Lance Armstrong Stripped Of All Titles

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Geico266

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In a stunning more Lance Armstrong has given up the fight of clearing his name is the doping charges.

Wow.
 
So he passes every drug test he ever took, but because people say he did something, a federal organization can find him guilty and remove awards earned in a foreign country, without a trial?

Choosing not to fight, is there proof of guilt?

Where is the country I was born in? Because this sure the hell isn't it.
 
Mafoo said:
So he passes every drug test he ever took, but because people say he did something, a federal organization can find him guilty and remove awards earned in a foreign country, without a trial?

Choosing not to fight, is there proof of guilt?

Where is the country I was born in? Because this sure the hell isn't it.
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Seriously. If he passed all the drug tests, where's the proof?
 
I wonder if they'll revoke his cancer and all the other things he went through too.
 
Anthony said:
Seriously. If he passed all the drug tests, where's the proof?
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They have people willing to testify that he did it. Interestingly, the people testifying have failed drug tests in the past, and are saying that Lance did the same thing.

He also uses coaches that have been convicted of such things.

None of it is proof of anything, and apparently hundreds of passed drug tests means nothing.
 
Apparently his case would not have gone to court, it would have gone into arbitration with the USADA, who (I think) have something like a 58-2 record in doping cases. Also, as has already been mentined, the USADA already has something like 14 witnesses prepared to testify again Lance. The USADA has agreements with the whatever international agency deals with these sorts of cases, so they will abide by the USADA ruling.

While it is not an "official" admission of guilt, in the eyes of...well just about everyone, it might as well be.
 
I'm not a cyclist, but a friend of mine is. He is a sponsored racer on a team in Dallas. He tells me in the community it's known that LA is guilty. Everyone at that level is. Turns out testicular cancer is a side effect of roids. Go figure.
 
darrell said:
Apparently his case would not have gone to court, it would have gone into arbitration with the USADA, who (I think) have something like a 58-2 record in doping cases. Also, as has already been mentined, the USADA already has something like 14 witnesses prepared to testify again Lance. The USADA has agreements with the whatever international agency deals with these sorts of cases, so they will abide by the USADA ruling.

While it is not an "official" admission of guilt, in the eyes of...well just about everyone, it might as well be.
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I think in Lance's last argument against the USADA was that those witnesses they had lined up were being kept confidential. I think that Floyd Landis was one, but most of the rest were not being made public, even to Lance and his legal team.

It's interesting that ESPN this morning mentioned - so, who would get the wins in the Tour if Lance is stripped? All the #2 and #3 finishers in his wins have tested positive themselves (except for 1, I think they said).

If everyone does it, where is the advantage?
 
Captain said:
I'm not a cyclist, but a friend of mine is. He is a sponsored racer on a team in Dallas. He tells me in the community it's known that LA is guilty. Everyone at that level is. Turns out testicular cancer is a side effect of roids. Go figure.
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I don't doubt it, and that really is a shame.
 
Captain said:
I'm not a cyclist, but a friend of mine is. He is a sponsored racer on a team in Dallas. He tells me in the community it's known that LA is guilty. Everyone at that level is. Turns out testicular cancer is a side effect of roids. Go figure.
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I understand that he had testicular cancer several years before he won his first Tour de France.

Further, I heard the charge is doping, not steriods.
 
He has never overtly said he did not use PED. He has always said "I have never tested positive for PED". Subtle distinction, like the definition of "is". I have a lot of respect for his accomplishments and the work he does which is enabled by his notoriety. His official statement is well done, but again carefully worded. It seems to indicate that they had a bunch of "guilty" cyclists lined up against him, who probably made sweetheart deals to keep racing.

