Friday, August 24, 2012

Lance Armstrong Stops Fighting Doping Allegations

There was never quite a story like Lance Armstrong. A man who had cancer that fought it and beat it then winning the Tour de France 7 times. The one blemish on that story was that occasionally there were outsiders saying that he was doping. The issue kept coming back and Lance Armstrong has always refuted time after time. This time however was one instance too far.

The US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) had been looking into Lance Armstrong and actually filed drug charges against him. Armstrong tried to fight these charges in a lawsuit saying that the USADA did not have jurisdiction but all attempts at that were thrown out by a judge. Armstrong decided against fighting through the USADA arbitration process and gave up. Armstrong is done fighting drug charges basically saying he has had enough. He once again declared his innocence, said the USADA was leading an "Unconstitutional Witch Hunt," and said he wanted to continue his work raising money for cancer research.

As a result of this, the USADA will now seek to strip Armstrong of his 7 Tour titles and will most likely be able to do so. They will also ban him from the sport for life.

So why give up now? It could be a number of things: he really is tired of fighting these accusations, he saw he wasn't going to win the case and just quit, he doesn't want to go broke fighting it, or he actually did cheat. I tend to think he did cheat but probably wouldn't swear on it. The sport of cycling is too corrupt and the recent winners of the Tour having their titles stripped away because of drug use makes me think that there can't be anyone that can win this thing 7 times in a row.

In the respect to cancer research, I hope that Lance Armstrong will be able to continue to help the cause. But in any other regard, he's still human.

P.S. I really don't care whether or not Lance took drugs because cycling is just so boring but why is everyone so eager to defend him? Where was this for Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds? The minute a baseball player's name is dropped in PED use, everyone assumes guilt immediately. Why not with Lance? Why must we hold Lance Armstrong as infallible?

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