Prosecutors close Lance Armstrong investigation

Boy, this sounds familiar.

Board sycophants are presented with facts. They have their own idea of the guilt or innocence of the accused -- and let's be clear, it's guilt 99 percent of the time -- and they barrel through the facts to tell us that they know the truth.

Not even saying, mind you, that I know he was innocent of doping. Just saying that you all don't know him, either. And you never, never, never allow yourself the possibility of being wrong.

 

The "fact" that the government chose not to pursue charges may or may not bear any relation to "the truth."

 

And in his losing quest to be cutting-edge, he underlines my point. That's the kind of thought process that keeps journalists in jobs.

 

Link to the 1999 drug test?

OK, fine; assume, which you must do to denigrate Armstrong, that a cyclist is, prima facie, a lab experiment that would make the East German women blush. Therefore, winning the Tour de France seven years in a row is still special, given the assumption that all cyclists are lab experiments.

And as fanatical as W.A.D.A. and other testing agencies are, and how bringing down the great Lance would be a crowning achievement for someone, I'm not discounting him being clean. I'm also not discounting him being as dirty as any other cyclist, going by the old saw. It's pitting "didn't test positive after any of his Tour de France wins" against "he must have used, everyone else did." Both are farrrrrrr from probative.

 

sports.espn.go.com/oly/cycling/columns/story?columnist=ford_bonnie_d&id=4303217

Controversy first erupted during the race when the newspaper Le Monde reported that traces of a banned corticosteroid had been found in his system, although not enough to meet the threshold of a positive test. Armstrong said he was using a cortisone cream to treat saddle sores, and produced a prescription; cycling authorities backed Armstrong.

Just days after Armstrong's 2005 retirement, the French sports daily newspaper L'Equipe reported that six of his urine samples from the '99 Tour, re-tested years later for research purposes, showed the presence of the blood booster EPO. No reliable test existed for the banned substance at the time, although its use had by then become common in the peloton. Armstrong vehemently denied the allegations. An investigator appointed by the UCI, cycling's international governing body, criticized the politics and methodology behind the testing. Proponents of both sides continue to dispute the credibility of the other.

 

Boy, what a honkin' scarlet letter that is.

 

I don't recall saying it was anything of the kind.

I said

 

Except he didn't fail a drug test. He passed the drug test in 1999, then those passed samples were tested years later for research purposes.

 

He failed a 1999 test - at a level too low to be la labeled a 'positive result' - and had to produce a note saying he was using a corticosteroid cream for saddle sores.

The retested samples additionally failed a test for EPO in 2005.

 

Lance dodged the bullet because his chemists were 150 miles ahead of any of the testing protocols. But despite the paucity of "evidence," we in the court of public opinion are allowed to render a verdict based on simple common sense.

In order to conclude Armstrong did not dope, you must believe a human being is physically capable of being literally at death's door with late-stage cancer throughout his body, only to beat that God-awful disease and bounce back to win the world's most famous bicycle race multiple times against a field of competitors who were doping their asses off ... all through sheer force of will, determination and physical superiority.

Personally, I'd find it more believable that Paterno knew nothing about Sandusky raping little boys in the PSU showers -- and I don't believe that for a second.

But that's just me.

 

There's nothing remotely common-sensical in that argument, other than the common-sense use of common sense as an attempt to disallow all debate.

 

No, it's not just you. It is most people with a shred of common sense.