By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Tuesday October 23, 2012
Lance Armstrong Is Stripped of His 7 Tour de France Titles
Tour de Fraud, Lance Armstrong gets new sponsors
The International Cycling Union announced Monday that it would not appeal the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s ruling to bar Lance Armstrong for life from Olympic sports for doping and for playing an instrumental role in the team-organized doping on his Tour de France-winning cycling squads.
Lance Armstrong won ultimate possession of the Tour de France’s yellow jersey for seven straight years, but his name is being removed from the Tour record books.
That decision to waive the right to take Armstrong’s case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest court in sports, formally stripped Armstrong of the seven Tour titles he won from 1999 to 2005.
“Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling; he deserves to be forgotten in cycling,” Pat McQuaid, the president of the cycling union, known as U.C.I., said in a news conference in Switzerland. “Something like this must never happen again.”
McQuaid said he was “sickened” by the facts in the 202-page report the antidoping agency made public two weeks ago regarding the evidence it had in the Armstrong case, and called it mind-boggling how former teammates like the five-time national time-trial champion David Zabriskie were pushed to use performance-enhancing drugs.
McQuaid said that Armstrong’s teams had a “win at all costs” attitude fueled by “deceit, intimidation, coercion and evasion,” and that all of the evidence was there to prove that Armstrong doped. He added that he was sorry the cycling union had not caught Armstrong and his teammates “red handed” so he could have thrown them out of the sport. (Source: NYTimes)