Their methods are murky because sometimes you have to get a little murky to catch a cheater like Lance. His lawyers never fought fair.
Actually, cyclists are pretty stupid in general. Lance is actually a pretty smart guy.
With his resources, with his association with Dr. Ferrari and the smarts to take the right stuff at the right time, there is no excuse for getting caught. And if you are taking the right stuff and you have a team built around concealing your guilt then it's extremely easy to get away with it. Nobody else had a the infrastructure that he did.
And he has tested positive. In '00 or '99 but the matter was conveniently thrown out, "saddle sores".. Please.
I guess the ten different witnesses who saw him dope and confessed to doping themselves don't count for anything. All of these guys are Americans, all of them. I guess it must be some sort of French conspiracy. It was pretty easy to engage in character assasination against Hamilton, Landis, his old mechanic, his old soigneur. But I guess you can't character assasinate, George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie, Frankie Andreu, Jonathan Vaughters and god knows who else they had lined to testify.. All of those people have no interest in lying, they have too much to lose. They all have lucrative and successful side businesses.
Every single guy he beat was doping. I guess he was the only guy that was clean, every single one but him. Sure.
Whether you think Tygart is deranged or not is pretty irrelevant. Lance is perhaps the biggest cheater in sports history. He did do a lot of good, but he also used the Cancer thing as a shield in the past as well.
Too many prominent cyclists have tested positive for various substances to say that you have to be stupid to be caught.
And I don't think this is all straightforward.
I'm not sure Armstrong had a choice here. The group that declares that you're guilty is the one who will sit in judgement of your arbitration. You bring a knife to a gunfight and then they take the knife - winning is not a possible outcome.
I had the chance to see Travis Tygart speak once - he is purely deranged. He's not a normal human being and his comments leading to this point have largely been unhinged. Their supposed efforts to clean up a particular sport involves threatening current athletes that they believe they can tag for PEDs with 'prosecution' unless they commit to testifying against a former athlete.
End result - current athletes they believe to be dirty are allowed to continue to compete.
But the end game is more political and aimed towards justifying their own existence than anything else. I think the judge that dismissed Armstrong case against the USADA offered the same thoughts as I have - their goals and methods are more than a little murky.
