USADA: An Open Letter to Lance Armstrong

Lance!  If you are guilty of using performance enhancing drugs during the 2009 and 2010 Tours de France as alleged by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) confess now and spare us all the trouble!  We fans should be entitled not to have to endure another endless bout of litigation and pointless denials which end only in tearful confessions and accusations of doping by cycling teams and riders!

But!  If you are innocent you must convey this message to the Anti-Doping Review Board (ADRB) with the simplest message.  "I am innocent."  Or "no data."  You do not need to get expansive with complaints that USADA has not been forthcoming with the evidence compiled against you.   The ADRB has had experience and first hand knowledge of the delaying tactics and subterfuge of Travis T. Tygart and USADA when it comes to releasing their evidence of doping to the accused.  When a formal complaint is filed against you then you will be provided the evidence USADA thinks is appropriate and nothing more.  If you insist upon further documents relevant to your case you will be expected to argue your request before an arbitration panel and the panel will have to rule in your favor before you can expect USADA to surrender any further documents for your perusal.

Lance!  I will bet you a plug nickel to a bucket of warm spit that the doping USADA alleges in their letter that you used during the 2009 and 2010 Tours de France, EPO,  human growth hormone, testosterone, transfused blood, and the plasma and saline injections used to mask drug use, are based upon physiological fluctuations that they found in your Tour de France tests that deviated from baseline data gathered from your UCI Biological Passport profile.  You should have expected this to happen with the fifty volumes of out-of-competition data they collected.  You should have known that they were compiling enough data to make a case against you.  Any fluctuation in a biological parameter that deviates from the norm of your profile could be conceivable considered as an indicator of doping activity, a slight increase in hematocrit levels when the levels are expected to decline at the end of a grueling two week stage race, for example.  The determination of whether these suspect hematocrit values indicate doping in the absence of a clear cut positive test result for rEPO or some other blood boosting prohibited drug is determined by a panel of experts who make a decision based upon trends and tendencies, hypothetical bunk and speculation, and general consensus of opinion.  The Court of Arbitration of Sport has accepted this "non-analytical positive" opinion as a basis to suspend riders in the past and this form of "non-analytical positive" finding is indefensible!  A negative test result for rEPO taken during the Tour de France will not exonerate you!  You will be accused of using micro doses of rEPO to defeat the tests!  If you used rEPO or any of the other performance enhancing substance during the 2009 or 2010 Tours de France, you have no excuse and you cannot be forgiven on the grounds of stupidity!  In any event, you should have known that they were collecting all of that UCI Biological Passport data and at the proper moment they were going to strike.  The Tour de France was that moment.  You were warned never to return to cycling, and you ignored the warnings. They have a vendetta against you according to your own statement, right?  They are suggesting a lifetime ban.  You will die and no one will weep over your corpse.  And you are to blame.  What could be more a more fitting punishment for a man who passed five hundred and fifty doping tests than to be tarred, feathered, and rode out of town on a rail?  People who hate your guts and who have accused you of doping for all of these years will be delighted with your demise.  You will be the new villain, non plus ultra,  and you will forever be enshrined forever in the cycling hall of shame.  

Lance!  Your attorney Robert D. Luskin is complaining about a lack of fairness of the process and a rush to judgment by USADA!  You and your attorney sound like beaten fighters waiting for the knock out blow.  There is no fairness in this process gentlemen.  Don't be deceived.  You have only two options.  The Ivan Basso option includes doing nothing and allowing USADA to prevail unchallenged.  You will lose the case but save all of your money.  The Floyd Landis option means spending millions of dollars in legal fees, paying for expert witnesses, etc.  You will lose the case and lose millions of dollars, but you might lay a foundation for a legal challenge.  In any event, if you are innocent, if you are wrongfully convicted of doping, you must file a legal challenge against USADA, WADA, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in open court on behalf of all athletes worldwide, you must serve as an international ambassador, you must strive to end this horrible ordeal of arbitrary, legally incontestable, "non analytical positive," comfortable satisfaction style of arbitration through lawfully legal means.

Lance!  If you are guilty of trafficking dope to your teammates on the U.S. Postal Professional Cycling Team, Discovery Channel Professional Cycling Team, Astana, or the Radio Shack Professional Cycling Team, confess right now!  Spare me the grief.  Indulge me.  Please.

But!  If you are innocent of these accusations you must stand your ground. The absurd nature of the USADA conspiracy charges sound like something out of a bad X-Files episode.  You should respond to the USADA charges thus: "We do not consider the testimony of drug addled, convicted dopers as 'evidence'."  Nothing more is needed because you do not want to give USADA a pretext to label you as a wealthy athlete who is willing to engage in obstructionist tactics to defeat a "clear non-analytical positive result."  Very non chic, this Travis T. Tygart with his descriptions of your egregious, infamous crimes.  Tygart is even willing to suspend the statute of limitations, USADA wants all seven of your titles Lance.  Do you understand?  USADA wants to parade your ex-teammates before an arbitration panel and claim that you forced them to do drugs and then threatened to murder them mafia style if they broke the sacred code of omerta.  Did you intimidate people?  Were you a bully?  Did you threaten to destroy the careers of people who wanted to expose your doping?  Are people like Greg and Kathy LeMond, Frankie and Betsy Andreu, Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton telling lies?  Did people really see you injecting EPO and taking blood transfusions?  Did you really give Floyd and Tyler performance enhancing drugs when they rode for you as trusty lieutenants?  Or did people like Floyd and Tyler and Betsy and Frankie make up the whole thing because they loathed you and envied your success and talent?

