Lance Armstrong Stripped of Tour de France Medals
"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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McQuaid accepted the USADA's sanctions and said he was "sickened" by the
evidence in the report, pointing to testimony from one of Armstrong's
former teammates David Zabriskie, in which he details how he was
allegedly coercing into doping.
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.
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McQuaid accepted the USADA's sanctions and said he was "sickened" by the
evidence in the report, pointing to testimony from one of Armstrong's
former teammates David Zabriskie, in which he details how he was
allegedly coercing into doping.
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.
Paris
Thirteen years ago, on an idyllic summer’s afternoon, I stood by
the side of a road in the cheesemaking region of Cantal and watched
Lance Armstrong speed by, tucked into the peloton, on his way to his first victory in the
Tour de France.
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.
