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The Official USADA report thread

Tygart says that all the evidence against LA will be available at the USADA site later today. Many of us will not have time to wade through the one thousand or so pages, certainly not any time soon. I suggest that those who do get into it in detail post significant tidbits here. A priority would be evidence not in Tyler’s book, including:

1) statements by witnesses that cover new ground, e.g., evidence of new drugs not available to the rest of the peloton (HemAssist, HBOCs, PFCs), more direct evidence of UCI protection
2) hard evidence of doping (positive tests not previously known about; statistical analysis of blood doping values)
3) paper trail evidence (emails, financial statements, phone records, etc.)
4) evidence that goes beyond doping, pointing towards crimes like fraud that were the focus of the federal investigation.
5) evidence implicating other riders (e.g., there has been speculation that AC could become ensnared in this through his participation with LA in Astana)

Discussion of these and other pieces of evidence can continue on current threads, but I would like to see a thread with direct quotes from the USADA report, hopefully with an indication of where in the report they are from so they can be accessed quickly.
 
i am absolutely gleeful.

gleeful.

this is a great day.

it feels good when justice is finally served.

armstrong's last hope to hold onto the general public is now gone.

he will first be a punchline. and then he will fade into insignificance (the worst possible thing for him).

though many of the statements coming seem to hint at pressure for a renewed fed case...oh, the joy!

tygart has done an absolutely stunning job.
 
Dec 7, 2010
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"I have personally talked with and heard these athletes’ stories and firmly believe that, collectively, these athletes, if forgiven and embraced, have a chance to leave a legacy far greater for the good of the sport than anything they ever did on a bike.

"Lance Armstrong was given the same opportunity to come forward and be part of the solution. He rejected it."
 
This really does look like the final nail in the coffin. Both curious to see just what's there, but also very much hoping the sport can all but forget Armstrong, learn from this recent past and move forward as best as possible.
 
Mar 18, 2009
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What's that lovely, lovely sound echoing through the woods and in the streets? It's the fat lady, and she's singing her ****ing heart out. What a great day. Finally.
 
Aug 6, 2009
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Merckx index said:
Tygart says that all the evidence against LA will be available at the USADA site later today. Many of us will not have time to wade through the one thousand or so pages, certainly not any time soon. I suggest that those who do get into it in detail post significant tidbits here. A priority would be evidence not in Tyler’s book, including:

1) statements by witnesses that cover new ground, e.g., evidence of new drugs not available to the rest of the peloton (HemAssist, HBOCs, PFCs), more direct evidence of UCI protection
2) hard evidence of doping (positive tests not previously known about; statistical analysis of blood doping values)
3) paper trail evidence (emails, financial statements, phone records, etc.)
4) evidence that goes beyond doping, pointing towards crimes like fraud that were the focus of the federal investigation.
5) evidence implicating other riders (e.g., there has been speculation that AC could become ensnared in this through his participation with LA in Astana)

Discussion of these and other pieces of evidence can continue on current threads, but I would like to see a thread with direct quotes from the USADA report, hopefully with an indication of where in the report they are from so they can be accessed quickly.
I'd add 6 (or perhaps 4a) Evidence of overt complicity form the UCI with Armstrongs doping.
 
This is such great news!! Why aren't we allowed to go home for the rest of the day?!! As if anyone [who loves cycling] can concentrate after this kind of breaking news anyway. :D

I still want one of those yellow jerseys that doesn't belong to him anymore. :D
 
Jul 10, 2009
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Big Doopie said:
this is a great day.

it feels good when justice is finally served.
While I agree with the above.

Big Doopie said:
armstrong's last hope to hold onto the general public is now gone.

he will first be a punchline. and then he will fade into insignificance (the worst possible thing for him).

I don't agree with this.

There are just too many non-cycling LA fans who really don't give a **** about the whole thing. They see him as "Lance Armstrong: Cancer Survivor", not "Lance Armstrong: Doped Up Cyclist", and they never will. There are too many yellow wristbands floating around out there for any of this to really make a difference. And THAT is the truly sad part.
 
