Best comment I saw, on deadspin.

"If I wanted to listen to some smug prick who rides a bike and takes drugs, I'd just go to Portland."

Part two tonight. Does Oprah have a big surprise for us?

I doubt it. The smug cunt is going to carry on existing in his own fantasy world.

He's a fairly young man, so he may redeem himself eventually. I imagine at this point the enormity of it all is hard to get a grasp on. It may be a cliche to say, but I think it's accurate that somebody who tells a lie often enough will eventually start to believe it. So far he's gotten far enough to understand that he doped and lied about it. That's a good start, but it's obviously not enough.

Reed John wrote:


Ha ha!

From watching the interview, his defence for being the grand, shining, top-off-the-hill/king-of-the-mountian, glorious fanwa was that he was defending his “territory”. The way any alpha-male would. Any real alpha-male would. Why wouldn’t you? He was in the shit, a mire of shit – but he stood strong and showed a way to survive; to, if anything, protect the sport from your back-street, seaman-stained Frog, with his low-tech goofers and uppers, soiling those majestic mountains. He has a job in the higher echelons of the NRA waiting for him, I reckon.

Because there's a 5 year statute of limitations in the US.
He shone it on until that expired by pretending he wasn't prepared to dignify the allegations with a defence.

JV will like this.

www.theonion.com/video/lance-armstrong-d...ost:headline:default

Martin C wrote:


Surely the post-comeback racing career is only relevant in this regard if he has said anything under oath about it? He hasn't been in court recently that I'm aware of. There is something I've just discovered and don't really understand called "Continuing violations doctrine" (thank you, wikipedia) that might be the reason admitting nothing after 2005, maybe?
On the other hand, does the statute of limitations apply in situations where the accused was perverting the course of justice or whatever the equivalent American term is (obstructing justice)? I've got a vague memory of a judge recently (possibly over here) rejecting a statute of limitations defence on the grounds that the defendant had deceived people to prevent them discovering his crime. Can't find a reference for it, unfortunately.

Surely the statute of limitations isn't there to protect those who have committed a crime and then successfully covered it up? It is a measure about the right to a fair trial, and also to stop action by the authorities of dubious motive, when they go after someone on old issues which were public knowledge or had at least been open to investigation if someone had been interested enough to look into them at the time.

hobbes wrote:


I was asking as an outsider looking in. What I meant, why wasn't he charged, independent from his admission, before the statue of limitations expired? The whole world knew he was a dope cheat; was there absolutely no evidence until 2012? What about the re-tests of the frozen urine from 1999?

Issues with civil to criminal liability in terms of levels of proof, I guess. The evidence in the USASA report is mostly slightly vague along the lines of 'I saw him taking something and it was probably this, maybe that.' Some of that testimony was already in place in 2010, but the key people only broke in 2012. Lots of the evidence as it stood in 2010 had already been tested in a court and had proved insufficiently presuavsive to even win a civil case.

The 1999 sample that was re-analysed and proved positive for EPO was officially done blindly. It wasn't retested in a bid to get Armstrong, it was done as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of the new EPO test. They went to a set of samples that they expected to contain some positives, those given by riders in the 1999 tour, and found some identified as from rider X (can't remember the number) coming up positive.
It took a journalist to pin down that they were Armstrong's samples by process of elimination. Though Armstrong gave his permission for his samples to be retested, he only gave it for them to be tested anonymously. So it could have been struck out as evidence.

The deductive process ran something like this*;

When samples are given to the lab, each rider is randomly assigned a unique identification number. This is an important protection against accusations of bias in the testing process. A sealed document is created which links the anonymous rider numbers to individual people, and this is only consulted after a sample gives a positive result.
As well as the rider number, samples are also dated. This was key in breaking the anonymity, as it meant that you could group the samples by stage as well as by rider. The protocol for who was selected for testing is public available knowledge, something like the 1-2-3 finishers on a stage plus the jersey holders and a couple of random selections. So if you have riders who have given a significant number of samples, you can overlay the grid of race results with the grid of samples and say with a high degree of confidence that rider x = A, rider y = B, etc. However, you cannot prove this absolutely due to the random tests.
Problems may arise if there was a statute of limitations type deal on the document which links rider numbers to individuals (n.b. this is speculation on my part). That is has either been destroyed, or was meant to have been destroyed which would render it inadmissible even if a copy still existed. Without it, there is no direct traceability linking a rider with specific samples. Then it doesn't matter if, to borrow Johnny Vaughters recent colourful phrase, CIA satellites could see a sample glowing at night, you can't use it as evidence in a court.
There would still be a value in retaining the samples after the destruction of the records linking them to specific riders, but only for research purposes.

