Lance Armstrong Controversy: Race Officials Have Already Convicted Him

Lance Armstrong is denying reports coming from the French magazine L'Equipe that he used a banned substance in 1999 to win his first Tour de France.

It's sad that the head of the Tour has already convicted Armstrong, even though an analysis is not completed and the science itself used by the newspaper is faulty.

Even the newspaper admits that the testing process is highly dubious, but it didn't stop the Tour director from saying: "We are very shocked, very troubled by the revelations we read this morning. He also said "I feel confused and disappointed without a doubt like many sports people."

Fair enough.

Then, just a few hours later, without waiting to hear from Armstrong, his doctors or anyone else, the Tour director accused Armstrong of cheating and demanded an explanation based on "solid scientific proof" from the newspaper. BS solid proof!

Note to the Tour director: thanks for waiting for the entire story, idiot, like you said you were going to.

According to Breitbart.com, testing old samples with the new procedure to detect EPO (which commenced in 2001) revealed that fifteen samples from 1999 tested positive for the banned steroid EPO; forty from 1998 tested positive.

There's only two possibilities: Either the riders were breaking the rules, or the test was somehow giving off false positives, which is a possibility.

There's no way to go back and test the test. We'll never know the truth unless someone admits to cheating.

If he's innocent, Armstrong ought to be considering suing the Tour, the director of the tour, and the newspaper for defamation of character, which is a crime in France as well as in the U.S. They've gone and made a statement that harms Armstrong's reputation with no solid proof.

They have only the good word of a scandal-drivel magazine that has a bone to pick with Armstrong. And if Armstrong comes out and says "I'm sorry; I made a mistake," then professional-level cycling will be set back for years.

I'm disgusted with this entire farce. Is there no set procedure for something like this in the Tour de France?