What Gives: City of Allen throws Armstrong a bone

" Dear Mr. Barron:

I read your November 2nd article entitled City of Allen throws Armstrong a bone and, to put it mildly, your comments were unamusing and you write as someone who appears to have only minimal knowledge or understanding of the sport of professional cycling. Your remarks come across as someone who has typically preferred baseball, tennis and football while likely considering that cycling is just a bunch of geeks riding bicycles. The tone of your article fairly reeks of your pleasure at poking fun at Lance Armstrong. The city of Allen exercised grossly poor taste in their insulting invitation to Armstrong, only marginally poorer than your own.

Make no mistake, I make no apologies for any cyclist or other athlete, amateur or professional, that uses performance enhancing drugs. I am of the opinion that, at the moment, the largely unthinking herd of sportswriters and various others in the sports community who look upon cycling as that other sport have in relative unison seized upon the recent USADA report submitted to UCI alleging Lance Armstrongs use of performance enhancing substances during his reign in the Tour de France as literal evidence of his guilt. Professional cycling is certainly no stranger to doping then again, just to be clear, neither is American professional football, baseball or a number of other American sports.

The following problems exist with respect to the outcome of the Armstrong case:

The USADA report is based upon testimony of 26 witnesses, some of whom were team members and none of whom have been credibly demonstrated by disinterested parties not to have been in some way coerced or financially or otherwise induced to make the statements used in the report. Honesty and a clear lack of profit motive on the part of any of those who contributed to the report will allow them to clear one of many such hurdles in establishing Armstrongs guilt. To my knowledge, no one has independently investigated USADAs motivations for waiting this long to pursue their allegations against Armstrong nor any possible underlying motivations why they may be doing so.
Armstrong passed over 500 doping tests during his professional cycling career without a single positive result. How does the simple testimony in the USADAs report categorically refute years of hard laboratory evidence that has systematically failed to produce any trace of drug or other substance abuse?
The UCIs past president, Hein Verbruggen, has gone on record as having found no evidence of foul play during Armstrongs years long professional career. The UCI is now headed by Pat McQuaid. The fact that an international organization such as UCI can suddenly and summarily dispense with its own considerable wealth of physical evidence which cleared Armstrong of wrongdoing so as to accept on face value questionable and otherwise unsubstantiated hearsay submitted in 1,000 pages of testimony is suggestive of something less than basic honest truth.
The U.S. federal government investigated Armstrong on the basis of using illegal substances while he was the captain of the USPS team. Their investigation was lengthy and was eventually closed finding no evidence with which to charge Armstrong.
Armstrongs motivations for not pursuing the legal challenge any further have been simplistically presumed by many as patent evidence of his guilt. I have not read of any admission of guilt by Armstrong. In the absence of your having directly mentioned it in your article, I doubt you have either. In other words, your position is little more than recycled uninformed opinion. Presuming Armstrongs guilt omits the equal possibility that the legal battle may have become personally too costly for Armstrong to continue to pursue, that it is taking a toll on his health, that it is presenting problems to his sponsors, that it is presenting problems for the Livestrong foundation or any combination of the above. None of these possibilities are mentioned in your article either.
The USADAs report has not been the subject of any formal hearing nor has it undergone any peer review or other independent scrutiny for errors, omissions or failure of the evidence to cause the reviewers to similarly arrive at the reports given conclusion. Imagine if you were on trial for a criminal offense and all the prosecution had to do was write up the charges based upon supposed eyewitness testimony for you to be convicted of the offense without a trial by jury. This is essentially what has transpired in Armstrongs case.

I dont know if Lance Armstrong is innocent or guilty of using banned performance enhancing substances. I will accept his guilt once he declares it or it is demonstrated by an independent organization as described above and not until then. As some like to say in this country, A man is innocent until proven guilty.

I can say without any probable doubt that Lance Armstrong has likely done more to help cancer victims, personally spent more time with them and raised more funds for cancer research and brought more visibility to the cause than you have. Now is that the truth?

Sincerely,

Steve Tennyson "