Regarding Lance Armstrong

In recent weeks, there has been a flurry of feature stories and opinion columns that have been released regarding the  decision on the part of the USADA to strip Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France victories and ban him from cycling for life. I've never been a fan of cycling or any other sport, for that matter. Despite that, I have admired Mr. Armstrong over the years because of his athletic abilities and disciplined regimen he maintained after a battle with cancer. Even if he had not become famous and known throughout the world - his grit and determination displayed after overcoming such a life-altering brush with death made him someone I would look up to.

Over the years that I observed his career, I made note of the accusations made against Mr. Armstrong - all of which fizzled out and seemed to be cast aside. As time went on, he continued his training and participation in cycling events - having passed the drug tests administered to him by the proper authorities. When Mr. Armstrong retired from racing back in 2005, he dropped off my radar for the most part, although I know he did not retire fully from cycling until early 2011.

The way the USADA had specifically pursued Mr. Armstrong did not pass the smell test with me for many reasons. I am not a trial attorney by any means, but when I looked at the case from the standpoint of an outside observer, I began to formulate a comparative reference to the story.

Imagine that you are a prominent District Attorney for a large city and a case is brought before you for your consideration. Charges are being sought against a defendant for hundreds of instances of larceny. He has not only been accused of participating in the thefts, but is also being accused of being the ringleader of a massive criminal enterprise of other thieves. Members of the supposed criminal organization are ready to testify.

Only as you are considering taking up the case - some details come to light that give you pause. First, the laws regarding the statute of limitations are in play because the accused instances of larceny occurred beyond the specified time limit for prosecution. You then come to find out that a considerable number of the people who are coming forward to accuse the defendant were themselves caught in their own acts of theft and were offered immunity or lesser sentences for their crimes in exchange for their testimony, tainting their motivation. Even worse? The defendant in the case has a documented receipt for every item he was accused of stealing showing that they were legitimately purchased, along with witnesses who have come forward to - in many cases - corroborate his purchases.

Unless you were interested in being humiliated with a resounding loss in court and becoming a laughing stock of the legal community - very few D.A.s would ever pursue such a case because of risk involved with winning the case because of exculpatory evidence being present or a lack of hard evidence needed to substantiate the charges. 

A federal investigation took place where Armstrong was accused of doping during his tenure as a member of the USPS Cycling Team from 1999 through 2004. When the charges did not pan out because they were not substantiated through the evidence presented, they were dropped. That was when the USADA stepped in.

The USADA is not a governmental entity, but rather a non-profit organization. They became active in the year 2000 as an offshoot of the USOC. They took it upon themselves to charge Lance Armstrong after the federal case was lost, only instead of a normal hearing - the USADA demanded that the process be settled through arbitration.

At that point, Mr. Armstrong took the USADA to court. The argument made by Armstrong was that the USADA lacked any jurisdiction in the case because it not only did not have the authority to press charges of their own, but also had no bases for the charges levied because the instances of doping he was accused of fell beyond the 8 year statute of limitations imposed on the USADA by their own charter. In effect, the USADA was engaging in a move that is likened to Double Jeopardy - where a person who has been found not guilty of a crime is charged all over again.

Arbitration, in this case, was a panel of people working for the USADA who would determine guilt or innocence, but unlike a court of law, the burden of proof does not necessarily rest on the prosecution. In addition, the presumption of innocence is also not automatically granted to the accused, and evidence that normally would be considered hearsay, libel or otherwise be inadmissible or easily objected to in a court of law can be presented and considered there. The case the USADA was building against Mr. Armstrong was based primarily off of testimony given by other cyclists and other non-cycling related people - testimony that in many cases had been heard in other venues that failed to meet the burden of proof. The only thing the USADA had to do was merely show that there were enough accusations or reasonable suspicions to meet a determination of guilt or innocence.

Mr. Armstrong wasn't going to have any part of it. When the USADA was allowed by the court to legally bypass the limitations of its charter to bring about it's own set of charges - he knew that there was no chance that the process was going to be fair. He was right, because from everything I've seen - the move made by the USADA was never meant to give him a fair hearing.

Stop and think about this for a moment: Imagine if you and other people had engaged in a series of long-term legal arguments and fights with one another, and every single time you walked away the victor because a court sided with you. Then, out of nowhere - a fabricated 3rd party entity steps in and is given the authority to find you guilty anyway.

