Why Lance Armstrong’s Teammates Snitched
Why Lance Armstrong’s Teammates Snitched -
Much of the commentary following today’s release of damning testimony against bike racer Lance Armstrong shows that the case turned on 11 former associates, who admitted to doping themselves. Why did they do that?
It’s now clear that without the other riders, there wasn’t a case. Despite more than a decade of blood tests and urine samples, little scientific or quantitative data existed to wave at Armstrong. What little there is, doesn’t prove the case.
A few weeks ago in this space we looked at one possible number. We asked whether Armstrong’s recorded times for a famous mountain stage of the Tour de France, the Alpe d’Huez, might be a clue to his guilt or innocence. We concluded (and readers insisted in the comments, often angrily) that the case was still circumstantial at best, even considering what we knew about Armstrong’s actual velocity on a bicycle—which was very, very, very fast.
Still, because cycling isn’t a statistically oriented sport (it doesn’t have speed records as does track and field or swimming) the case against Armstrong would be legal, not scientific, our exercise concluded.