Lance Armstrong case: 'He deserves to be forgotten,' says UCI President

Although Lance Armstrong was finally and definitively cast out of his sport and stripped off his seven Tour de France titles on Monday, the cycling world will have to wait a while longer to discover whether or not new winners will be declared for the races held between 1999 and 2005.
Pat McQuaid, the president of the UCI, the International Cycling Union, announced at a press conference in Geneva on Monday that the governing body has accepted the verdict of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada), which concluded last week that Armstrong and his US Postal and Discovery Channel teams had colluded in what it called "the biggest doping conspiracy in the history of sport".
The UCI will not be taking an appeal against Usada's 1,000-page "reasoned decision" to the court of arbitration for sport, with McQuaid making it clear that he would now like to erase the former seven-times champion from cycling's history.
"Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling," McQuaid declared. "He deserves to be forgotten."
On Friday his management committee will meet to decide whether the runners-up in those seven Tours will be retrospectively handed a winner's yellow jersey, or whether the top step of the podium will be left blank in the record books, with an accompanying asterisk. The complication of elevating riders from second and third places is that so many of them – the likes of Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso – have subsequently been implicated in one or more of the various doping scandals that have brought the reputation of the sport to its lowest point at a time, paradoxically, when cycling as a sport and a recreation is enjoying a resurgence of popularity.
The committee will also discuss whether or not Armstrong will be made to refund his Tour prize money. Traditionally the winner's cheque is divided between all nine riders of his team; since Usada's case against Armstrong implicates his colleagues, then a wholesale recovery of the money would seem to be justified.
McQuaid also announced that the UCI will be supporting Usada's decision to hand reduced six-month suspensions to all the currently active riders who admitted doping as part of Armstrong's Tour campaigns, and on whose evidence the case depended.
McQuaid denounced as "absolutely untrue" the claims made by Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, two of Armstrong's former team-mates, that their team leader had given more than $100,000 to the UCI in order to persuade them to cover up an alleged positive test for EPO at the 2001 Tour de Suisse. The money was said to have been used to buy a blood analysis machine to increase the effectiveness of the UCI's dope testing programme.
While admitting that Armstrong had indeed made two donations, one of $25,000 in 2002 and another of $100,000 promised in 2005 and paid in 2007, McQuaid said that any suggestion of a cover-up was "absolutely untrue". In similar circumstances, he said, he would accept further donations from riders.
Friday's committee meeting will also consider the possibility of setting up some sort of truth and reconciliation process on the lines of that utilised by the South African government in the wake of apartheid, including the notion of an amnesty. "The trouble is that amnesty means different things in different languages," Philippe Verbiest, the UCI's legal advisor, said on Monday. "It's not something that you can figure out in one day."
The idea of an amnesty does not, however, appear to extend to journalists. McQuaid confirmed that he and Hein Verbruggen, fromer UCI president, will be continuing their legal action for defamation against the Irish journalist and former rider Paul Kimmage, one of a handful of reporters who showed the persistence and courage to pursue the Armstrong story through years of veiled and explicit threats.
"It's a straight defamation case," McQuaid said. "He called us corrupt." Kimmage's supporters have raised a significant sum of money to help with his defence.