Lance

[Kolesar]

Anti-doping authorities don't play fair against athletes
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120825,0,2080853.column

By Michael Hiltzik
August 26, 2012

With the whole world atwitter over Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong's decision to drop his legal fight against anti-doping allegations, it's the right moment to be appalled at the travesty in sports this case represents.

It's not that the case will be seen as a major victory for sports anti-doping authorities. It's that the anti-doping system claiming its highest-profile quarry ever is the most thoroughly one-sided and dishonest legal regime anywhere in the world this side of Beijing.

It's a system deliberately designed to place almost insurmountable hurdles in the way of athletes defending themselves or appealing adverse findings. Evidence has emerged over the years that laboratories certified by the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, have been incompetent at analyzing athletes' samples or fabricated results when they didn't get the numbers they were hoping to see.

Lance Armstrong doping campaign exposes USADA’s hypocrisy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/othersports/lance-armstrong-doping-campaign-exposes-usadas-hypocrisy/2012/08/24/858a13ca-ee22-11e1-afd6-f55f84bc0c41_story.html?fb_ref=sm_btn_fb

By Sally Jenkins

First of all, Lance Armstrong is a good man. There’s nothing that I can learn about him short of murder that would alter my opinion on that. Second, I don’t know if he’s telling the truth when he insists he didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France — never have known. I do know that he beat cancer fair and square, that he’s not the mastermind criminal the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency makes him out to be, and that the process of stripping him of his titles reeks.

A federal judge wrote last week, “USADA’s conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.” You don’t say. Then when is a judge, or better yet Congress, going to do something about it?

Quite independently of Lance, with whom I wrote two books, for a long, long time I’ve had serious doubts about the motives, efficiency and wisdom of these “doping” investigations. In the Balco affair, all the wrong people were prosecuted. It’s the only so-called drug investigation in which the manufacturers and the distributors were given plea deals in order to throw the book at the users. What that told us was that it was big-game hunting, not justice. It was careerist investigators trying to put athletes’ antlers on their walls. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment became a muddy, stomped-on, kicked-aside doormat.

So forget Lance. I have so many problems with USADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) — which is supposed to be where athletes can appeal, only they never, ever win — that it’s hard to know where to begin. American athletes have lost 58 of 60 cases before the CAS. Would you want to go before that court?

[wtmusic]

1. Amazing what millions in PR can buy

Lance declined to defend himself, which in any court of law is known as a "guilty plea".

You need to dig a little deeper than the Washington Post. First, get to know Lance the person:

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/biking/road-biking/My-Life-With-Lance-Armstrong.html

Then get to know Lance the Charity:

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/athletes/lance-armstrong/Its-Not-About-the-Lab-Rats.html

Then get to know Lance the Cheater:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Race-Cover-ups-Winning/dp/0345530411/

(if you don't want to buy the book, simply note that it's rated 4.5 stars and read some of the reviews).

Lance is not only guilty as sin, but a manipulative tool who has enlisted the brilliant intimidation of Karl Rove's legal machine to save his own empire and his own freedom.