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Official Lance Armstrong Thread: Part 3 (Post-Confession)

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Re:

irondan said:
Thanks for the insight guys!

What's the consensus up to this point? Is Lance going to pay $100 million do you think?
I hope not. I hope Lance not only retains the money, but finds a whistle blower against the USPS. It's a pity if putting a no doping clause in an elite athlete's contract doesn't violate some rule against reasonable expectation or good faith. Would this make professional sports a criminal enterprise?
 
Aug 7, 2010
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Re: Re:

Oh, this one hurts. HRH is sitting around on a Sunday downing Lanceritas like it's the Day of the Dead and slurring at anyone who'll listen.[/quote]

Who's HRH?
 
Re:

Benotti69 said:
Armstrong pays SCA $10mil....................

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/more_sport/article1612629.ece

behind a paywall

So basically both parties are put back to their original position before any deal was ever in place.

Armstrong took a $10m loan for 9 years interest free. Whatever may have earnt on that investment has probably had to pay his last round of legal fees. In saying that he had to appeal to exhaust SCA to settle.

What a tremendous waste of time for all! No winners or losers.
 
Re: Official Lance Armstrong Thread: Part 3 (Post-Confession

SCA were without $10m of working capital for 9 years, lost CPI and possible revenue from the amount. They have finally restored their position but lost the opportunity to earn off the amount.

Waste of time for all involved. At least justice was served by way of settlement.
 
Aug 31, 2012
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Any chance Lance's actual assets will be close to 0 once all is said and done? I'm kind of hoping he won't be a wealthy man from here on out but it's probably a fool's hope.
 
Re: Re:

thehog said:
Benotti69 said:
Armstrong pays SCA $10mil....................

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/more_sport/article1612629.ece

behind a paywall

So basically both parties are put back to their original position before any deal was ever in place.

Armstrong took a $10m loan for 9 years interest free. Whatever may have earnt on that investment has probably had to pay his last round of legal fees. In saying that he had to appeal to exhaust SCA to settle.

What a tremendous waste of time for all! No winners or losers.

We don't really know. What I can make out is that "terms of the settlement were confidential" plus a Lance Armstrong apology for his perjurious behavior.
 
Re:

SeriousSam said:
Any chance Lance's actual assets will be close to 0 once all is said and done? I'm kind of hoping he won't be a wealthy man from here on out but it's probably a fool's hope.

He just opened a new Mellow Johnny's outlet so I think Lance is here to stay. He will own the bike shop market by 2017. Expect to see Armstrong bikes to compete with Trek & LeMond real soon. Then a title sponsor of Slipstream when Garmin/Cannodale withdraw over TommyD's 15th positive test.
 
May 26, 2010
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Re:

SeriousSam said:
Any chance Lance's actual assets will be close to 0 once all is said and done? I'm kind of hoping he won't be a wealthy man from here on out but it's probably a fool's hope.

Guy had a private jet for a few years and no doubt visited offshore locations to bank some of those ill gotten gains.

I doubt he will be at zero, but will have to watch his investments closely and his outgoings.
 
Re: Re:

MarkvW said:
thehog said:
Benotti69 said:
Armstrong pays SCA $10mil....................

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/more_sport/article1612629.ece

behind a paywall

So basically both parties are put back to their original position before any deal was ever in place.

Armstrong took a $10m loan for 9 years interest free. Whatever may have earnt on that investment has probably had to pay his last round of legal fees. In saying that he had to appeal to exhaust SCA to settle.

What a tremendous waste of time for all! No winners or losers.

We don't really know. What I can make out is that "terms of the settlement were confidential" plus a Lance Armstrong apology for his perjurious behavior.

Agreed. We may never know the amount he settled for. A lovely non-admitance of guilt apology as well :cool:

I am pleased to have this matter behind me and I look forward to moving on. I do wish to apologize to SCA and its (chief executive), Bob Hamman, for any misconduct on my part in connection with our dispute and the resulting arbitration," Armstrong said in a statement Sunday to The Associated Press.

Armstrong did not reveal how much he paid SCA.
 
Re:

Afrank said:
I think Chris Farley describes Armstrongs ultimate fate best. https://vimeo.com/37818251#t=70s :D
Hilarious!

Don't be fooled into thinking Lance doesn't have lot's of money hidden and protected in places that the US govt can't touch.

He's known he was a cheater and could be caught from the beginning. He would have to be the worlds biggest idiot to not protect himself. Not to mention the fact that he's had top notch financial advice available to him for many years now.

No, Lance will never be 'down by the river in a van'. Comical thought though. :D
 
Aug 16, 2011
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Re: Re:

irondan said:
Afrank said:
I think Chris Farley describes Armstrongs ultimate fate best. https://vimeo.com/37818251#t=70s :D
Hilarious!

Don't be fooled into thinking Lance doesn't have lot's of money hidden and protected in places that the US govt can't touch.

He's known he was a cheater and could be caught from the beginning. He would have to be the worlds biggest idiot to not protect himself. Not to mention the fact that he's had top notch financial advice available to him for many years now.

No, Lance will never be 'down by the river in a van'. Comical thought though. :D

Perhaps the clinic should organize an oceans 11 type heist and put him in that van down by the river. :cool:
 
Re: Re:

Afrank said:
irondan said:
Afrank said:
I think Chris Farley describes Armstrongs ultimate fate best. https://vimeo.com/37818251#t=70s :D
Hilarious!

Don't be fooled into thinking Lance doesn't have lot's of money hidden and protected in places that the US govt can't touch.

He's known he was a cheater and could be caught from the beginning. He would have to be the worlds biggest idiot to not protect himself. Not to mention the fact that he's had top notch financial advice available to him for many years now.

No, Lance will never be 'down by the river in a van'. Comical thought though. :D

Perhaps the clinic should organize an oceans 11 type heist and put him in that van down by the river. :cool:

Oceans 12 it should be. ;)
 
Re: Re:

BigMac said:
Afrank said:
irondan said:
Afrank said:
I think Chris Farley describes Armstrongs ultimate fate best. https://vimeo.com/37818251#t=70s :D
Hilarious!

Don't be fooled into thinking Lance doesn't have lot's of money hidden and protected in places that the US govt can't touch.

He's known he was a cheater and could be caught from the beginning. He would have to be the worlds biggest idiot to not protect himself. Not to mention the fact that he's had top notch financial advice available to him for many years now.

No, Lance will never be 'down by the river in a van'. Comical thought though. :D

Perhaps the clinic should organize an oceans 11 type heist and put him in that van down by the river. :cool:

Oceans 12 it should be. ;)
Nicely done
 
Apr 20, 2009
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Re: Re:

thehog said:
Benotti69 said:
Armstrong pays SCA $10mil....................

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/more_sport/article1612629.ece

behind a paywall

So basically both parties are put back to their original position before any deal was ever in place.

Armstrong took a $10m loan for 9 years interest free. Whatever may have earnt on that investment has probably had to pay his last round of legal fees. In saying that he had to appeal to exhaust SCA to settle.

What a tremendous waste of time for all! No winners or losers.

Just as a broad measure, Dow was about 10K 10 years ago. It's now 16.3K. So as a quick and dirty guess he made 6.3M on the deal.

Or using a more conservative estimate of the CPI - or, said another way, what SCA paid minus what it lost to a decline in the value of the dollar - The 10M they paid is now being repaid as 7.9M.

Either way, it's pretty stunning that SCA was so wronged and, in the end, they still lose a substantial sum of money. Not that I have any sympathy for a company that insures these type of events, but still...wow.

Oops! I now realize that the actual dollar figure is not cited. So perhaps he did pay more than the 10M. One would certainly hope so.
 
Jul 6, 2015
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Sigh, I miss the days when LA's love life and all his romantic malfeasance was the topic. Much juicier gossip than all this boring money talk.
 
Re: Re:

eleven said:
thehog said:
Benotti69 said:
Armstrong pays SCA $10mil....................

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/more_sport/article1612629.ece

behind a paywall

So basically both parties are put back to their original position before any deal was ever in place.

Armstrong took a $10m loan for 9 years interest free. Whatever may have earnt on that investment has probably had to pay his last round of legal fees. In saying that he had to appeal to exhaust SCA to settle.

What a tremendous waste of time for all! No winners or losers.

Just as a broad measure, Dow was about 10K 10 years ago. It's now 16.3K. So as a quick and dirty guess he made 6.3M on the deal.

Or using a more conservative estimate of the CPI - or, said another way, what SCA paid minus what it lost to a decline in the value of the dollar - The 10M they paid is now being repaid as 7.9M.

Either way, it's pretty stunning that SCA was so wronged and, in the end, they still lose a substantial sum of money. Not that I have any sympathy for a company that insures these type of events, but still...wow.

Oops! I now realize that the actual dollar figure is not cited. So perhaps he did pay more than the 10M. One would certainly hope so.

