Lance, Livestrong and the UCI

Numerous reports are flooding the internet that the UCI has sustained USADA's decision to strip Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles making Greg LeMond the only American to ever win the Tour de France. Of course, this comes as no surprise to those who were aware of the plethora of evidence showing Lance to be the biggest sporting fraud in history; the Bernie Madoff of sport.

Last week we read of Livestrong donors asking for their money back. My wife says that given today's news we should be reading soon about Lance wanting his donations to the UCI back too...

Lance Armstrong Investigation: Was LiveStrong Built on the Back of a Fraud?

As I mentioned in the last post, I've been contacted by some LiveStrong donors who want their money back because they believe they donated under false pretenses. You can read about two of these donors on CNN. Here are a few bytes:

Lance Armstrong's Kingdom is Crumbling

 Update: since publishing this post this morning, several other sponsors have dropped Lance Armstrong. This article in The Wall Street Journal lists a bunch...

A few days ago, I received an email from a person who explained that, in 2000, she and her husband had donated $50,000 to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, now LiveStrong. A few years later she initiated a fundraiser that hosted Lance and collected $155,000. She explained that "With the news of Lance's deception, we feel cheated and also resentful that we were used to unknowingly continue the fraud." She said they believe there may be grounds for a class action lawsuit and wondered if there are any attorneys working on LiveStrong litigation due to Lance's fraud. (I'm still trying to find out so please email me if you have information on this.) Today's news reports indicate that this sad story is not an isolated case and that Lance's kingdom is quickly crumbling...

Lance Armstrong Investigation: Signs of Corporate Corruption

Lance Armstrong has now officially earned the title as the Bernie Madoff of sporting fraud. To fraudulently orchestrate an operation that led to winning the Tour de France seven times in a row all the while running a sophisticated doping operation for himself and his teammates is no small feat. Just as Bernie Madoff could never run a $50 billion Ponzi scheme on his own, Lance needed a lot of players to go along with it. Recent news reports are now suggesting that Lance had help from corporate sponsors to pull off this tragic deception...

Lance Armstrong Investigation: A Documentary

Australian television has a very well done documentary on the Lance Armstrong investigation at this link. Some highlights include videos of Lance and many others testifying in the SCA Promotions lawsuit from a few years ago. Also, Phil Liggett finally admits in an interview that Lance must have doped. There is a lot more testimony and details in the documentary that you might enjoy if you've been following this fraud. I agree with Betsy Andreu's assessment in the documentary that Lance is the Bernie Madoff of sport.

Heroes in the Lance Armstrong Investigation

Emma O'Reilly

There are a few heroes that paid a substantial price in the fight for truth in the Lance Armstrong investigation. For example, Emma O'Reilly, Lance's former soigneur, was one of the first to tell others that she knew Lance was doping. Emma spoke up nearly a decade ago and told her story. She paid a price for her honesty as Lance sued her for libel and persecuted her ruthlessly. In her words:  Lance tried to make her life hell. Emma paid a big price for telling her story. Yes, she was paid by a book author to tell it but without her story, it's possible many other stories would not have come out.

The Complexity of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi Operation is Coming to Light

The Wall Street Journal published an article this week with more information about how Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme could operate with so few people. I've always been skeptical that anyone could pull off such a massive fraud without a team of people involved. It looks like the government is now putting together a case showing that a team was behind the fraud and it ran for a much longer time than previously estimated: nearly four decades.

USADA Evidence Against Lance Armstrong

The WSJ and other news outlets are reporting that later today USADA will release more than 1,000 pages of documents supporting their accusations that Lance Armstrong doped.  Some noteworthy highlights: