Adrian Smith, a prominent blogger on soccer, cycling and clean sports, recently posted this amazingly damning, focused and, despite it's 4,000 words, succinct narrative on Lance's dirty past. It'd be a shorter post if Lance hadn't acted like such an asshole for most of his career.
Anyway, read on. Smith's post, "It's Not about the Bike," is the best thing you'll read on why stripping Lance of his Tour titles and slapping him with a life ban was the right thing to do. After reading Smith's post, it almost seems like the Texan got off easy.
Here are some quick-hit highlights of the post:
"...Armstrong would never say that he’d never doped. Instead, he would say one of two themes, that he’d either never tested positive (note here: this isn’t correct, and we’ll go over that later), or that he’d never been caught."
"As part of that treatment, Armstrong, scared and with nobody with knowledge to consult about his condition, was asked in hospital whether he’d ever used any performance-enhancing drugs(PEDs). His response, as detailed by npr, and in evidence given by Betsy Andreu, was to list off a reel of drugs which he’d taken."
"Sports Illustrated would report years down the track that Armstrong, in three tests the 90s, produced samples that indicated doping with testosterone. The anti-doping scientist who allegedly tested these samples was Don Catlin. He was unable to confirm two of the tests - a highly irregular occurrence - and refused to comment on the third."
"In 1999, Lance Armstrong tested positive for a prohibited substance in a urine test: corticosteroids."
"Armstrong, fresh with a warning from Michele Ferrari not to use EPO, as a test had been formulated and ratified, tested positive for exactly that in Switzerland in 2001...The directive to make it disappear was delivered by none other than the head of the UCI at the time, Hein Verbrugghen."
"A number of people testified that Lance Armstrong testified positive for EPO, and that Armstrong’s influence with the governing body of the sport made that positive test simply disappear."