Correct, it go down as the one of the dumbest deals in history.

Anyone with a ounce of due diligence would have realised betting against Armstrong in that era with the UCI and Ferrari on his team, Lance wasn’t going to lose.

My thought is Armstrong wouldn’t have paid more than the fine levied of $10m. There was no need to. He could have kept appealing the decision until sometime in 2025. SCA had cut their losses at some point.

Like I said, there were no winners or losers in this sham. Armstrong might have come out on top but that’s a big “if’. If he invested the ill gotten gains wisely he may have done well from all this.
 
Re: Re:

thehog said:
...

Correct, it go down as the one of the dumbest deals in history.

Anyone with a ounce of due diligence would have realised betting against Armstrong in that era with the UCI and Ferrari on his team, Lance wasn’t going to lose.

My thought is Armstrong wouldn’t have paid more than the fine levied of $10m. There was no need to. He could have kept appealing the decision until sometime in 2025. SCA had cut their losses at some point.

Like I said, there were no winners or losers in this sham. Armstrong might have come out on top but that’s a big “if’. If he invested the ill gotten gains wisely he may have done well from all this.

It is hard to blame someone for entering a contract where the counter-party was planning to defraud them.

Nonetheless, the biggest win for Lance is that he has thus far escaped true punishment and any short of jail time.

The premeditated nature of the fraud is inescapable. He was actively working with Ferrari, and had been tilting results at least as far back as Thrift Drug.

But, to be fair to SCA, there is a lot more clarity though 20/20 hindsight than there was at the time.

* The Festina scandal had cleaned up the sport.
* EPO was really a cancer drug.
* Doping was something that only East German female swimmers did, and the wall had just come down demonstrating the failure.
* Lance was an American, and therefore untarnished by any sort of Festina-like European activities and was, of course, GI Joe clean by nature. (Not trying to bait or promote any sort of Nationalistic jingoism, just stating the common (mis)perception(s) aka at-the-time conventional wisdom).
* Corruption in American sport wasn't revealed until post the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and Balco (also 2002). Even then, it is still isolated to a very few and very isolated bad apples....
* There was only one guy saying anything, and nobody was listening.
AND, he didn't make that statement until AFTER the SCA contract had been signed. The contract was signed in January, Greg made his statement in July. Moreover, as true as Greg's observation was, he is still pilloried for it fifteen years later. The Lance PR machine remains effective.

So, yes, easy to condemn SCA.

After all, they were duped.

Stupid victim. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Dave.
 
Re: Official Lance Armstrong Thread: Part 3 (Post-Confession

Than language is you use is somewhat vitriolic, not sure why, no one is blaming SCA. It was just a bad deal that they made.

Due diligence is important part of any financial deal. Especially that of a sports betting/insurance company. That’s what they do... risk assessment and due diligence.

A part of due diligence is to assess the “fitness” of the deal, i.e. how likely is it that one might be defrauded in this deal. All very standard risk modeling that would have or should have taken place.

In fact it appears so little due diligence was done SCA didn’t think wise to add a doping clause to the contract despite the fact that the entire sport came to its knees in 1998 and again at the 1999 Giro. Not that the doping clause would have amounted to much but they should have least been looking to protect themselves.

The fact that SCA didn’t think the sport of cycling would find itself into the doping mire again was beyond belief. Its like they actually believed that the sport had cleaned up in one/two years despite very little change at the top of sports administration or the testing methods. Virenque was even back riding at the 1999 Tour for crying out loud! :cool:

Doping or not doping, what it boiled down to was a $460k down payment from Armstrong to collect $10m and keep hold of it for 9 years.

What were SCA thinking?
 
Not sure anyone foresaw seven wins - but they made a bet and didn't know the market. A streetside bookie would have conducted more due diligence with the punter in from a bar. They ventured into a sport where they were clearly out of their depth - then they ran crying when they lost.
 
As far as SCA and Lance goes, it was all business, all the time. Of course SCA factored in the possibility that Lance Armstrong was going to defraud them. If insurance companies didn't take that probability into account (like all of the other probabilities that they take into account), they'd be out of business in no time.

Against that probability, the insurance company balanced the likelihood and amount of fraud recovery that they might receive and the likelihood that Lance Armstrong was actually going to win another TdF.

Lance's winning that series of TdFs was an astonishingly surprising series of events. Even for the biggest doper and greatest responder to doping, it is still astonishing. Lance was competing against a whole series of major dopers--some of whom (like Ullrich) were extremely formidable opponents. Even factoring in Lance's defrauding by dope, betting against Lance was still a reasonable bet.