From the beginning, however, this investigation has not been about learning the truth or cleaning up cycling, but about punishing me at all costs. I am a retired cyclist, yet USADA has lodged charges over 17 years old despite its own 8-year limitation. As respected organizations such as UCI and USA Cycling have made clear, USADA lacks jurisdiction even to bring these charges. The international bodies governing cycling have ordered USADA to stop, have given notice that no one should participate in USADA’s improper proceedings, and have made it clear the pronouncements by USADA that it has banned people for life or stripped them of their accomplishments are made without authority. And as many others, including USADA’s own arbitrators, have found, there is nothing even remotely fair about its process. USADA has broken the law, turned its back on its own rules, and stiff-armed those who have tried to persuade USADA to honor its obligations. At every turn, USADA has played the role of a bully, threatening everyone in its way and challenging the good faith of anyone who questions its motives or its methods, all at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. For the last two months, USADA has endlessly repeated the mantra that there should be a single set of rules, applicable to all, but they have arrogantly refused to practice what they preach. On top of all that, USADA has allegedly made deals with other riders that circumvent their own rules as long as they said I cheated. Many of those riders continue to race today.
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Emphasis mine.

http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance-armstongs-statement-of-august-23-2012
 
It's easy to get a long list of witnesses when you first charge them with doping/fraud and then offer them immunity to testify against Armstrong. I see no one who wins in this. Certainly no benefit to the taxpayers who funded the witch hunt. Given all he did to increase cycling awareness and participation and what he did for unify the country (if only for a month a year), I just don't see the benefit to chasing him down. I think this is similar to trying to lock up Steve Jobs for admitted past drug use. Sometimes, it's just worth turning the other way to things.
 
Lance never said he did not use ped's. All he said was that he passed the tests in place. That is a HUGE difference. He simply used drugs that were either maskable or not tested for. He also did not say the charges were false. All he said basically was what Matthew said above which is that I had no advantage.
 
This whole thing is so incredibly stupid. Lance Armstrong earned his titles. Sure, some sanctioning authority can declare them invalid, but they can't take back the history of what he did. Sheesh.

I wish the paranoia over doping in professional athletics would just stop. At that level, professional athletes are tearing their bodys up regardless of whether they use roids or not. And they all do it anyway.
 
If, as has been suggested, roids were the (possible) cause of his cancer, after all the agony he went through fighting it. (You should read his book "It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life) Do you think he would put himself at risk by continuing the use of substances that almost killed him in order to win a bike race? :dunno::mad2: His cancer fight was before the Tour wins. I'm as against cheating as much as the next guy, but something about this "witch hunt " smells fishy. If the French won't strip him of those wins, how can USADA?
 
I'm highly suspicious of what "everyone knows".

The bottom line is that none of the hundreds of drug tests ever showed evidence of what he is accused of. There has been a lynch mob out to get Lance for years. They initially tried to catch him within the rules. Now they have quit trying to use the rules and decided they will just lynch him.
 
SCCutler said:
Is there really a federal agency tasked with dealing with athlete doping? A federal bureaucracy?

Really?
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Yes.

And the prosecutions of various star baseball players was undertaken in by the US Attorney in Federal court.
 
People are convicted and sentenced by the criminal courts every day based on the testimony of other criminals who have cut a deal to help themselves... Lance could expect no less...
We do have the best system in the world, but that only means we are slightly better than Putin's Russia, not that our system is either logical or fair...

Did he dope with EP?
Dunno (shrug)
Don't care...

denny-o
 
I wonder if whatever organization runs the Tour de France recognizes the USADA's authority to strip titles.

So, do the second place finishers get bumped up to first?

Are the USADA police going to raid Armstrong's home and seize his yellow shirts?
 
Steve Foley said:
I wonder if whatever organization runs the Tour de France recognizes the USADA's authority to strip titles.

So, do the second place finishers get bumped up to first?

Are the USADA police going to raid Armstrong's home and seize his yellow shirts?
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The bigger problem for them is everyone else on the podium during Lance's years has since be caught or admitted to doping. Do they really want a 15 year period in which every winner of the TDF (other than Sastre) has been forced to vacate the yellow jersey or just let things be?
 
roncachamp said:
Oh, I think it is much less than "just about everyone".
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Indeed. I am not remotely interested in convicting him in the court of ill-informed public opinion.

bartmc said:
Maybe he didn't want them to dig too deep and this was the best option he had :devil:
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Sometimes, as it is said, you opt not to wrestle with the pig in the mud, because you get dirty while the pig enjoys it.

wsuffa said:
Yes.

And the prosecutions of various star baseball players was undertaken in by the US Attorney in Federal court.
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Gosh golly. Cannot think of a more valuable use of tax money.
 
