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Lance Armstrong - Refusal to fight admission of guilt?
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Post by
Dundaz
Yesterday I read an article that Armstrong got denied entry to a marthon he was going to run as a part of Livestrong Team. He was going to run it as a fund raiser to help others fight cancer. Is this a little too much? I still don't understand why they keep telling the world he cheated yet cannot prove it. I think he should be give those Tour throphies back!
Source:
http://tvnz.co.nz/othersports-news/armstrong-denied-marathon-entry-drugs-ban-bites-5069984
Post by
ChairmanKaga
Well, the USADA finally
revealed its hand
.
And I must admit, contrary to my earlier speculation, it's substantially damning for Armstrong.
The interesting bits start on page 129, where they pretty effectively eviscerate the "never had a positive drug test" defense. And yes, there's legitimate science to back it up.
I still applaud the man for fighting back from cancer, but it's going to be very hard to applaud him for much else from here on.
Post by
Magician22773
Well, the USADA finally
revealed its hand
.
And I must admit, contrary to my earlier speculation, it's substantially damning for Armstrong.
The interesting bits start on page 129, where they pretty effectively eviscerate the "never had a positive drug test" defense. And yes, there's legitimate science to back it up.
I still applaud the man for fighting back from cancer, but it's going to be very hard to applaud him for much else from here on.
I actually read the vast majority of that thing, and I still feel the same way I did before I read it.
There is still no real "evidence", but this is not a real "case". Its almost entirely made up of affidavit testimony of other riders, that were all coerced, mostly with "deals" in exchange for their testimony. It is also extremely, and unnecessarily redundant in its presentation. The whole 230+ pages could have easily be condensed to about a 1/4 of that if they had not used the same "stories" over and over again to make the same points.
I also find it "underwhelming" that so much of it focused on the use of Cortisone, a product that is really a stretch to even call it "performance enhancing", since it is legal to use, even in cycling, as long as a doctor prescribes it. If "rider A" had a prescription, and "rider B" didn't, would that not give "rider A" an advantage, if it really was "performance enhancing"?
Do I think Armstrong is 100% "innocent", no. But even with this wonderfully prepared statement, I still think they are missing one major thing, burden of proof. There is honestly not enough real evidence in there to get a court conviction for a speeding ticket, let alone the destruction of a man's career and legacy in a sport. The fact is, he still did not fail a single test. 50 pages of why and how he managed to pass those tests offers no proof that he was doping. It does offer a pretty good indication that their testing policy was flawed.
Post by
gamerunknown
I also find it "underwhelming" that so much of it focused on the use of Cortisone, a product that is really a stretch to even call it "performance enhancing", since it is legal to use, even in cycling, as long as a doctor prescribes it. If "rider A" had a prescription, and "rider B" didn't, would that not give "rider A" an advantage, if it really was "performance enhancing"?
As far as I'm aware, the legality wasn't in question. It's whether he contravened the rules of the race - blood doping is legal too, for instance.
Post by
164232
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Squishalot
I also find it "underwhelming" that so much of it focused on the use of Cortisone, a product that is really a stretch to even call it "performance enhancing", since it is legal to use, even in cycling, as long as a doctor prescribes it. If "rider A" had a prescription, and "rider B" didn't, would that not give "rider A" an advantage, if it really was "performance enhancing"?
As far as I'm aware, the legality wasn't in question. It's whether he contravened the rules of the race - blood doping is legal too, for instance.
I think Magician's point is that it would have been legal had a doctor prescribed it, therefore, as far as performance enhancing and moral fairness is concerned, his use of it is as equally 'fair' as a prescribed use of it.
Post by
Magician22773
I also find it "underwhelming" that so much of it focused on the use of Cortisone, a product that is really a stretch to even call it "performance enhancing", since it is legal to use, even in cycling, as long as a doctor prescribes it. If "rider A" had a prescription, and "rider B" didn't, would that not give "rider A" an advantage, if it really was "performance enhancing"?
As far as I'm aware, the legality wasn't in question. It's whether he contravened the rules of the race - blood doping is legal too, for instance.
I think Magician's point is that it would have been legal had a doctor prescribed it, therefore, as far as performance enhancing and moral fairness is concerned, his use of it is as equally 'fair' as a prescribed use of it.
Exactly.
The brief alleged that Armstrong, in order to beat a failed test for Cortisone, produced a backdated prescription for a cream to treat a saddle-sore.
Something as benign as Cortisone cream being considered a "performance enhancing" drug seems like they were really grasping for anything there, since he allegedly "failed" a test, until he produced the alleged, backdated prescription.
From what I read, I see more of a group of World Class athletes, that, at the worst, skirted the edges of the rules of a sport, to try to gain a very miniscule, at best, advantage. By comparison, look at the steroid scandal that baseball had in the 90's. You had men that put on massive amounts of muscle mass, and literally transformed themselves into different beings than they were, or would have been, without the drugs.
The cycling issue seems more to me like someone that was already at 99% efficiency, looking for that last 1%.
And if you look at what they are calling "damning" evidence, it just doesn't resonate. They mention several times that Armstrong would retreat into the mountains "to avoid drug testing". But anyone who followed his Tour wins knows, that his strongest legs of the race were...mountian legs. I don't think him spending time at high altitude training is "evidence" of him avoiding drug testing, I think it was him spending time training for what usually won him the races.
The same goes for the "scientific evidence" that they present. They have 1 "doctor" looking at decades old blood sample analysis, and comparing plasma volumes, and ratio's of juvenile red blood cells to mature cells. I mean, this is splitting hairs, and then splitting the pieces of hairs, at best. Even the doctors own words about the results were that there was a "1 in a million" chance that the numbers would come out that way, without doping. In my opinion, that is "reasonable doubt".
World class athletes often defy what science would deem to be normal. Carl Edwards, a NASCAR driver, is considered by many to be one of the most athletic humans ever. Not just the most athletic NASCAR driver, but of all sports. A while back, I saw an article where Sports Illustrated ran several tests on him. One of those was a reaction time test, followed by a Cardio stress test, then followed by the same reaction time test. The series was to see how much his reaction times fell after exhausting his body.
His times did not fall, they improved.
The doctor giving the test concluded that his body and mind's reaction to exhaustion was "impossible", yet the test proved otherwise.
It is just as possible that Armstrong's blood test levels were, in fact, that "1 in a million", due to his conditioning, training, and that "unknown" something that world class athletes seem to have.
Post by
gamerunknown
In my opinion, that is "reasonable doubt".
Nowhere else does this constitute reasonable doubt. In statistics, probabilities are transcribed for shorthand. In order to reject the null hypothesis and accept the experimental hypothesis, scientists have agreed at a reasonable confidence rating in the data is that for the results to have occurred in the sample and not in the population one in roughly twenty times is an acceptable threshold (there will always be anomalies due to issues of measurement and noise). This can be represented as a 95% confidence rating that the effect witnessed was not due to chance. Some experiments use a more stringent threshold of one in one hundred, which can be represented as 99%, or one in one thousand, which is 99.9%. One in one million can be represented as a confidence interval of 99.9999% certainly.
Wikipedia
has a good chart for discussing likelihoods in regards to normal distribution to help with comprehension of that figure. Given it has a chance of occurring daily, we should expect to see one instance of that event between every 400 to 4000 years.
Post by
164232
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Dundaz
Just noticed this topic on my profile.. we now all know the truth! Bad Lance, bad!
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