It's here! Thanks to Wet Trout for the link:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/109619079/Reasoned-Decision

Can't resist making comments as I go along:

pp. 18-19. JV watched LA inject EPO at the 1998 Vuelta. JV, how do you feel that you kept this information to yourself after LA won his first Tour the following year and became a national hero, inspiring cancer victims with the possibility of winning clean?

Btw, just to p. 19 there are > 50 footnotes, most or all of them to affidavits, which themselves are apparently divided into extensive sections.
 
#3

A search of the 202 pages for "funds", "transactions", or "money" does not reveal any evidence of regarding the paper trail of financial transactions.

Kind of disappointing.

Is there another document I'm missing?

edit: see Benotti's post below.

Also, I hope the Mods can keep this thread clear of off-topic discussions/statements
 
May 26, 2010
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Willy_Voet said:
#3

A search of the 202 pages for "funds", "transactions", or "money" does not reveal any evidence of regarding the paper trail of financial transactions.

Kind of disappointing.

Is there another document I'm missing?

Page | 58
Performance record $150,000.00 in payments from Armstrong to Ferrari in 2002

Page | 60
Dr. Michele Ferrari continued to work with Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie,Christian Vande Velde and others in 2003.
305
While Johan Bruyneel continued as team director in 2003, and Luis Garcia del Moral continued as the principal team doctor, accounting recordsfor Dr. Ferrari’s Swiss company record $475,000.00 in payments from Armstrong to Ferrari
 
Jun 15, 2009
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The Unthinkable Day. I still can´t believe it. Can´t even find the right words to describe my feelings. I think i am in shock. I go to bed now, wake up tomorrow and see if this is real.

:)
 
Benotti69 said:
Page | 58
Performance record $150,000.00 in payments from Armstrong to Ferrari in 2002

Page | 60
Dr. Michele Ferrari continued to work with Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie,Christian Vande Velde and others in 2003.
305
While Johan Bruyneel continued as team director in 2003, and Luis Garcia del Moral continued as the principal team doctor, accounting recordsfor Dr. Ferrari’s Swiss company record $475,000.00 in payments from Armstrong to Ferrari

Thanks...didn't search for "payment" :eek:

edit: Payments/communication to/with Ferrari continued into 2009.

evidence (page 85): On September 1, 2009, Stefano writes, “Schumi asked me if you could process the payment (25.000 EUR) for the season as agreed last March. You can forward the payment when’s best for you to my account in MC [Monte Carlo].”428 To which Armstrong responds, “Can I pay it in cash when I see you?”429

Fabiani lies: (page 86)

"The foregoing examples from 2009 and 2010 constitute only a small sample of the communications (including emails, meetings and phone calls) which occurred between Armstrong and Michele Ferrari before April 15, 2010, when Mark Fabiani, acting on behalf of Lance Armstrong, issued his unambiguous denial of a professional relationship between Armstrong and Ferrari and said that Armstrong and Ferrari had not seen each other in a year. Fabiani’s statement on behalf of Armstrong was a lie. Indeed, Armstrong’s professional relationship with Ferrari continued even into preparation for Armstrong’s new career in triathlon."
 
I have gone through the entire document, skipping through some of the last parts that reiterate the court cases. It’s much as I thought it would be. The witness testimony is extremely comprehensive and damning. Among some of the highlights:

Betsy Andreu observed a delivery from Marti to Armstrong following a dinner at the Villa d’Este Restaurant in Nice in 1999. The dinner involved Lance and Kristin Armstrong,Betsy Andreu, Kevin Livingston and his fiancé, and Pepe and his girlfriend.
Dinner was held later than usual. The explanation Andreu was given was that dinner was so late because the purpose of Pepe’s attendance in Nice was to bring EPO to Lance, and it was safer to cross the border at night. After the dinner the Armstrongs took Andreu home. Andreu saw Pepe give Lance Armstrong a brown paper bag and as Armstrong opened the car door for Andreu he smiled, held up the bag and commented, “liquid gold.”
(p. 28, bottom numbering system)