Mafoo said:
So he passes every drug test he ever took,
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Not exactly, they have an old sample (actually at this point more than one) of his urine/blood from TdF and other races that tests positive for EPO. Why they could not find this trace years ago - tests for EPO were developed only recently.
 
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The drama over the doping, driven by the need to win to bring in sponsorship money, itself keeps an otherwise completely boring sporting event interesting, which brings in even more money.

Yawn. Go ride your bike, and stop watching "professionals" who have to mess with their bodies, do it.

It's gotten to the point where if someone is "unbeatable" in any sport, the odds they're cheating are so high, it's not even interesting as a debate anymore.

I always thought it was entertaining that the Postal Service sponsored Lance's team, anyway. What, you're not bankrupt enough, you should buy some bikes and a team to drag his ass up the hill?

Said something funny, albeit probably unintended, about USPS, really. ;)

For the aviation bent... I'm similarly conflicted with Sean Tucker. Oracle is an awful company. Worse behavior than MSFT as far as likely anti-trust/anti-competition goes -- see last week's news regarding their continued efforts to kill MySQL as a viable business RDBMS platform. But I do enjoy seeing that maniac fly.

Shrug. Doping. Who cares? Let 'me all juice up and blow up their hearts and livers. Call it "Unlimited Class". They won't, becaus they want the impression that you don't have to be a stark-raving psycho to compete at that level. "Anyone can do it..." (Now, take this infusion and don't get caught... viewership is falling...)
 
denverpilot said:
The drama over the doping, driven by the need to win to bring in sponsorship money, itself keeps an otherwise completely boring sporting event interesting, which brings in even more money.

Yawn. Go ride your bike, and stop watching "professionals" who have to mess with their bodies, do it.

It's gotten to the point where if someone is "unbeatable" in any sport, the odds they're cheating are so high, it's not even interesting as a debate anymore.

I always thought it was entertaining that the Postal Service sponsored Lance's team, anyway. What, you're not bankrupt enough, you should buy some bikes and a team to drag his ass up the hill?

Said something funny, albeit probably unintended, about USPS, really. ;)

For the aviation bent... I'm similarly conflicted with Sean Tucker. Oracle is an awful company. Worse behavior than MSFT as far as likely anti-trust/anti-competition goes -- see last week's news regarding their continued efforts to kill MySQL as a viable business RDBMS platform. But I do enjoy seeing that maniac fly.

Shrug. Doping. Who cares? Let 'me all juice up and blow up their hearts and livers. Call it "Unlimited Class". They won't, becaus they want the impression that you don't have to be a stark-raving psycho to compete at that level. "Anyone can do it..." (Now, take this infusion and don't get caught... viewership is falling...)
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There's good money in keeping it illegal, what with lawyers, congressional panels, anti-doping agencies, compliance regulations that have to be monitored, media stores etc...

I hate MySQL.
 
bartmc said:
There's good money in keeping it illegal, what with lawyers, congressional panels, anti-doping agencies, compliance regulations that have to be monitored, media stores etc...

I hate MySQL.
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Yup.

I hate it too, but it was at least semi-viable for folks who didn't have the cash to buy Oracle. ;)

Personally, I like Informix. ;)
 
jesse said:
Curious what you two hate about MySQL?
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Scale. It sucks at scaling. That's about it, really. If you don't start from day one with clustering, it's a huge PITA to have to use a giant dump file to restore a small portion of the DB that's damaged.

I also dislike that it didn't have stored procedures until v5. Well written stored procedures can defend against clueless coders issuing giant queries that crush the hardware. "Here is the API, and the data you can retrieve via the stored procedures", is a good way to keep that from happening.

I also wasn't that long ago that it used MyISAM instead of InnoDB, and that significantly changed how seriously I took it. Until InnoDB, it wasn't capable of so many things, that it shouldn't have been called a "real" database. But that complaint went away some time ago.

Overall, the crux of it might be that there were RDBMS in the 80s that did more than MySQL for at least a decade, until it caught up. For some reason, it generally beat out PostgreSQL in the "free" market, which seemed a giant backward step for many years until it matched performance and features.

A lot of that was driven by PHP having better support for MySQL during the right timing to be used for websites when the Web appeared out of nowhere. Prior to that, Perl had a rich set of tools to talk to just about any DB (still does), and nowadays, PHP and Python do, while Ruby lags behind.

