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Lance Armstrong and the Science of Drug Testing
Hugh Pickens writes "As the media reports that seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong says he will no longer fight doping charges from the US Anti-Doping Agency, which will strip him of his titles and ban him from competitive cycling for life, Tracee Hamilton writes that the Lance Armstrong vs. USADA fight is a tough one in which to take a side, because to believe USADA means suspending belief in the science of drug testing. 'If you take personalities out of the equation, you're left with pee in a cup and blood in a syringe,' writes Hamilton. 'Armstrong never failed a drug test. He was tested in competition, out of competition. He was tested at the Olympics, at the Tour de France, at dozens if not hundreds of other events. And he never failed a test.' Instead Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of the USADA, gathered a group of people who swear they saw Armstrong doping. 'If the results can be discarded in favor of testimony, then let's go right to the testimony phase and quit horsing around with blood and urine.' There has been no trial, no due process, but in the minds of many, that testimony outweighs the results of hundreds of drug tests. 'I don't know if Armstrong did the things he's accused of doing, and neither do you,' concludes Hamilton adding that it can't work both ways. 'Either a drug test is the standard, or it isn't.'"
Believe whatever you want. Amphetamines are magic and I hope they don't work for you or anybody else I come in contact with. Believe for every brilliant person that is drug free, there's someone equally as brilliant that is hopped up on Adderal and he will stomp you in the ground intellectually. I didn't believe it either until I gave it a shot one day and suddenly figured out why some of the people around me seem to have the magical ability of putting their brains on overdrive auto-pilot from the moment they walk in the door until the moment they leave. Incidentally, those were also the people that had the best insights, the easiest time dealing with clients, and just plain did the best work. Now I'm one of those people and I like it.
Yes, he said liars, and I agree. Birthers wanted a long-form certificate, got one, and decided it must be fake. How many people must have colluded to cheat vs. how many people are claiming that they *think* something is wrong? Isaac Asimov has a character in "The Evitable Conflict" say, in response to accusations that a person is secretly a robot, "Instead of saying "I've never caught him eating or sleeping", you claim "He never eats! He never sleeps!"" (paraphrased).
Personally I've always figured that something about going through chemotherapy had given Armstrong an advantage - mental certainly, in that anything he went through afterwards couldn't be worse, but physically as well in that he had been stripped down to skin and bone and built himself back up very deliberately. And maybe something about the allowable medical treatment that he continued to need that was supposedly calculated to be fair was miscalculated. I'm suggesting that maybe he was skating just right up to the margins of legality, without quite stepping over it.
Not quite. WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) is standing behind USADA's decision, and they do have much more authority. The IOC (International Olympic Committee) is one such body that will be influenced, and any body under the IOC will likely have to play along - and thus i believe the UCI (International Cycling Union).
Also, USADA's case *is* being continued - next up is Lance's long-time team manager Johan Bruyneel, who will likely make a similar decision (although will be surprising to see him leave the cycling world.) Then, i believe the USADA will provide the IOC and UCI with their findings, and THEN we'll see Lance's titles stripped from him. Given that these bodies all have to play nice, i would be very surprised if the UCI challenged the findings. Yes, it will implicate themselves, but they're pretty much damned either way as i see it..if their real goal is to eliminate doping from cycling, then they'll have to shape up. I think the evidence is pretty strong that there has been corruption, and they won't be able to hide it much longer...
That's my two cents. =)
Whether that shows that he's just weary of being persecuted or he realised he can't win, or whether it's a tacit admission of guilt, will probably be debated for years to come.
Or maybe going what he went through to fight cancer has made him realize that life is too short to worry about the USADA's shit.
Or maybe we should view Lance as an "heroic cheat" who overcame cancer, built his body/team into a better cheating machine than all the other cheaters in the Tour, beat them "fairly" in this larger pharma/athletics game, and donated tons of money and time to cancer research to benefit all humankind.
Maybe USADA/WADA are an obsolete organization that--while started with noble intentions--are now just trying to whitewash a field that has moved onto a place that the world isn't quite ready to accept yet.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The problem, as I understand it, is that the witnesses had compelling reasons to make their testimonies whether they were true or not. They themselves had been caught through the drug tests and were offered leniency for testifying against Armstrong.
Faced with threats of perjury, former teammates caved. Tyler Hamilton (who had passed many doping tests before failing one at the end of his career), Floyd Landis and others reportedly testified. They admitted they’d been doping all along. The U.S. attorney ultimately declined to press charges, but USADA took the evidence and issued its own charges. Because the standard in these cases is merely “comfortable satisfaction,” not “beyond reasonable doubt,” there was no reasonable doubt that Armstrong was doomed.
http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/08/lance-armstrong-doping-allegations/
To me, it doesn't matter if they're telling the truth or not. The fact that the investigative process can compel them to lie makes their testimony worthless. A human witness is hardly a reliable thing. Neither are drug tests, but at least they're objective (whether there's a false positive/negative or not). The method of this investigation is all too similar to McCarthy's witch hunt. I'm not saying Armstrong is innocent, but I think he's owed the assumption until there's concrete evidence. I wouldn't call his accusers liars, but I do recognize their obvious conflict of interests.
As a sports fan, it saddens me to say this, but advancements in medical science may ruin sports. It's getting harder and harder to figure out where to draw the line between what type of physical enhancements are legitimate and which one's aren't. Which ones should be and shouldn't be. This is probably why I like collegiate sports so much better than professional ones. With college teams, one gets the sense that they're watching actual people.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."