at a lane, then you and your enemy pass by that lane. Now your enemy complains to the police that you did it. And now the system has all rights to punish you on that statement alone. This agency looks like to formed to increase their kill ratio. And to some how punish a few famous athletes so that they can justify their own existence and show the world why they are so important.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  > But what are the odds of 'hundreds' of tests turning out out to be false negatives? The Tour is one of the most heavily drug-tested events in international sport, and yet it's still notorious for rampant doping. (About half of people who have finished in the top 10 in the Tour over the past decade have also been caught doping.) The odds that thousands of drug tests can be false negatives is virtually zero. . . but it's certain that they regularly fail to catch doping. Doping is harder to catch in the Tour, because doping in multi-stage bike racing is very different from doping in most sports. It's not about taking anabolic steroids to give you the physique of a pro wrestler, it's about very carefully tweaking your metabolism to help give you just a bit more endurance than you would have otherwise, or to help you recover from the exhaustion of the previous day's stage just a bit more than you would have otherwise. There are lots of ways to do this, and many of them don't even involve drugs. For example, a nightly blood transfusion will give you more red blood cells with which to keep your muscles oxygenated. Another popular agent, EPO, is a natural part of human metabolism that plays a part in red cell production - and it's impossible to distinguish EPO that a person's body produces from EPO that's been injected. So instead officials have just set an upper limit on how much EPO can be detectable in your bloodstream. Which essentially codifies doping as just another part of the strategy of winning the Tour: The goal is to skirt as close as you can to that limit without going over.
richardw 14y ago
The Lance Armstrong I've followed and read about all these years wouldn't give up now, if he were innocent. He'd follow it up like he did investigating cancer. He'd consider it a challenge, which if won would make the world finally admit that he was right. Every hour riding in the snow and rain in training is worth a few months or a year of fighting, especially when he can afford the best resources money can buy. He's still a hero of mine - he's the consummate professional, checking every tiny box that could possibly affect his performance, despite having some serious physiological advantages that might have left others feeling confident that they had it in the bag. He rode in the worst weather, just because he might compete in that weather. He lived for his life's work like most of us never will. I believe he simply competed in a time where many really good racers were doping, and if you want to check all the boxes, that was one you had to seriously consider. This is not he-said-she-said rumours. It includes 2009 and 2010 blood samples consistent with blood doping. Witnesses aren't enemies, they are some of his closest allies, people who he relied on for tens of thousands of kilometres. At some point the weight of evidence starts to mount up. Keep in mind that the doctors (like Ferrari) who (allegedly) helped him, were experts in their field. They would have known every technique used to catch doping, and would have tested their methods against them. That's how you beat testing - you do your own testing, and if you can mask doping well enough, you use it on your top athletes. Armstrong says he's willing to take people to court for this. If so, he's not only interested in moving on with his life. Moving on with his life would be ignoring it, and moving on. So: still a hero and one of the most amazing athletes ever, but guilty.
- kamaal 14y ago
  >>It includes 2009 and 2010 blood samples consistent with blood doping. You need to back that up with some data. Especially when the agency that refuses to accept his 'hundreds' of previous tests says this. Besides your proof is: a. Team mates that say he was doping. Must be taken at face value. b. Doctors who are super experts and might be supplying drugs which no body else can detect. Regarding b)- If its true then dope testing is seriously broken. And with that now everybody who has every played a sport needs to be rechecked again. I think all the man is asking is to give him evidence based on tested samples. And why is it so difficult for the test agencies to disclose those reports when they claim to have found it in 2009-2010.
mgiedt 14y ago
Must read: http://inrng.com/2012/08/lance-armstrong-quits/ http://inrng.com/2012/08/lance-armstrong-quits/

21 points by eliajf 14y ago

It's ridiculous that the government pursue these charges as criminal. Any such issues should be dealt by the sport's own committee and not by a government body.