In general, it always felt "unfinished" until right about the time Oracle bought it, which says something... It finally became a significant business threat to them about that time.

That said, I maintain one MySQL engine with about 1.5TB of data in it, and it's generally happy. Corrupted backups (hardware problem) recently required a 12 hour downtime to get a solid dump from it, a snapshot of the filesystem when quiet may have sufficed, but no one trusted it. Having used both Oracle and Informix's built in snapshotting tools inside the DB, I trust those. They've worked for a long time.

Informix + VeritasFS + Veritas Cluster Server (very well integrated) on Sun hardware was online/offline cluster solidness. That combination worked flawlessly enough that many places didn't (and still don't) even bother with DB backups. (Scary, but I know numerous telco systems that don't. The vendor says to do it, but no one does.). That stuff was working in the late 80s and early 90s. MySQL wasn't even a player then in that space. Wasn't cheap, though.
 
Nice to know our tax dollars are being used for such essential service as chasing Lance Armstrong.
 
The need for regulatory bodies to do something, anything BIG, once in a while, to keep their funding, is pretty much responsible for this joke.
 
jesse said:
Curious what you two hate about MySQL?
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We were looking to replace Informix (well sort of Informix) we were using the ISAM Files Informix creates and writing our own parsing/indexing routines to search them (i.e. not using an SQL). We evaluated MySQL at the time, approx 9ish years ago, they didn't support stored procedures (no big deal on my account, most stored procs are a mess and misused to being with, one less thing for someone to screw up) OR Foreign Key relationship... They actually had diatribes written about why not supporting Foreign key relationships was the best route to take... I giggled and installed PostgreSQL and went on with life. Fast forward 6 years, I'm now consulting. I should probably love MySQL due to the the fact that I get handed big messes most of which involve some sort of LAMP application and some sort of hacked up GPLed CMS that's gotten unmanageable (The rest are Access projects gone wrong). It's good for business. One of my first dealings with one of these messes was to determine why results all throughout the application were inconsistent.. Aparrently the same guy at MySQL who determined that not offering the option of Foreign Keys was best also implemented the GROUP BY logic... You can SELECT anything you want and it doesn't have to be in the GROUP BY... If it's not in the GROUP BY, the results will for those columns will be picked pseudo-random (Well, you can carefully craft an ORDER BY to get predictable results). The original programmer had utilized this "feature" (as they call it) extensively. Given that anything SELECTed should be GROUPed BY, the structure of the queries was just incorrect and every query in this application had to be re-written to adhere to somewhat sane SQL standards. There's plenty of stuff like that in there to make me run from it, if I have a choice. For a little personal wordpress blog, it's fine for anything serious, I'd chose PostgreSQL if I were looking to the Open Source market for my solutions.
 
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Like any tool - you need to know how to use it. MySQL has shipped with InnoDB for quite a long time now. I've found that most people's complaints about it are because they looked at it many years ago and haven't realized those concerns are long gone.

Keep in mind that I'm not a total MySQL fan boy. I know where it does well and where it doesn't do well I use something else. The current project I'm working on uses Postgresql. But I support a lot of MySQL and for some things it still makes a lot of sense. It's going to have integrated memcached support soon which could be pretty damn cool.

denverpilot said:
That said, I maintain one MySQL engine with about 1.5TB of data in it, and it's generally happy. Corrupted backups (hardware problem) recently required a 12 hour downtime to get a solid dump from it, a snapshot of the filesystem when quiet may have sufficed, but no one trusted it. Having used both Oracle and Informix's built in snapshotting tools inside the DB, I trust those. They've worked for a long time.
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Next time that happens let me know. I've been down that road many times. Why did you have to shut it down for 12 hours to get a dump? If you're using InnoDB you can just dump in a single transaction without causing any real locking issues: --single-transaction option on mysqldump. Filesystem snapshot works very well with InnoDB as well and can be trusted. If you're really concerned you can do a flush tables with read lock; and then snapshot quickly and unlock tables.

I did recently run into a really weird problem where running mysqldump would crash the mysqld process. I finally traced it down to some weird underlieing data corruption that was likely our fault from many years ago and was able to repair the tables without disruption.
 
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