Drug Cheats?

Lance Armstrong has been a sporting phenomenon. Recovering from testicular cancer to win the Tour de France seven times is quite extraordinary.

That he has been accused of doping (including some testimony by former teammates) goes with the territory. That he has denied it consistently is in his favour and the fact that he has never failed a test, despite his high profile, also speaks in his favour.

That he is now refusing to face charges by the USADA while maintaining his innocence sounds typical of him. It is sad that it has come to this, and proof of any guilt seems likely to be based upon hearsay.

Officially he will in all probability be stripped of all his titles - which would be a sad end to an inspiring story, though whether his guilt will have been actually proven is another matter.

Perhaps one curiosity that will result from this is that three of his titles would pass, officially at least, to Germany's Jan Ullrich. Another interesting character who has also been accused on numerous occasions of doping, and has also followed Armstrong's line that he did not dope. As he was the chief lieutenant on Team Telekom to Bjarne Riis, the 1996 winner, who has admitted to using steroids, and other members of that team have suggested that taking steroids was virtually team policy, and yet Ullrich managed to avoid taking them for all the years that he was involved with them, while nearly everyone else was doing so .... 

That said, except for the Fuentes affair (which he claims to be a one-off!) at the end of his career in 2006, he too never failed a drug test or got caught .... All his victories in various events from 2005 on have been erased, the rest (including the one TdF win in 1997 and several current second places) remain wharrever the suspicions involved.  

And this suspicion has never gone away.

Strip Ullrich of his 1997 Tour de France title, it would then pass to Richard Virenque of France who was involved in more than one doping scandal! And of course denied everything until he got caught! At which point the story became he did not realise what was happening!

This sadly becomes a never-ending story.

And the situation surrounding Lance Armstrong, given what he meant to so many cancer survivors, is all the sadder. You would hope that somehow his continued claims of innocence could somehow be proved beyond doubt. As it is we will never really know.