Armstrong suit to block doping charges dismissed

[DanTex]

Source: Boston Globe (AP)

AUSTIN, Texas—A federal judge has dismissed Lance Armstrong's lawsuit against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, but says the cyclist can refile it within 20 days.

The seven-time Tour de France champion sued USADA on Monday in an attempt to prevent it from moving forward with charges that he used performance-enhancing drugs throughout much of his career.

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks ruled just hours later. He criticized Armstrong's attorneys for filing an 80-page complaint the judge says seems more intended to whip up public opinion for his case than focus on the legal argument.

Sparks, however, did not decide on the merits of Armstrong's case and said he can refile his lawsuit.


Read more: http://www.boston.com/sports/other_sports/cycling/articles/2012/07/09/armstrong_sues_to_block_doping_charges/

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Interesting. The lawsuit was dismissed within a day of being filed. Maybe Armstrong will finally get busted. The lawsuit suggests that he's afraid of the USADA hearing, but now it's been dismissed. But he's been able to skate by so many times in the past, it wouldn't surprise me if his legal/PR people have a few more tricks in store. Or maybe his lives have run out.

[russspeakeasy]

1. He should also be charged with "intentional assholyness".

[Scairp]

5. Hey

I am a Lance supporter, almost rabidly so. Doesn't anyone care what he's been through, what he's done with this fame? No, you are all deeply jealous, just the militant failed athletes who run the USADA and are persecuting him. They had a grand jury investigation and ended up dropping the whole thing. And please tell me when exactly he failed a drug test during his career, and more specifically when did he fail one during any of his SEVEN Tour de France wins? Let me help you all out...NEVER. He was clean for all of them, and tell me, why would a guy who beat cancer that by all rights should have killed him ever put the stuff into his body they accuse him of using? So what he has an attitude. He's done good things and rather than punishing him he should be held up as an example of how life goes on after such a devastating diagnosis. So get off Lance's case. He won all of those titles fair and square. This is a witch hunt, pure and simple.

[DanTex]

6. Actually, Armstrong tested positive twice (at least).

First, in the 1999 tour he tested positive for corticosteroids, but then came up with a backdated prescription which he used to to get a therapeutic use exemption. This was a violation of UCI protocol, which, for obvious reasons, requires that you state your exemptions beforehand, not after you test positive. In other news, Lance Armstrong bribed donated $125K to UCI over the course of his career.

His B urine samples from the 1999 tour were later tested for EPO, and six of them came out positive. He wasn't sanctioned here because the test was unofficial -- it was part of a research program, and the results were only made public when a journalist got hold of them.

According to Tyler Hamilton on '60 Minutes', Lance tested positive for EPO in the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, but again was able to make the positive test "go away". Yes, Hamilton is an admitted doper, but, according to the charges filed by USADA, the director of the lab that analyzed the 2001 samples has corroborated the EPO findings.

Finally, not testing positive means practically nothing. There are countless examples of dopers who never tested positive, and either later admitted doping or were implicated based on other evidence. For example, Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Bjarne Riis... It's a game of cat-and-mouse, and the sophisticated dopers and doctors stay ahead of the controls. Also, not everything can be tested for, particularly not during Armstrong's years. There was no test for EPO until around 2001, which means that it really doesn't matter how many times you got tested. There wasn't a test for blood doping for several years after that. And so on.

They say that the doping is less pronounced now than during the 90s and 00s. The tests are better and also, the times on the big climbs in TdF have gotten slower. Still, it's hard to believe that the sport is completely clean. However, in the Armstrong era, where basically all of the top riders were doping, EPO/blood doping was rampant, and people were sprinting up the mountains much faster than anyone before or since, the chances that Armstrong could have dominated the way he did without intensive performance enhancing drug use are zero.

[truebrit71]

7. So in other words he was never found to have been doping...

...this is a never-ending vendetta against one of the most famous athletes in the world because people simply can't believe he did it on his own...