soperj 14y ago
meh, if it's true he made a lot of money from it. Fraud?
- warmwaffles 14y ago
  I don't think it constitutes as fraud.
  - soperj 14y ago
    maybe not, still makes him a phony.
smacktoward 14y ago
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) isn't the government, and nobody's pursuing criminal charges. (There was a criminal investigation into his case, but it ended in February. The AP story has background: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CYC_ARMSTRONG_DOPING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-08-23-21-52-08 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CYC_ARMSTRONG_DOPING?...) The proposed punishment is stripping Armstrong of his cycling titles and barring him from participating from the sport in the future.

prezjordan 14y ago

What a shame for the sport and community as a whole that this happened. EDIT: HNers might enjoy this [0] relevant Wikipedia article [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling#1886 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cycling...

warmwaffles 14y ago
This would have dragged on for months and the witch hunt would have found something. Remember the Barry Bonds case took AGES to complete and his case was easy.

timmyd 14y ago

"The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of controls I have passed with flying colors. I made myself available around the clock and around the world. In-competition. Out of competition. Blood. Urine. Whatever they asked for I provided. What is the point of all this testing if, in the end, USADA will not stand by it?" I assume the USADA is stating that all these tests we wrong ? Or that his 'doping' technique was too advanced ? Seems a pretty long stretch of the bow in my mind.

kamaal 14y ago
That claim would be ridiculous. Basically because those tests are firstly numbered in 'hundreds'. Secondly the sheer count of its numbers in occasions, places, people, labs, qualification of testers all turning out to be false negatives over the years is impossible.
smacktoward 14y ago
Armstrong's claim of passing "hundreds of controls" obscures the actual issue in this case. It's true that Armstrong passed many drug tests over the course of his career, but the USADA charges that he was engaged in "blood doping" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping), a technique generally associated with a substance called EPO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythropoietin). A new process made EPO widely available in the late 1980s. But because EPO is chemically similar to substances the body produces naturally, nobody was able to come up with a way to test athletes for EPO usage at all until the year 2000 (http://www.wada-ama.org/en/Resources/Q-and-A/EPO-Detection/ http://www.wada-ama.org/en/Resources/Q-and-A/EPO-Detection/), and it took a few more years after that for anti-doping agencies to have confidence in the accuracy of the test. So there was a 10 to 15 year window of time where athletes could use EPO with a degree of confidence that no contemporary test would be able to definitively prove they did so. The result was that many of the results of cycling's top races during the 1990s and 2000s had to be re-examined when it finally became clear that many of the contenders had been blood doping during that period (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#Doping_histories_of_Top-10_finishers.2C_1998_-_2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#Do... for examples from the Tour de France). So the "hundreds of controls" defense is a bit weasel-wordy. It doesn't mean so much to pass hundreds of tests if those tests were given at a time when the testers didn't know how to catch the thing you're accused of doing.

kamaal 14y ago

>>The only physical evidence here is the hundreds of controls I have passed with flying colors. I made myself available around the clock and around the world. In-competition. Out of competition. Blood. Urine. Whatever they asked for I provided. What is the point of all this testing if, in the end, USADA will not stand by it? And. >>Tygart and the antidoping agency were basing their case not on a positive drug test but rather on other supporting evidence. (From http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/sports/cycling/lance-armstrong-ends-fight-against-doping-charges-losing-his-7-tour-de-france-titles.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/sports/cycling/lance-armst...) Well I don't know the complete story of what tests and when he passed them. But what are the odds of 'hundreds' of tests turning out out to be false negatives? And I suppose these tests are carried out all round the world in various competitions in various countries, in various labs, by hundreds of people over the years? Its like their only evidence is he-said and she-said rumors over the years combined with the perceived impossibility of a cancer survivor making it through that high levels of endurance required to make it where Armstrong has made it. >>The idea that athletes can be convicted today without positive A and B samples, under the same rules and procedures that apply to athletes with positive tests, perverts the system and creates a process where any begrudged ex-teammate can open a USADA case out of spite or for personal gain or a cheating cyclist can cut a sweetheart deal for themselves. It’s an unfair approach, applied selectively, in opposition to all the rules. It’s just not right. If what I'm reading is true. This is something like a murder happens at a lane, then you and your enemy pass by that lane. Now your enemy complains to the police that you did it. And now the system has all rights to punish you on that statement alone. This agency looks like to formed to increase their kill ratio. And to some how punish a few famous athletes so that they can justify their own existence and show the world why they are so important.