GH warns LA by text that testers are coming, right after LA told GH he took testosterone, so LA dropped out of the race. (39-40)

Hincapie was well aware that Armstrong used blood doping in every Tour de France from 2001through 2005.
(64)

Not only did Armstrong encourage riders to work with Ferrari, but, as Christian Vande Velde testified in Section IV.B.5.e., in 2002, Armstrong played the enforcer for Ferrari’s doping advice. When Armstrong learned that Vande Velde was not strictly adhering to the doping regimen prescribed by Ferrari (including regular use of EPO and testosterone), Armstrong came down hard on Vande Velde in a meeting involving Armstrong, Vande Velde and Ferrari inArmstrong’s Girona, Spain apartment, following the 2002 Tour de France.Armstrong made it very clear to Vande Velde that if he did not shape up and conform to Ferrari’s doping program that Vande Velde would soon be kicked off the team.Vande Velde got the message and immediately stepped up his Ferrari-developed doping program
(95)

Scene where Zabriskie, who took up racing to get away from the memories of his drug-addicted father, was essentially forced to dope by JB. He said he returned to his room later and cried (112-14)

Wrt some other issues:

1) hard science: there is nothing about new positives. There is nothing about other drugs, such as HemAssist. There is nothing new about the TdS samples, other than an insistence that they would have been definitely positive under today’s criteria. Wrt the blood values, here is the key passage:

When Prof. Gore compared the suppressed reticulocyte percentage in Armstrong’s 2009 and 2010 Tour de France samples to the reticulocyte percentage in his other samples, Prof. Gore concluded that the approximate likelihood of Armstrong’s seven suppressed reticulocyte values during the 2009 and 2010 Tours de France occurring naturally was less thanone in a million
(p. 140; numbering system on bottom of page)

I’m not sure, but if this means that Gore subjected the values to the software used in the passport system, it would definitely have raised a red flag and been sent to an expert panel. If this is the case, USADA should try to find out if the data were in fact sent to a panel, and if so, why the panel did not conclude doping. OTOH, Gore’s analysis may not be based on the software. If that is the case, why not? That is the relevant analysis to use here.

On the same subject, I found it very interesting that LA told Vaughters he learned from Conconi how the EPO test worked (p. 51). Also:

Vaughters testified that Armstrong had an awareness of the aspects of the molecular structure of the EPO product Aranesp that would make that product easy to detect. Vaughters’ conversation with Armstrong on these topics preceded the positive drug tests for Aranesp (also known as Dynepo) involving several athletes at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games
(96-7)

This contrasts sharply with LA’s public statement in 2005, on the Larry King show, pretending he didn’t even know if EPO was tested in blood or urine. Likewise, he pretended he knew nothing about actovegin, when in fact the entire team was using it.

It should be kept in mind that Armstrong’s and the team’s cover up concerning Actovegin was made in response to an official French law enforcement investigation. The fact that Armstrong and team officials were willing to make false statements in the course of a law enforcement investigation regarding doping directly bears on evaluation of the credibility of their statements regarding the use of other products. In other words, if Lance Armstrong was willing to lie about Actovegin—and he clearly did lie about Actovegin— there is little reason to believe that Armstrong would not be willing to lie about other products and with regard to other topics.
(p. 45)

A discussion of Ferrari’s notational system:

Multiple handwritten training plans for Kevin Livingston were found in Dr. Ferrari’sf iles during a search of his residence in the first investigation of Dr. Ferrari. The cyclists who have worked with Dr. Ferrari describe handwritten training plans prepared by Dr. Ferrari, and have testified that he placed notations on their plans to indicate the dates on which they were supposed to use performance enhancing drugs. Multiple asterisks are an evident feature on all of the training plans in the file for Kevin Livingston. Another feature on one of the plans in the file is a series of two dots side by side immediately prior to the workout description on three consecutive days and a single dot on the fourth day.


