It’s a sad day for me and sports fans like me. Lance Armstrong quits fighting USADA. I have huge admiration for this guy professionally (not personally), the guy fought cancer, won 7 Tour-De-France titles, made cycling a popular sport in America, setup one of the very successful cancer foundations and more importantly the most popular yellow “live strong” wrist bands. The bands at one point were so popular that people were envious of those who had it and it was a matter of pride wearing it.
The most important thing for me was, he lives in Austin and he is a native of Texas. If my memory serves right, I bought my bike after his 2004 win of “Tour-de-France”.
I had been following this case of USADA vs Lance pretty closely and I am surprised by the timing of it. He was practically retired from the professional life and the last title he had won was in 2006. The case they are making is from blood samples from 2009 and 2010, What were these blood samples doing for the last 3 odd years. Waiting for the technology to mature for testing. I don’t understand their terms also, one can only get into an arbitration with them and not a fight and there is no third party to oversee the proceedings.
Whatever their allegations or reasons behind it may be, I was hoping Mr. Armstrong will fight it to the end and prove one way or other. By letting it away, he has left lots of people like me in confusion, did he dope and if he did how come he was never caught all these years? with all the countless tests he had to face while racing “Tour-De-France”. Or what was he scared of with USADA which made him to quickly accept the defeat (in less than 2 months).
I guess the solace we have to take is from the fact that he did fight back from cancer and medals or not made it to the international sporting scene and setup a successful cancer research foundation.
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