bunderbunder 14y ago
> But what are the odds of 'hundreds' of tests turning out out to be false negatives? The Tour is one of the most heavily drug-tested events in international sport, and yet it's still notorious for rampant doping. (About half of people who have finished in the top 10 in the Tour over the past decade have also been caught doping.) The odds that thousands of drug tests can be false negatives is virtually zero. . . but it's certain that they regularly fail to catch doping. Doping is harder to catch in the Tour, because doping in multi-stage bike racing is very different from doping in most sports. It's not about taking anabolic steroids to give you the physique of a pro wrestler, it's about very carefully tweaking your metabolism to help give you just a bit more endurance than you would have otherwise, or to help you recover from the exhaustion of the previous day's stage just a bit more than you would have otherwise. There are lots of ways to do this, and many of them don't even involve drugs. For example, a nightly blood transfusion will give you more red blood cells with which to keep your muscles oxygenated. Another popular agent, EPO, is a natural part of human metabolism that plays a part in red cell production - and it's impossible to distinguish EPO that a person's body produces from EPO that's been injected. So instead officials have just set an upper limit on how much EPO can be detectable in your bloodstream. Which essentially codifies doping as just another part of the strategy of winning the Tour: The goal is to skirt as close as you can to that limit without going over.

richardw 14y ago

The Lance Armstrong I've followed and read about all these years wouldn't give up now, if he were innocent. He'd follow it up like he did investigating cancer. He'd consider it a challenge, which if won would make the world finally admit that he was right. Every hour riding in the snow and rain in training is worth a few months or a year of fighting, especially when he can afford the best resources money can buy. He's still a hero of mine - he's the consummate professional, checking every tiny box that could possibly affect his performance, despite having some serious physiological advantages that might have left others feeling confident that they had it in the bag. He rode in the worst weather, just because he might compete in that weather. He lived for his life's work like most of us never will. I believe he simply competed in a time where many really good racers were doping, and if you want to check all the boxes, that was one you had to seriously consider. This is not he-said-she-said rumours. It includes 2009 and 2010 blood samples consistent with blood doping. Witnesses aren't enemies, they are some of his closest allies, people who he relied on for tens of thousands of kilometres. At some point the weight of evidence starts to mount up. Keep in mind that the doctors (like Ferrari) who (allegedly) helped him, were experts in their field. They would have known every technique used to catch doping, and would have tested their methods against them. That's how you beat testing - you do your own testing, and if you can mask doping well enough, you use it on your top athletes. Armstrong says he's willing to take people to court for this. If so, he's not only interested in moving on with his life. Moving on with his life would be ignoring it, and moving on. So: still a hero and one of the most amazing athletes ever, but guilty.

kamaal 14y ago
>>It includes 2009 and 2010 blood samples consistent with blood doping. You need to back that up with some data. Especially when the agency that refuses to accept his 'hundreds' of previous tests says this. Besides your proof is: a. Team mates that say he was doping. Must be taken at face value. b. Doctors who are super experts and might be supplying drugs which no body else can detect. Regarding b)- If its true then dope testing is seriously broken. And with that now everybody who has every played a sport needs to be rechecked again. I think all the man is asking is to give him evidence based on tested samples. And why is it so difficult for the test agencies to disclose those reports when they claim to have found it in 2009-2010.

mgiedt 14y ago

Must read: http://inrng.com/2012/08/lance-armstrong-quits/ http://inrng.com/2012/08/lance-armstrong-quits/