To me, the issue is not whether Lance Armstrong used drugs. He probably did. That is not the point and not the focus of my disagreement. I simply cannot abide by the idea of people tolerating or accepting the creation of a group who's presumptive authority supersedes its mandate and bypasses its own limitations in special circumstances to arbitrarily declare the guilt of a single individual. That negates every notion of fairness or justice I know.

When I look online, I find a lot of stories about people who had made accusations against Mr. Armstrong prancing around in a victory lap declaring themselves to be vindicated. In one such instance, a woman had previously accused Mr. Armstrong of confessing his drug use to doctors while at a hospital when he was being treated for cancer. Intrigued, I had to find an article back from 2006 to find out why such an accusation made so many years before did not gain traction. It turned out that members of the hospital staff who were also present at the time of the examination countered her story by claiming that no such conversation or confession took place, so the matter was dropped.

That the USADA has come out and declared Mr. Armstrong to be guilty is not a vindication for her or anyone else. She made an accusation, the case was heard, witnesses countered her testimony and in the end her accusations were (for right or wrong) dismissed. Having someone else declare you to be right doesn't make you right, it just means someone else has chosen your side. At this point, that type of vindication can only come from a mea culpa by Mr. Armstrong himself.

The USADA has stripped Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France victories, Olympic medals and banned him for life from cycling. Because of this - he no longer has sponsors, cannot participate in the sport he loves, is no longer head of his Live Strong Foundation to fight cancer and is most likely going to be financially destroyed by the demands to have various bonuses and monetary awards returned, not to mention the cost of legal fees in the foreseeable future. If a non-legal entity like the USADA ultimately has the power to do this to anyone involved in professional sports and in effect devastate their lives while requiring a diminished threshold for the determination of guilt, then it doesn't say much for the sports community as a whole that they would tolerate its existence and capitulate to their flexible standards and targeted application of justice.

*** UPDATE ***

Rumor has it that Lance is going to appear on Oprah to ask her for absolution. I don't see the point, but then again I don't see the point of using drugs to begin with. I will comment more once the rumor is confirmed or refuted.

*** UPDATE II ***

Now that Lance Armstrong has confessed to his use of PEDs, I find my biggest disappointment in Mr. Armstrong's drug use is that it now gives a veil of legitimacy to the USADA where it should not exist. To understand why, I have to again point out that the reduced standards for the determination of guilt, the burden of proof being placed on the accused and the failure of the organization to abide by the regulations mandated by their own charter have unintended consequences.

Lance Armstrong did do the things he was accused of, so from a casual glance it would appear that the steps taken by the USADA were legitimate. But the fact that Lance Armstrong is now definitively known as a user of PEDs is a direct result of his confession and not because the USADA actually proved anything.

Up until the USADA intervened, Mr. Armstrong had won every single challenge because none of the evidence or accusations were able to meet a standard that is meant expressly to reduce the possibility of an innocent person being falsely accused or worse - convicted. To see this point, use yourself as an example and place yourself in a similar situation:

You are a professional athlete and have won a series of championships or awards from a set of yearly competitions. People start to accuse you of cheating, claiming you doped. Some even say they've seen you  taking strange looking pills. One of your hundreds of drug tests came back within the bounds of acceptability, but is on the borderline of being abnormal is some fashion. The USADA holds hearings, brings in witnesses, entertains hearsay evidence and points out that people you defeated in previous competitions have either tested positive or confessed to their own drug use and insinuated your possible involvement. The process will be conducted through arbitration, and the people running the show don't have to prove anything.

For the sake of argument, you are absolutely 100% innocent of any drug use. You are clean.

How would the situation you are in be any different from Lance Armstrong? The fact that you've passed your tests doesn't matter. The fact that admitted (or discovered) cheats who are implicating you or suggesting your  involvement are at times being given lesser punishments in exchange for their voluntary testimony doesn't matter. It's your word against theirs, and that proving a negative is a much, much higher standard to bear than putting the onus on the people accusing you does not matter either. Guilt is determined by a consensus of opinions made by the people in charge of the arbitration, and their word is final.

Effectively, your fate in such a situation would probably be no different than Lance Armstrong, but imagine how much worse it would be knowing you are innocent. In such a case, would the legitimacy of the actions taken by the USADA be any different? Would it be fair, or just?

I say no.