Some things are beyond my ability to comprehend. One of those is the movement to destroy Lance Armstrong. He's been banned from the sport of professional cycling. He's just stepped down from the cancer charity he founded, "Livestrong". As far as I can tell, the only sanctions they haven't imposed yet are imprisonment and torture.
They claim he cheated. Used performance-enhancing drugs. They never actually caught him. He reportedly had a positive result once, but it's unclear what happened - it seemed to just go away. The case was built on hearsay and circumstantial evidence, the most convincing of which was Armstrong's supposed relationship with a known enabler of athletes who doped. There seem to be lots of related stories that doping was rampant among nearly all of the top riders in the Tour de France.
Anyway, based on all that hearsay and rumors and stories told by other riders who may have been envious of Armstrong's success, the organization that's supposed to be the enforcer against performance-enhancing drugs decided to persecute him fully.
I thought athletes were subjected to lots of rigorous testing, and if one is caught with a positive sample, the sanctions will kick in. That's not what happened to Armstrong. They instead spent years gathering the gossip from other riders and everyone they could find who was willing to say they thought Armstrong was a doper. Then they sprung it all on the public as justification for rescinding all of his cycling victories, even those in years they didn't find anybody suggesting he had doped.
What's confusing to me is this: Doesn't this mean that when an athlete wins an event, all it takes for the award to be rescinded is a sour-grapes runner-up coming forward to suggest he was a doper? What happened to standards of evidence? If Lance was doping all those years, isn't it more appropriate to blame the enforcement organization for missing it, and focusing on tightening the testing protocols?
Guilty or not, it just seems to me Armstrong's been railroaded.
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