Why Did Lance Armstrong not Contest USADA?

Comment: USADA where is the factual explanation of the conclusive proof of the U.S. Postal doping conspiracy that you claim to possess. A short summary of the witness list with all pertinent statements or affidavits, including dates and times when the alleged doping incidents occurred, and a complete summary of all of the false statements made by Mr. Lance Armstrong, Johan Bruyneel and other suspended defendants that constitute your grounds for waving of the statute of limitations is required to comfortably satisfy the demand for total public transparency. Otherwise, there may be some cynics who will insist that the charges levied against Mr. Armstrong was based upon nothing more than a bluff, that the U.S. Postal conspiracy is nothing more than a charade, that you and your supposed witnesses are nothing more than imposters. Either provide proof or withdraw your charges. It is obvious from a short study of cycling history that neither USADA, witnesses Floyd Landis or Tyler Hamilton can be trusted to make factual statements based upon honor.

USADA is suffering from a obsessive compulsive desire to kill Lance Armstrong based upon the assumption that Lance Armstrong duped the golden standard of WADA anti-doping testing by flying under the radar five hundred and fifty times. By God a man who hires a doping doctor who can generate five hundred and fifty false negative test results must be punished for his crimes. Digging deep into the arsenal there still remains for USADA the golden UCI Biological passport, a deceptive device used to monitor so called baseline scores of athletes over time, any random variable in these scores could be construed as a result of doping. And if the UCI Biological passport is not enough to convince an independent arbitrator that doping occurred, there still remains the golden ticket for USADA, a burden placed upon the athlete to prove that claims by disgruntled teammates are factual statements and not the result of confabulations that are a result of rampant abuse of performance enhancing drug abuse that has caused an enlargement of the third ventricle of the brain and that has caused these witness patients to fill in lapses of memory with fictional accounts of events that never occurred in reality.

Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton also seem to be suffering from a malady known as attention seeking disorder. When prospects were good, salaries high, team leadership, accolades, gold medals, and Tour de France championships; there was no time to accuse former teammates of engaging in a conspiracy to use performance enhancing drugs.  No indeed, not until these truthful witnesses were caught using performance enhancing drugs themselves and were stripped of their titles and medals did the thought occur to them that if I am stripped of my Tour de France title or my Olympic gold medal then by God I will cause Lance Armstrong to lose his Tour de France titles and his Olympic gold medal.  Thus the e-mails and the television interviews, the accusations, the testimony.  The attention seeking syndrome was back in full force. Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton were back in the news, they were important, people were paying attention to them again.

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, one of the few and rare sports journalists who would dare to question the anti-doping crusade with an intelligent discussion; wrote a very good article questioning the need for doping testing if USADA was to force an athlete into an impossible task of defending him or herself against  unfounded and unprovable conspiracy theories based upon confabulations of demented ex-teammate dopers.  She says why not just do away with testing entirely?  The reason is obvious.  Some tests to produce results, they do detect performance enhancing drug use, positive test results obviate the need for a circus with jokers and clowns.  The second reason is also obvious.  WADA laboratories can produce a tremendous amount of false negative tests, but it is impossible to produce a false positive test result.  When the test result is positive it is deemed incontestable and infallible proof of doping.  The Court of Arbitration of Sport will rubber stamp any positive test no matter how long it is contested.  A problem emerges with false negative tests because it is assumed that the athlete and his or her doctor is flying below the radar and thus a passed test is no proof of competing clean.  Thus these false negative tests can be discounted as proof and deemed to be lies, and if an athlete makes statements of his innocence upon these tests he is considered by the anti-doping crusade to be a liar.  This seems to be the attitude taken by USADA: Lance Armstrong merely stated that he passed five hundred and fifty tests, which is a factual statement of truth, but according to USADA he manipulated the tests in a way to make them appear truthful when they were in fact deceptive; thus the statement of truth is no longer the truth but a lie, and this justifies the wavier of the statute of limitations.   Plus:  WADA and USADA justify their existence and funding with positive tests, they are achieving results, and this is very important to the wallet.

People are mystified as to why Lance Armstrong did not contest his doping charges.  The answer could be answered from an old study done on rats in a psychology experiment.  A rat is placed in a box on an electric grid, the juice is turned on.  At first the rat engages in multiple behaviors in an attempt to turn off the current but when nothing seems to work the rat resigns to doing nothing but crouch in the corner.  Even if an escape hatch is opened the rat will continue to huddle in the corner rather than escape through the hatch.  This is called the learned helplessness model.  Well, Lance Armstrong finally reached the learned helplessness stage, driven there by classical conditioning.  Hounded, vilified by the government, the press, the UCI, the public; for years bombarded with multiple accusations, law suits, investigations, probes, jeers and sneers, Lance Armstrong after multiple victories simply gave up out of exhaustion just like the rat on the electric grid.  "Enough is enough" and "no more of this nonsense," was how Lance Armstrong reacted.  He could have said, "Man, I have had enough of this shit and I'm tired of it.  I just want to spent time with my family and with my foundation."  And to those clueless assholes who never tire of claiming that Lance Armstrong quit because he was guilty of something; it is not your money that is being spent to defend your honor!  It is not your life that is being wasted fighting with USADA in arbitration!  There is a limit to human endurance!  Get a life!