UCI Strips Lance Armstrong Of Tour de France Titles

The International Cycling Union says it will not appeal the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s ruling to ban Lance Armstrong from Olympic sports for life and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping.

The UCI said it has completed its review of USADA’s 'Reasoned Decision' and appendices in the case against Lance Armstrong.

The UCI said it has considered the main issues of jurisdiction, the statute of limitation the evidence gathered by USADA and the sanction imposed upon Mr Armstrong.

"The UCI confirms that it will not appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and that it will recognise the sanction that USADA has imposed," it said in a statement.

The USADA decision explains how riders on the USPS Team showed no inclination to share the full extent of what they knew until they were subpoenaed or called by federal investigators and that their only reason for telling the truth is because the law required them to do so.

"These riders have confronted their past and told their stories. Their accounts of their past provide a shocking insight into the USPS Team where the expression to ‘win at all costs’ was redefined in terms of deceit, intimidation, coercion and evasion.

"Their testimony confirms that the anti-doping infrastructure that existed at that time was, by itself, insufficient and inadequate to detect the practices taking place within the team. The UCI has always been the first international sporting federation to embrace new developments in the fight against doping and it regrets that the anti-doping infrastructure that exists today was not available at that time so as to render such evasion impossible."

Many of the USPS Team riders have already acknowledged that the culture of cycling has now changed and that young riders today are no longer confronted with the same choices to use performance enhancing drugs.

The UCI says it has recognized the problem of doping within the sport and taken significant steps to confront the problem and to clean up cycling.

"Today’s riders are subject to the most innovative and effective anti-doping procedures and regulations in sport. Cycling has been a pioneer in the fight against doping in sport under the leadership of the UCI and this role has been recognised by WADA."

The UCI tested Tyler Hamilton 40 times and found him positive. It tested Floyd Landis 46 times and found him positive as the winner of the Tour de France. The list of riders that it has found positive does not end there.

The UCI has tested Lance Armstrong 218 times. If Lance Armstrong was able to beat the system then the responsibility for addressing that rests not only with the UCI but also with WADA and all of the other anti-doping agencies who accepted the results.

The UCI supports WADA’s decision to create a working group to examine 'The Ineffectiveness of the Fight Against Doping in Sport' and proposes that it commence its work by examining the effectiveness of the system in place to detect the use of performance enhancing substances in cycling.

The UCI says it is committed to reviewing the environment upon which the sport operates in order to ensure that something like this never happens again.

It has convened a special meeting of its Management Committee on Friday, October 26th to begin the process of examining the existing structures and introducing changes to safeguard the future of cycling.