The noose has been chosen and the scaffolding is going up, but Lance Armstrong is hardly the sort of fellow to throw up his hands and meekly turn himself in to the sheriff.
Never mind that Boulder cyclist Tyler Hamilton has now recanted years of lies, admitting he was a doper and insisting that former teammate Armstrong was, too.
Never mind that another former teammate and confessed cheater, Floyd Landis, fingered Armstrong last year, and that one-time friend Frankie Andreu gave sworn testimony several years ago that Armstrong told a doctor in 1996 that he’d taken a variety of performance-enhancing drugs.
You don’t become history’s greatest cyclist, a seven-time winner of the Tour de France, without a combative instinct that is as unpleasant as it is fearsome. Armstrong is the sort of warrior who, according to Matt Rendell’s book “Blazing Saddles,” stomped about the team bus after seizing the leader’s yellow jersey in the 2003 Tour while loudly raging, “No one trains like me. No one rides like me. This jersey’s mine. I live for this jersey. It’s my life. No one’s taking it away from me. This f—— jersey’s mine.”
Not only does Armstrong play for keeps, he also is armed with good lawyers, a website dedicated to refuting allegations — — and the fairly consequential fact that he has apparently never failed one of hundreds of urine and blood tests over the years.
He is well-equipped, in short, for the apparently inevitable clash with federal prosecutors over whether he once used performance drugs — a clash likely to be even more pointless, unsatisfying and wasteful than the feds’ recent pursuit of slugger Barry Bonds.
I’m an Armstrong fan who for years had hoped he was clean, but I hold no brief for him. I’d like to know the truth, however disillusioning it might be. But how the truth is established matters, and in this case it is likely to surface through an abuse of federal power — or at least the highly dubious use of it.
Hamilton — who once tested positive for blood doping — came clean only when called to testify before a federal grand jury that had been assembled at the prodding of investigators for the Food and Drug Administration. You might well wonder why the FDA would take it upon itself to police a bicycle race in France. The answer seems to be that the lead agent, Jeff Novitzky, has an obsession with sports cheats. Novitzky is the same former IRS sleuth — part bloodhound, part bulldog — whose relentless pursuit of the blood-testing service BALCO helped bring down Bonds.
But if Novitzky is determined to protect the integrity of cycling, he chose the wrong profession. He should have applied to become president of the International Cycling Union. The hunt for Armstrong will cost millions of dollars and may be fruitless. And while Armstrong’s secrets are of considerable cultural interest, it is hard to see any compelling interest to the U.S. taxpayer in ferreting out the truth.
Don’t FDA investigators have any actual threats to the health of consumers that they should be targeting?
The New York Times tells us “the inquiry aims to prove that Armstrong and his associates committed fraud against the government,” apparently because they were sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service — how’s that for legal creativity? — and perhaps drug trafficking and money laundering, too.
Like baseball, cycling went through a long period in which elite performers were either regularly suspected of cheating or actually caught flat-out doing it. Even Bicycling magazine editor-at-large Bill Strickland, author of “Tour de Lance” and a longtime agnostic regarding Armstrong’s alleged drug use, wrote recently that he had come across information “that finally convinced me that in some form he doped to win some of his Tours.”
It’s a tantalizing mystery, to be sure. But why is Uncle Sam trying to solve it?
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Read his blog at
