Lance Armstrong Stripped of Tour de France Medals
The global governing body of cycling today said it will officially strip Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and ban him from the sport for life, marking an epic downfall for the cyclist once lauded as the greatest of all time but now at the center of a doping scandal.
"Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling and he deserves to be forgotten
in cycling," Pat McQuaid, the president of the International Cycling
Union, known as UCI, said today at a news conference in Switzerland.
"This is a landmark day for cycling."
The UCI's decision comes days after the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency banned Armstrong from the sport for life for alleged use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. The USADA issued a 200-page report Oct. 10 after a wide-scale investigation into Armstrong's alleged use of performance-enhancing substances.
The agency said its investigators interviewed 26 people with direct knowledge of Armstrong's alleged doping, including 11 teammates, and collected 1,000 pages of evidence accusing him of cheating.
Tom Pennington/Getty Images
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Armstrong tried to fight the USADA ban in court, but told the USADA in August that he wouldn't fight the doping charges against him. He has maintained he never cheated.
Armstrong made two appearances this weekend at the Livestrong Foundation's 15th anniversary charity gala, but did not concede much in the way of an explanation or apology for the alleged doping that cost him his medals and lucrative sponsors.
"People ask me a lot, 'How are you doing?' And I tell them, 'I've been better but I've also been worse,'" the cancer survivor said. "This mission is bigger than me. It's bigger than any individual."
Armstrong stepped down as the chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the cancer charity commonly known as Livestrong that he founded in 1997, a year after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer at age 25. He resigned last week to "spare the foundation any negative effects as a result of controversy."
Nike, Anheuser-Busch and Trek Bicycles are among the companies that severed ties with the cycling star last week in the wake of the scandal. Oakley sunglasses cut ties with Armstrong today after the UCI decision.
As Armstrong's sponsorships and reputation have fallen off a cliff, the silence surrounding his alleged doping methods over the years has begun to crack. In the USADA report, teammates describe years of systematic doping, using banned substances and receiving illicit blood transfusions.
A former competitor, Stephen Swart, testified in a deposition that Armstrong bribed him to throw a race with a $1 million prize. Swart said he was offered approximately $50,000 to allow Armstrong to win.
Armstrong tried to fight the USADA ban in court, but told the USADA in August that he wouldn't fight the doping charges against him. He has maintained he never cheated.
Armstrong made two appearances this weekend at the Livestrong Foundation's 15th anniversary charity gala, but did not concede much in the way of an explanation or apology for the alleged doping that cost him his medals and lucrative sponsors.
"People ask me a lot, 'How are you doing?' And I tell them, 'I've been better but I've also been worse,'" the cancer survivor said. "This mission is bigger than me. It's bigger than any individual."
Armstrong stepped down as the chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the cancer charity commonly known as Livestrong that he founded in 1997, a year after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer at age 25. He resigned last week to "spare the foundation any negative effects as a result of controversy."
Nike, Anheuser-Busch and Trek Bicycles are among the companies that severed ties with the cycling star last week in the wake of the scandal. Oakley sunglasses cut ties with Armstrong today after the UCI decision.
As Armstrong's sponsorships and reputation have fallen off a cliff, the silence surrounding his alleged doping methods over the years has begun to crack. In the USADA report, teammates describe years of systematic doping, using banned substances and receiving illicit blood transfusions.
A former competitor, Stephen Swart, testified in a deposition that Armstrong bribed him to throw a race with a $1 million prize. Swart said he was offered approximately $50,000 to allow Armstrong to win.
The USADA also accuses Armstrong of trying to intimidate witnesses. Former Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts said Armstrong and his inner circle tried to turn her into a villain with her bosses and smear her reputation personally when they heard she was investigation doping allegations.
"I don't really think there's any politician, celebrity or athlete who has really put together the machinery to suppress reporting about them like Lance Armstrong has," Roberts said.
For fans like me, Lance Armstrong doping saga spoils memories
Peter Ford, who covered Lance Armstrong's winning streak at the Tour de France for the Monitor, writes that Armstrong's doping has 'tainted some of my happiest memories of reporting in France.'
This
file photo shows Lance Armstrong, center, waving from the podium in
July 2002 as he holds the winner's trophy after the 20th and final stage
of the Tour de France cycling
race between Melun and Paris. Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour
de France titles and banned for life by cycling's governing body Monday.
Peter Dejong/AP/File Peter Ford
It was 1999. A year earlier the Tour had been in tatters, devastated by a doping scandal that had seen police and judges raiding riders’ hotel rooms in the middle of the night, seizing drugs. Armstrong’s successful arrival on the scene after overcoming cancer “is symbolic of the way the Tour de France is emerging from its own battle against disappearance,” said the tour director at the time.
His victory would be “highly symbolic of the combat he fought against death, and that we are fighting against doping,” promised Jean-Marie Leblanc.
It turns out that Mr. Armstrong beat the Tour de France organizers just as he had beaten death. Today the International Cycling Union (UCI), accepting evidence gathered by the US Anti-Doping Agency that Armstrong was a serial drug-taker, stripped the US “champion” of all his titles.
Even back in 1999, people suspected something was wrong. “Armstrong is very strong, too strong, incredibly strong,” commented one French TV journalist the evening that the US rider won a punishing stage in the Alps.
But that could be dismissed as sour grapes, as an American charged into a sport long dominated by the French and swept all before him, “winning” a record seven Tours.
And we all wanted to believe in Armstrong, from the UCI – for whom he was a magnificent money-spinning mascot for his sport – down to the lowliest spectator standing by the side of the road who admired his comeback courage.
Well, not all of us. My (French) wife never believed Armstrong was clean. She never believed that any of the top riders were clean. In argument after argument over the years I called her cynical, pointing out that my hero had never failed a drug test. Now I know that she was just clear-eyed.
Everybody who followed Lance during his “glory days” will have his or her own way of feeling disappointed now that the truth, it seems, is out. (Armstrong has not acknowledged any guilt but says he will not challenge the USADA report.)
For me, the news has tainted some of my happiest memories of reporting in France. I used to love covering the Tour, driving halfway up an Alp one July afternoon, parking my car near a steep hairpin bend, picnicking sociably with whomever I found parked next to me (and there were always crowds of families waiting for the Tour to come by), sleeping in the car, and then the next day enjoying the hoopla of the publicity caravan before the riders themselves came by, just an arm’s length away, thighs straining, sweat pouring from their chins, teeth gritted.
It was an annual treat for me, the most fun I have ever had at work. And watching these men at the outer edges of endurance even inspired me to take up cycling myself: I had a go at one of the Tour’s mountain stages in 2005 and I spend my weekends now cycling up and down mountains. (You can imagine what my wife thinks about that….)
Lance Armstrong, whose feats excited a lot of interest in American newspaper readers, was my passport to this kind of fun, and now that we know he was cheating, it feels almost as though I was piggyback cheating by having that fun.
Even at the time though, I realize, I could not entirely ignore my wife’s doubts. That evening in July 1999, as I dictated my article over the phone to my editor, I ended it with something the spokesman for Credit Lyonnais bank, the Tour’s leading sponsor, had told me.
“We cannot be certain that a scandal won’t drop on our heads,” he said. “I have just one hope: that the rumors about Lance Armstrong are not true.”
Thanks to:
Beijing Bureau Chief
Peter Ford is The Christian Science Monitor’s Beijing Bureau Chief. He covers news and features throughout China and also makes reporting trips to Japan and the Korean peninsula.
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