Look at the incident where Beloki wiped out. Lance's Tour could have ended right there and his insurer could have happily smiled and kept the premium.

And...if I'm an insurance company and I expect that my client is going to dope, then I know that I have a potential lawsuit in reserve to get my money back in the unlikely event that he does win the TdF.

I'm not buying the "poor victim" insurance company. I'm much closer to viewing them as another one of Lance's accomplices who were fortunately able to escape from their entanglement with him without too much financial loss.

Ascribing moral ascendacy to any of the tawdry helpers of Lance Armstrong (like Frankie, Tyler, Floyd, Vaughters, SCA, Nike, the UCI, etc..) is something that the Choir might be seriously into, but to me the whole cluster of them, together, were just another example of the corrupt world of pro cycling.
 
Aug 9, 2014
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Re: Re:

D-Queued said:
thehog said:
...

Correct, it go down as the one of the dumbest deals in history.

Anyone with a ounce of due diligence would have realised betting against Armstrong in that era with the UCI and Ferrari on his team, Lance wasn’t going to lose.

My thought is Armstrong wouldn’t have paid more than the fine levied of $10m. There was no need to. He could have kept appealing the decision until sometime in 2025. SCA had cut their losses at some point.

Like I said, there were no winners or losers in this sham. Armstrong might have come out on top but that’s a big “if’. If he invested the ill gotten gains wisely he may have done well from all this.

It is hard to blame someone for entering a contract where the counter-party was planning to defraud them.

Nonetheless, the biggest win for Lance is that he has thus far escaped true punishment and any short of jail time.

The premeditated nature of the fraud is inescapable. He was actively working with Ferrari, and had been tilting results at least as far back as Thrift Drug.

But, to be fair to SCA, there is a lot more clarity though 20/20 hindsight than there was at the time.

* The Festina scandal had cleaned up the sport.
* EPO was really a cancer drug.
* Doping was something that only East German female swimmers did, and the wall had just come down demonstrating the failure.
* Lance was an American, and therefore untarnished by any sort of Festina-like European activities and was, of course, GI Joe clean by nature. (Not trying to bait or promote any sort of Nationalistic jingoism, just stating the common (mis)perception(s) aka at-the-time conventional wisdom).
* Corruption in American sport wasn't revealed until post the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and Balco (also 2002). Even then, it is still isolated to a very few and very isolated bad apples....
* There was only one guy saying anything, and nobody was listening.
AND, he didn't make that statement until AFTER the SCA contract had been signed. The contract was signed in January, Greg made his statement in July. Moreover, as true as Greg's observation was, he is still pilloried for it fifteen years later. The Lance PR machine remains effective.

So, yes, easy to condemn SCA.

After all, they were duped.

Stupid victim. Shame. Shame. Shame.

Dave.

There is also a bit of probability that SCA thought would work in their favor. They insured a bonus for winning 5 tdfs. Even cyclists who were known to dope had failed to win 5.

Why? Because stuff happens - crashes, injuries, lack of team support and doping being bad for you long term. Hinault probably could have won more if he didn't have knee problems, Merckx if he hadn't injured his back, Ulrich would have won if not for Armstrong, etc... Every year, how many contenders crash out, get sick, don't quite get to peak form, have bad luck with mechanicals, don't have a strong team around them, etc...

Maybe SCA believed Armstrong's denials 'I had cancer, why would I risk doping?' Maybe SCA underestimated the advantage that doping could provide. Maybe they calculated that something would happen - a crash, an injury, other riders getting better, other teams getting better - to keep Armstrong from reaching 5.

In hindsight, SCA was unwise to insure Armstrong. But, at the time, if anyone had said "I bet millions that Armstrong will win 5 (or 7)" people would have thought it was a crazy bet.
 
Re: Official Lance Armstrong Thread: Part 3 (Post-Confession

What planet were you on?

Armstrong was confident of winning. The UCI said he was clean. The commentators of the day said he'd win and keep winning, Armstrong focused solely on one race, had a sponsor which didn't need to him to ride a 100 euro races prior, Ullrich was smashing his Porsche into a street sight whilst drunk, USPS bought all the best riders of the day (Heras et al) and made them domestiques.

It was a terrible bet by SCA and a lazy one. They fell for gamblers fallacy, which is ironic considering their founder was a renowned Bridge player.