Lance Armstrong accepts lifetime ban, loss of Tour de France

What Oscar Pereiro said..." What is USADA going to do..? Give Lance's 7 TDF titles to Alex Zulle ( doper ) or Joseba Beloki ( doper )...Bagh...!

Anti-doping authorities don't play fair against athletes

It's a system deliberately designed to place almost insurmountable hurdles in the way of athletes defending themselves or appealing adverse findings. Evidence has emerged over the years that laboratories certified by the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, have been incompetent at analyzing athletes' samples or fabricated results when they didn't get the numbers they were hoping to see.

We're talking about three, four, five years of litigation

Before we go further, let's address the question most people think is the nub of the matter. Is Lance Armstrong a doper?

Here's the answer: I don't know. You don't know either. More to the point, Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, doesn't know. That hasn't kept USADA from declaring Armstrong to be guilty of charges it has not proved in public, or to attempt to strip him of his seven Tour de France titles. (It's not yet clear that USADA has the latter authority.)

In part that's because under the rules written by the anti-doping system, athletes' cases are heard not in a court of law but in arbitration.

Arbitration is a system that more Americans are becoming familiar with, to their misfortune and distaste. It's where banks, brokerages, cellphone companies and other powerful business institutions force their customers to litigate grievances, for the simple reason that arbitration systems favor those who use them the most — banks, brokerages, cellphone companies, etc.

The real secret of why anti-doping agencies have been able to hound athletes out of their sports with impunity is that in this system they're not only the prosecutors but also the judges and juries. They write the arbitration rules, including those governing what evidence is relevant and under what circumstances it can be questioned.

Defending oneself in this system is horrifically expensive. The hiring of lawyers and scientific experts, the cost of visiting labs in foreign lands and attending hearings all over the country can drive a routine defense to six figures.

How many amateur athletes have the resources to do that? So most defendants give in and accept a suspension for a year or more. But countless innocent athletes, or competitors whose violations are clearly the result of an accident or blameless error, carry the stigma of cheater because they couldn't afford a defense.

"You're up against a prosecutor who drafts the rules, and goes back and changes the rules when they go against him," says Michael Straubel, director of the sports law clinic at Valparaiso University Law School and a defense attorney who handed USADA one of its rare defeats in an arbitration case.

For example, World Anti-Doping Agency rules provide for an eight-year statute of limitations, meaning that anti-doping agencies aren't supposed to use test results older than that to bring charges against an athlete. But Armstrong has pointed out that USADA was basing its case against him on test results as much as 14 years old. Presto: WADA is proposing to update its statute of limitations to 14 years — and it's proposing that the update be retroactive.

Federal Judge Sam Sparks of Austin, Texas, who was asked by Armstrong to block USADA's case against him, found lots not to like about the agency's pursuit of the cyclist. He called USADA's charging document, a letter that listed Armstrong's purported doping violations, "so vague and unhelpful it would not pass muster in any court in the United States." The deficiency, he said, "is of serious constitutional concern."

LA isn't even challenging the merits of the case anymore - it is all procedural.

fact known to us at this stage, there seems to be no question that theADO which discoveredthe violations is USADA. Therefore, USADA’s results management procedure (i.e ., the “USADA Protocol”) is controlling.