Because, for all of those years that you were supposedly running some sort of shooting gallery in the team bus, not once in all of those years did a single teammate of yours test positive for performance enhancing drugs, and that includes Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton.  With all of the doping and distribution of performance enhancing drugs going on for all of those years as USADA alleges this fact seems incredible!  After all, when Tyler Hamilton joined Team Phonak as team leader he tested positive twice for having a double red cell population in his blood, first at the Olympic time trial race and later at the Tour of Spain 911 time trial race! Tyler Hamilton was suspended for two years, and was later forced to surrender his Olympic gold medal. And Floyd Landis who was riding for Team Phonak as team leader won the 2006 Tour de France and tested positive for synthetic testosterone and was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title and suspended for two years.  Obviously there was something contagious in the water at Phonak, but nothing that suggested organized, systematic team doping.  But USADA does not have time to investigate Phonak, they are too obsessed with Lance to care about Team Phonak.

Roberto Heras is another strange example.  Clean as a whistle, as was his U.S. Postal teammates, Heras won the Tour of Spain.  It was only after Roberto Heras left U.S. Postal and joined another cycling team that he tested positive for rEPO and was stripped of his title and suspended for two years.  Bizarre wouldn't you agree?

And star witness for the prosecution Frankie Andreu, the wife of Betsy Andreu the woman who loathes your soul more than any other person in the world, a woman who claims you corrupted her man with your nefarious persuasions, went to a pharmacy and purchased rEPO from a druggist on his own initiative and probably without the knowledge and permission of the director sportive, and competed in the 1999 Tour de France as your trusted lieutenant.  It is strange that Frankie Andreu needed to buy rEPO when, according to USADA, it was on tap at the team shooting gallery, is it not?  Even stranger is the reaction of queen Betsy who preferred to blame Lance for corrupting her man rather than her man taking responsibility for his own stupid behavior.  And old queen Betsy would have been better off saying nothing about you using performance enhancing drugs during the Motorola days because we could have always said that your incredible increase in performance post cancer was all due to performance enhancing drugs.  But that stupid dame Betsy made that assertion forever impossible when she claimed she overheard you giving a doctor a summary of your medical history that included past use of performance enhancing drugs.  rEPO before cancer rEPO after cancer, that cancels out and cannot be calculated as a factor in your incredible increase in endurance and performance post cancer, or the fact that Motorola you could not even complete a Tour de France let alone win seven in a row.
You will have a field day with that woman on the witness stand, no joke.

Your case may drag on indefinitely, but it of some interest to understand the psychology of  probable USADA star prosecution witness Tyler Hamilton.  Tyler Hamilton,  the depressed, destructive man who has the strangest cognitive reasoning imaginable.  Tyler Hamilton the chief accuser, the man who claimed on sixty minutes that "I doped because everyone was doing it."  First, this assertion that "everyone was doing it" is preposterous.  Everyone was not doing it!  Tyler Hamilton's statement can be verified by the number of Olympic time trial riders who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs during the time trial that Tyler Hamilton won.  One Olympic time trial rider tested positive for performance enhancing drug use, Tyler Hamilton.  The rest of the Olympic time trial riders tested clean.  Tyler Hamilton used dope because he was convinced that he had to use dope to keep pace with the pack or he would be left behind.  Hamilton also used dope because like all type A personalities he loved the money, he loved the accolades, he loved the laurels, he was avaricious, greedy, he wanted to be the man.  Tyler Hamilton, thought that Lance Armstrong was using performance enhancing drugs to win races, that Lance Armstrong had the best drugs and the best drug doctors.  But nonetheless, even after being repeatedly warned by the UCI that certain irregularities existed in his blood samples Tyler Hamilton continued to receive blood transfusions probably under the delusional thinking that masking agents would ensure deception of detection.  He was caught at the Tour of Spain, he was suspended, he denied ever doping, he enlisted his groupies to corner people and shout in their ears to "Believe Tyler."  And would you believe it?  USADA expects us to believe Tyler again.  The Jeff Novitzky Federal investigation into doping by Lance Armstrong and his nefarious associates could not generate enough evidence of wrongdoing to convince a secret Federal grand jury to return an indictment, apparently they did not  "Believe Tyler."  Let us hope that an arbitration panel comes to the same conclusion.

Last comment.  Good old Greg LeMond, the man of endless accusations of Lance Armstong, the man who insisted that Lance Armstrong confess, to admit that he cheated, and to reform his doping ways.  Greg LeMond is another man of bizarre cognition, he thinks still to this day that he lost the 1991 Tour de France to Miguel Indurain, not because Indurain was a great five time Tour de France champion and the strongest rider of the 1991 Tour de France, but because Miguel Indurain was using rEPO.  Not only was Miguel Indurain using rEPO but the entire pack was using rEPO, and the reason that Greg LeMond finished in forth place instead of first place, is because "everyone was doing it."  Dope.  Therefore, Greg LeMond, the great champion could not keep pace, not because the LeMond era ended and the Indurain era begin, but because everyone was doing drugs but him.  Without the drugs I think LeMond thought he would reign as kingpin forever.  When old age proved him wrong he must have been seriously disillusioned.  Greg LeMond has always felt cheated by the world, first he was accidentally shot which deprived him of competing for several years in the Tour de France, then he felt he was cheated out of his rightful legacy by a bunch of no good dopers, and he has harbored a bitter resentment against the cycling community ever since.  Greg LeMond and his wife Kathy loath Lance Armstrong because Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times and they have done everything in their power to expose Lance Armstrong as a no good doping cheat, to remove his name from the pantheon of Tour de France winners and replace his name with "title vacant."  Rejoice, Greg, USADA, may fulfill your fondest wish, but you will never gain my respect.