Lance has been laying pretty low since this whole USADA file was turned over to the UCI. Today I read this article at Cyclingnews.com that said that Lance has resigned completely from the LiveStrong board of directors.
I haven’t been actively following the activities of Lance recently unless he happened to be somewhere I was, like in San Diego a month or so ago. I read somewhere he was hanging out in Hawaii, but I have no idea why that was.
Anyway, Lance was right in resigning from the LiveStrong board if he was worried about the survival of LiveStrong, which obviously he was. Now that Nike, Oakley, Trek (to some degree), Michelob Lite, and nearly all his other sponsors have pulled the plug, I wonder if Lance had previously thought the carnage would be this severe?
I read somewhere that Lance would be losing about 12 million yearly from loss of speaking engagements. The article said that he receives about $200,000 per engagement. I found a place where it is only $100,000 a talk. I wonder if he’s even available now?
Nearly all the Spanish riders seem to support Lance. I wonder what they owe him. And of course we have the idiotic interview with Benoit Joachim saying that he never doped, but now regrets it, and never “saw” organized doping on the Postal Service Team. Then he goes on to contradict himself by saying, “Doping was not imposed by the team. Every rider had his own choice and I refused.” What a moron.
I have to admit that I think Lance is getting a bad rap in one respect. I don’t think he was the drug lord that he is being made out to be by the media and some of his former team mates. There were/are hundreds of riders taking drugs. And Postal wasn’t the only organized team in this respect. Everyone was doing it, Lance was just doing it much better.
Anyway, it is going to be very interesting how history treats this whole affair. And how it is going to play out though out the years. I didn’t really get any surprised here. Americans are very forgiving in the long run. Ultimately, I believe that is how this is going to be for Lance and we’ll see a lot more of him in the future.
Here are some photos I found he posted recently at his twitter account. He seems to be same old same old.
Here is a spin on Lance and his jersey collection showcase.
Agree on the fact that he seems to be the whipping boy on the doping deal…..I think if we looked into the ranks of any other team from the last decade, we would see the same things. I DO think that paying the UCI money though is the tipping point….of course they are the ones that took the $$. I hope that he confesses and spills the beans on the corruption of the UCI, but I think he is going to take his ‘I never tested positive’ to the grave.
Hasn’t it been well established that Benoit Joachim is rider # 20 ? The one that hid the drugs and paraphernalia in the woods. More than likely he did dope but didn’t respond to it. Good excuse for a lousy career. It’s well known that all of the waffle shops in Luxembourg sprinkle nandrolone on top of the whip creme and nutella.
He is the whipping boy only in that he won the TdF seven times fraudulently – who do you think USADA will go after – domestiques?
Michelob ultra and michelob light is not spelled lite. 🙂 sorry, anhueser Busch guy here.
i imagine he’s hanging out in hawaii cause he can afford to…do you need to know the reason why he’s hanging there?????
wish that man would just come out and admit he took drugs like every pro since the 60’s… badass domistique tough man sean yeates. guy with all the tough guy sayings.. didnt this wuss just quit a cush job cause he was afraid of his team finding out about his past?? wuss. matty white, eddy merckx, johan m vino, freddy m, sean kelly, fuck, EVERYBODY. and the ones that didnt get caught still cheated….just wish they would put every rider on a lie detector since the eddy merckx era.. BET EVERYONE WHO WAS PRO GET CAUGHT LYING….. i hate cheats, but i hate it more when these clowns who were asked 10000 times, denied it, now all of a sudden, these last few months, 100 guys that never ever took drugs, and passed the tests, are coming clean. wussies..
There have been a number of supplements contaminated with banned substances including nandrolone–hey, that’s why certain supplements worked–so I’ll give Joachim a sly wink and the benefit of the doubt on that one. Best to just lay off the supplements, I suppose, Joachim.
I found Joachim’s candid admission that in hindsight he would have doped amusing but his position has a perverse logic to it. Hincapie, Vande Velde, and Leipheimer all did well for themselves and they get slapped on the wrist. Big George rides his bike off into the sunset–crocodile tears all around. They all deserved a substantial penalty. They did real economic injury to many riders.
Of course, the real problem was/is the UCI and the culture of impunity that really started rolling with 1997’s 50% hematocrit rule. Once the UCI set a number and with no test for synthetic EPO riders were going to get as close to that figure as they could, and even when they exceeded the limit suspension was only for the time one was above 50%. In 1997 the only real disincentives to use synthetic EPO were fear of needles and lack of funds to pay for the drug. The policy guaranteed more doping was going to happen.
He won’t be gone for long. He could have retired and stayed retired like a Miguel Indurain but he couldn’t stay away.
He can’t stay away from trouble for very long. He’ll be back. Hopefully it’ll be a white collar felony bringing Wiesel down too.
He may not be profiting from Livestrong.org, but I’m guessing he’s still making money off livestrong.com, which has always been a for-profit website. And I’m guessing he has the livestrong name trademarked so that he gets money off the use of that name (i.e., from Nike’s use of that logo on their clothing–that way they can drop him but still pay him).
Tyler Hamilton was clearly on the doping program before Lance joined US Postal, as was George Hincapie, so, yeah, it’s hard to believe that Lance was the drug kingpin. Still, he was deep in it and probably encouraged it. The Spaniards just have a different opinion about doping–it isn’t cheating to them. They have a deluded sense of right and wrong.
As for Lance’s no-longer-existent speaking engagements, I’m thinking someone named Steve Tilford could give a cut-rate deal to all of those organizations that had booked Lance. I think $50,000 would seem like a bargain to them. Plus we all know they’d be entertained.
Well ,Lance has been hanging in Hawaii cause he owns a home on the Big Island. I think the pic of the living room jerseys “just hanging” was a big FU to the world. Seems to be working rather well. I just wonder if he keeps flying the G4 or gets a smaller rig. Be interesting so see how long Nike and Trek stay on board with the big Livestrong contributions since he now does not wear any of their stuff or ride their bikes any more. Seems the foundation needs them more than Nike or Trek needs him.
Lance has lost some symbolic prize/endorsement money, but he’s still worth quite a lot if I remember, over 100 million.
Now I want to see some of the top Gold medalist swimmers get busted. There were some pretty telling performances this year in woman’s swimming. They still seem to have this ‘sour grapes’ explanation for doping scrutiny, interesting to see if swimming/track/field/distance running starts to get some scandals seen as how those sports are completely dominated by an extremely small group of rich pros who probably dope, whereas there’s numerous low paid poor athletes directly behind them.