2) paper trails:

The bank records related to Ferrari’s Swiss company reflect that on July 2, 2004, the day before the 2004 Tour de France, Ferrari’s company was wired $100,000.00 from Lance Armstrong’s account in the United States.
(p. 69)

On March 29, 2005, Armstrong wired Ferrari one hundred thousand dollars($100,000.00) to the Swiss account of Health & Performance. Also in March 2005,Armstrong attended a training camp with Dr. Ferrari on the island of Tenerife. Armstrong invited Levi Leipheimer to Tenerife and introduced Leipheimer to Ferrari.
Leipheimer became a client of Ferrari at this time and immediately began receiving doping advice from Dr. Ferrari.
(p. 78)

This is followed by a discussion of how Stapleton had to know this at the SCA hearing, and thus lied when he said LA had no relationship with Ferrari, as did Fabiani much later.

Bill Stapleton is the same man who went into corporate boardrooms around America seeking sponsor dollars, looked top executives in the eye and told them Lance Armstrong was not doping. These were not new issues, and if anyone knew what was going on between Armstrong and Ferrari it was Stapleton
(79)

as made clear by the statements of both Mr. Armstrong and his agent at their depositions, Mr. Armstrong engaged in a carefully calculated effort to continue his sporting fraud and cover up his relationship with Ferrari
(81)

On September 1, 2009, Stefano writes, “Schumi asked me if you could process the payment (25.000 EUR) for the season as agreed last March. You can forward the payment when’s best for you to my account in MC [Monte Carlo].”To which Armstrong responds, “Can I pay it in cash when I see you?”
(p. 85)

The foregoing examples from 2009 and 2010 constitute only a small sample of the communications (including emails, meetings and phone calls) which occurred between Armstrong and Michele Ferrari before April 15, 2010, when Mark Fabiani, acting on behalf of Lance Armstrong, issued his unambiguous denial of a professional relationship between Armstrong and Ferrari and said that Armstrong and Ferrari had not seen each other in a year. Fabiani’s statement on behalf of Armstrong was a lie.
(86)

Also this:

Much more than “occasional advice on training” is also reflected in payments made by Armstrong to a Swiss company controlled by Dr. Ferrari known as “Health & Performance SA.”Included among the records for this company is an invoice to Lance Armstrong for “Training and osteopath consulting.” Bank statements and corporate accounting records for the company document payments from Armstrong totaling more than a million dollars
(p. 99)

And on p. 107, there is a chart summarizing La’s payments to Ferrari

In 2009 Levi Leipheimer asked Armstrong whether he was still working with “Schumi.”Armstrong said that he was, “through a middle person.” Through the assistance of Italian authorities USADA has discovered that this middle person was Ferrari’s son, Stefano Ferrari, who regularly forwarded to Armstrong Michele’s training plans for Armstrong. Many of these communications took place via email, and the emails obtained by USADA plainly reflect that Stefano Ferrari merely served as a conduit for his father’s training advice. The emails also indicate that from time to time Armstrong communicated directly with Dr. Ferrari, including, as noted above, participating in meetings with him
(83)

This is followed by transcripts of emails between LA and Stefano F. discussing “Schumi”

3) Intimidation. In addition to the incidents the Clinic is aware of, there is discussion of what appears to be intimidation of Levi and his wife (150-151)
 
Aug 27, 2012
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UCI complicity? Looks like it's been carefully scrubbed out...

I understand USADA now holds UCI over the barrel, as they clearly have the trump card up their sleeve. But we need this card played at some stage after the 21 days.

If Pat has any sense he resigns now, paves the way, then the new administration can get on with the truth and reconciliation process. And use the "full file" to clean up cycling and truly turn the corner.

F**k LA, he'll be yesterday's news real quick. We need cycling cleaned up...