Lance Armstrong is back, but he should be banned from any association with cycling

Sydney Morning Herald

04-07-2025

Nonetheless, that indelible image of Armstrong kickin' back in his study, seven framed yellow jerseys still hanging on the wall, years after his name was stricken from the record books. Defiance, in the face of certainty and reason.
Why is any of this relevant in 2025? Pogačar was a seven-year-old the last time Armstrong stood victorious, cloaked in yellow on the Champs-Élysées. Because Armstrong is back (if indeed he ever went away).
Not as a cyclist. Not as a coach or a team owner. But as a sponsor. As someone who wants to hitch his trailer to the commerciality of pro cycling. Armstrong these days has shape-shifted to becoming a podcaster. His podcast, THEMOVE, on professional cycling, triathlon and other endurance sports, fairly kills it. Apparently.
One of Armstrong's joint venturers on this new media is George Hincapie. A former teammate of Armstrong's, whose name appears not less than 287 times in USADA's reasoned decision concerning Armstrong (I counted), because Hincapie's sworn testimony, including regarding his own use of prohibited substances, was one of the evidentiary planks on which Armstrong was banned for life.
Hincapie had retired by August 2012. For his part, he nonetheless was suspended for six months in late 2012 for his misconduct. His personal results achieved in past Tours de France while he was doping were expunged.
But now, in addition to being a podcaster, Hincapie is the owner of Modern Adventure Pro Cycling. A new US team with the stated aim of eventually, but within a short timeframe, obtaining a first division pro licence from cycling's international federation, the UCI. That licence would in turn permit Modern Adventure's entry to pro cycling's greatest single-day races and grand tours. The Tour de France included.
The question then becomes one of how can this be allowed to happen? How could Armstrong's podcast insignia have the potential to be splashed across the livery of a pro cycling team that might one day compete on the sport's biggest stage?
USADA's sanction of a period of lifetime ineligibility and disqualification of all competitive results that Armstrong achieved, since 1998, remains in force. No appeal has shifted that life sentence.
Ineligibility by definition in anti-doping terms means that a person so sanctioned is barred, on account of their anti-doping rule violations, for a specified period of time from participating in any competition or other activity.
If Armstrong had been sanctioned for his misconduct not as an athlete but as a coach, manager or other non-athlete personnel, his lifetime ban would be caught by the prohibited association rules appearing in the WADA Code. Those make it a separate offence for an athlete to continue to associate with a coach, for example, who is serving a ban for doping.
But because Armstrong was sanctioned as an athlete, and not a coach, those prohibited association rules don't apply. Which is an endpoint that highlights a glaring gap in WADA's rules.
USADA's reasoned decision is constructed on the foundation of witness statements and affidavits received from more than two dozen fellow professional cyclists and non-riding staff from Armstrong's US Postal team. Fairly put, Armstrong wasn't merely a doper. If he were, he'd not have been banned for life.
Instead, Armstrong was a conniving standover merchant who demanded not only that his misdeeds be smothered, but that many other cyclists faithfully commit to an orchestrated and systemic doping program under a code of silence – otherwise they would be cut from his team.
USADA's reasoned decision records that Armstrong 'acted with the help of a small army of enablers, including doping doctors, drug smugglers, and others within and outside the sport and on his team'.
What the USADA determination says next though, is more telling: 'the evidence is also clear that Armstrong had ultimate control over not only his own personal drug use, which was extensive, but also over the doping culture of his team. Final responsibility for decisions to hire and retain a director, doctors and other staff committed to running a team-wide doping program ultimately flowed to him.'
USADA goes on, 'His goal led him to depend on EPO [Erythropoietin; a natural hormone produced by the kidney that stimulates the production of red blood cells], testosterone and blood transfusions but also, more ruthlessly, to expect and to require that his teammates would likewise use drugs to support his goals if not their own.
'The evidence is overwhelming that Lance Armstrong did not just use performance-enhancing drugs, he supplied them to his teammates … [and] he also required that they adhere to the doping program outlined for them or be replaced.'
Armstrong wasn't just a menacing coach exercising power over trusting, young and inexperienced athletes susceptible to subtle manipulation. If he were, the prohibited association provisions of the WADA Code would see to it that Armstrong couldn't sponsor a pro cycling team.
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Armstrong was much worse. He strong-armed and bullied with impunity. He demanded of others that they also must break all the rules, lest he'd smash their career to smithereens. He exercised greater power over his fellow athletes than team principals, coaches and doctors ever could on their own.
You could forgive Armstrong for his own doping: he's hardly Robinson Crusoe after all. What can't however, be forgotten is the malevolent intent; the single-minded viciousness and the destructive consequences inflicted by him, on countless others caught in his orbit.
Whether you can forgive Armstrong for all that is one thing. It's quite another though, to countenance the idea that he somehow be a sponsor of anyone's future success.