* - source: an interview with Michael Ashenden that I either saw or heard a few months ago, but unfortunately can't dig back up at the moment.

So he won't admit anything post 2005, because of the statue of limitations thing.

What, however, is his reasoning for not admitting his earlier doping, i.e. why is he still saying that Betsy Andreu is making stuff up? Surely that stuff is so old that he doesn't need to worry about statue of limitations and all that? Is it just a case of him only admitting to the stuff he's been caught on, and desperately wanting to cling to his 1993 World Title? It seems like he is trying to sell some perverse line that he was a totally clean rider pre-cancer, and that the cancer turned him into a doper, which makes the doping seem forgiveable in his mind.

edit: I've now also watched the second Oprah interview. I know it's a soft-interview thing supposed to put him in good light and I shouldn't fall for it, but I'm finding it difficult to be angry with the guy any more. To be honest I feel sorry for the mess he has gotten himself into. He has some serious problems/demons to deal with. It's the old adage: Behind the façade of every bully is a guy with serious problems.

Texan company sues Armstrong for $12 million

AB2 wrote:


Saw this guy on TV and he was quite amusing in the way he was dealing with the situation. He said that he would be waiting a while before deciding what to do. Guess a while is over.

AB2 wrote:


I thought they had filed a while ago.
This one seems a fairly clear cut case, the bonuses were due to Armstrong back in 2005 as he was the winner of the Tours of 2002, '03 & '04 at that point. As of last year that was no longer the case and so SCA were always going to persue him for their money back. Insurance companies don't forget these things.
Settled in full and out of court would be my guess as how this one progresses. Not a game changer.

The main point of interest about all this was the original case with SCA was the one where Armstrong was under oath and flaty denied doping, and also the one where he accused Betsy Andreu of lying about his conversation with his doctors.

Bryaniek wrote:


Heh. That was a theory I also put forward on 18/1 @ 14:38. Only Bryaniek has phrased it much more clearly and concisely.

Gawpus somewhat undermined the suggestion with another piece of the interview.

Gawpus wrote:


I suppose it's possible that the lies have got so convoluted that Armstrong caught himself out here, and has admitted to something he didn't mean to. That does kind of fit that archetype; at the time he is trying to deflect away another issue, that of his behaviour towards his teammates, and may have got so fixated on mitigating that particular element that he temporarily forgot he was denying doping pre-cancer.
Don't interrogators use similar distraction techniques as a matter of course?

Oh sorry, forgot that you had said the same thing. Your idea must have been subconciously planted in my mind.

In the second Oprah interview she asks him if doping contributed to him getting cancer, to which he replied, "No, I don't think so" or words to that effect. There again he didn't deny doping before cancer. I guess now he is getting confused and can't remember which stuff he is still supposed to lie about for legal reasons and which stuff he is supposed to tell the truth about.

In a way he is also still peddling the omerta culture by claiming that the biological passport has made cycling totally clean, when we know that's not really true. And the whole "I promised Kristen I wouldn't dope for my 2009 comeback, so of course I didn't" was cringeworthy. The guy was riding for Astana with Johan Bruyneel for god's sake. Then Oprah asked again, "So you didn't take any banned substances or blood dope after your comeback?" and Lance visibly squirmed.

I find the whole 'did drugs give you cancer?' line quite uncomfortable. For one thing, it's an unanswerable question (how could anybody say either way?), and there's almost a subtext of 'well you deserved it then' to it (not from anyone on here though, I would stress).

Depends on the purpose of the question. If Oprah ran that as a trick question, then she has done a fantastic job in exposing Armstrong's lies.

From the Telegraph:



So that would explain that.

Also, Lance said Kristin didn't want to know about the doping and that he insulated her from that:



He just can't stop lying, huh.

He now admits it is "sick" that when he was questioned in 2005 that he used the foundation as a reason why he would never cheat. Then a few minutes later he uses some cock and bull story about making a promise to his ex-wife as the reason why he supposedly didn't cheat in 2009. And it's not just pathological lying at this stage, it's calculated lying due to 2009 being not quite yet seven years ago yet.