A tale of two Armstrongs

“Although the court was sym­pa­thetic to my con­cerns and rec­og­nized the many impro­pri­eties and defi­cien­cies in USADA’s motives, its con­duct, and its process, the court ulti­mately decided that it could not intervene.”

— Lance Armstrong

“Mys­tery cre­ates won­der and won­der is the basis of man’s desire to understand.”

— Neil Armstrong

I’m not a big fan of Nico­las Cage’s act­ing. I’m sure he’s a won­der­ful guy, but I just don’t like his movies. I was greatly sur­prised, there­fore, that he won an Acad­emy Award in 1996 and was nom­i­nated for another in 2003 and he’s also won a Golden Globe award and a Screen Actor’s Guild award.

Per­haps, then, I should go to work next week and draft a very offi­cial look­ing court order that pro­claims that, by the power vested in me by the State of Ohio, County of Delaware, I have con­cluded that he has vio­lated the rules of good act­ing and is there­fore stripped of all awards that he has won since 1996. Surely (sar­casm alert), if I did so, the major news net­works would all report that those awards had been legit­i­mately taken away from him, wouldn’t they?

If you’re fairly cer­tain that they wouldn’t, then you should be sur­prised at what those same news ser­vices reported last week in ref­er­ence to Lance Arm­strong, the cyclist who used to be able to claim that he had won seven Tour de Frances and an Olympic medal before the United States Anti-Doping Agency stripped him of those titles last week. The prob­lem? As it turns out, the USADA’s author­ity to make that claim is about as murky as my author­ity to rip the Oscar out of Nic Cage’s hands. What hap­pened last week is also a bril­liant exam­ple of a judge show­ing restraint and yet mak­ing his point at the same time.

Arm­strong had sued the USADA to try to stop what he thought was an unfair and ille­gal inves­ti­ga­tion of alle­ga­tions that he had used banned sub­stances. The case came before U.S. Dis­trict Judge Sam Sparks. Ulti­mately, Sparks con­cluded that the U.S. Dis­trict Court sim­ply didn’t have juris­dic­tion over the case because the par­ties had pre­vi­ously agreed to resolve them through arbi­tra­tion. But Sparks used the bully pul­pit of his writ­ten deci­sion to make his point that the entire USADA inves­ti­ga­tion smelled rot­ten. After not­ing that he would dis­miss the case, Sparks wrote that he was con­cerned that the USADA, “has tar­geted Arm­strong for pros­e­cu­tion many years after the alleged dop­ing vio­la­tions occurred,” and that it was, “dif­fi­cult to avoid the con­clu­sion that USADA is moti­vated more by pol­i­tics and a desire for media atten­tion that faith­ful adher­ence to its obligations.”

When Arm­strong announced that he would no longer con­test the USADA’s alle­ga­tions, the agency issued a state­ment that said that as a result of that deci­sion, “Mr. Arm­strong will be dis­qual­i­fied from any and all com­pet­i­tive results obtained on and sub­se­quent to Aug. 1, 1998, includ­ing for­fei­ture of any medals, titles, win­nings, fin­ishes, points and prizes.” It’s a won­der­fully final state­ment — his titles and awards are wiped away, end of story. And indeed, all major media out­lets picked up on this seem­ingly final state­ment from a very offi­cial sound­ing orga­ni­za­tion and reported that Armstrong’s Tour titles were no more.

In so doing, they failed in their respon­si­bil­ity to look into what the actual effect of the USADA state­ment was. That’s because the USADA has lim­ited and unclear author­ity. It doesn’t con­trol the award­ing or removal of Olympic medals — the IOC does that. It doesn’t award Tour de France titles either — that respon­si­bil­ity goes to the Inter­na­tional Cycling Union (UCI). And the UCI has not yet said that it feels com­pelled to com­ply with the USADA find­ings. Sim­i­larly, the IOC has taken no action yet to strip Arm­strong of his Olympic medal.

In short, despite the report­ing on the issue, Armstrong’s seven Tour titles and his Olympic medal have not yet been taken away but rather the USADA has instead rec­om­mended to the UCI and the IOC that they make those offi­cial removals. And while Arm­strong has announced that he will not fight the USADA inves­ti­ga­tion, he could still ini­ti­ate legal action fight­ing USADA’s attempts to force the IOC and UCI to go along with their find­ings. The USADA may be wear­ing the yel­low jer­sey at the moment, but the race is not yet over.

The world lost its mod­ern day Christo­pher Colum­bus this week with the death of Ohioan Neil Arm­strong. While Armstrong’s ‘One small step’ is per­haps the most famous quote of the 20th Cen­tury, he was an incred­i­bly pri­vate man. That desire to main­tain his pri­vacy led to a sig­nif­i­cant law­suit between Arm­strong and Hall­mark, which had attempted to use Armstrong’s name and voice with­out his per­mis­sion in a 1994 Christ­mas ornament.

The pri­vacy suit was set­tled out of court for a “sub­stan­tial” but undis­closed amount of money, which Arm­strong donated to his alma mater, Pur­due Uni­ver­sity. Pur­due then con­structed the Neil Arm­strong Hall of Engi­neer­ing. Arm­strong showed us that there are still untold fron­tiers to con­quer, we sim­ply need to look sky­ward to find them.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Aug 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.