There have been so many attempts/accusations against him I would think that at some point he needs to start counter-suing...

It seems to me that the USADA has to go after the big fish in order to justify it's own existence and budget. They couldn't even get an indictment out of a federal grand jury after two years, but now the USADA says it has the goods on him? Not likely.

Someone is out to make a name for themselves off the back of Lance's achievements, and that is a low-down, crappy thing to do...I hope that Lance wins, and then sues the ever-loving shit out of the vindictive assholes behind this..

[joshcryer]

2. 80 pages of cruft. I don't blame the court.

Total crap. Probably copy-pasted from some PR junk.

[arewenotdemo]

3. In every photo I've ever seen of the guy

the arrogance just drips off.

"I'm Lance F***ing Armstrong."

Dude's not smart enough to know when the jig is up, though.

I wish Sheryl Crow had never crossed his path, for her sake.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/lance-armstrong-suit-dismiss-doping-case-thrown/story?id=16740965#.T_uPNoU3BMt

[MrSlayer]

4. Why do we even care about this?

Who the hell would be declared the winner when the next twenty runners up were also doing it?

Between this and the stupid baseball hearings in congress we are wasting time and money on things that are ultimately meaningless.

It's entertainment, the roids and whatnot make them better performers, that's what we buy tickets for.

[Third Doctor]

8. I agree

Society spends far too much time worrying about games and entertainment. The rethugs seems to think that teachers, firefighters and factory workers are paid too much but it's okay for athletes and entertainers to make obscene amounts of money. It's modern bread and circuses.

[DanTex]

10. I sort of agree.

Clearly sports are not that important in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, there is something to be said about having clean athletic competitions, as opposed to competitions to see who has the best doping protocols and who is better at beating the drug testing. I agree that the baseball hearings in congress were dumb -- congress shouldn't be getting involved. But it is entirely appropriate that there be an organization like USADA dedicated to fighting doping in sports. It's not really a lot of money being spent.

What I would do is take away Armstrong's titles and then simply declare nobody a winner. Basically, the sport was so dirty during that time that it doesn't make sense to declare a winner. Even if there were a way to magically figure out who the top clean rider was, that person would be way down in the standings. All of the major contenders were doping.

In a perverse way, the Lance Armstrong story is sort of a tale of American ingenuity. Lance saw what was going on in cycling, and figured out that, while practically everyone was doping, there was room to take it to the next level. As the USADA charges suggest, the USPS team was a doping machine -- they basically beat the Europeans at their own game.

Still, even though I have a perverse respect for that, I think that it would be really good for the sport to see Lance's titles taken away. If they are allowed to stand, it is a signal that the way to succeed in cycling is to cheat, to do it systematically, and then to bully anyone who tries to speak up against the corruption of the sport. If he loses his titles, it is a signal that you can get away with it for a while, a long while even, but eventually it will catch up to you.

[PavePusher]

9. This would all be a non-issue....

if there were two leagues for every sport: Drug-enhanced and Non-Drug-enhanced.

Make it legal for adults to put anything they want into their own bodies, hold them strictly accountable for any harm done to themselves or others, and let evolution sort it out.

All else is sheer fucktardery.

[DanTex]

11. Update: Three charged in Armstrong doping case receive lifetime bans

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has issued lifetime sports bans to three former staff members and consultants for some of Lance Armstrong's winning Tour de France teams

Luis Garcia del Moral of Spain was a team doctor; Michele Ferrari was a consulting doctor; and Jose "Pepe" Marti (trainer) worked for Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service teams. All had been accused by USADA of participating in a vast doping conspiracy on those teams.

USADA announced the ban Tuesday, the day after the deadline they faced to challenge the allegations or accept sanctions.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/cycling/story/2012-07-10/usada-lifetime-ban-lance-armstrong-michele-ferrari/56130256/1

[maddezmom]

12. doesn't look good for Lance that they chose not to fight this, imo.