Final ruling handed down in Armstrong doping scandal
The last acts of justice finally have been handed down in the Lance Armstrong doping scandal of more than 12 years ago.
On Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, based in Switzerland, issued lifetime bans to Armstrong’s former cycling team director Johan Bruyneel and team doctor Pedro Celaya. It also extended the ban of team trainer Pepe Marti from eight to 15 years.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) described the ruling as the final chapter in the history of the infamous U.S. Postal Service cycling team.
“Bruyneel, Celaya, and Marti pulled out every trick to avoid the truth and continued, even at the hearing and even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to present a false narrative,” USADA chief executive Travis Tygart said in a statement Wednesday. “This is another powerful example that playing by the rules matters and doping is never justified and always inexcusable.”
Their cases stem from 2012, when USADA charged them with doping violations from years earlier. The proceedings then worked through the international sports judicial system, initially leading to a 10-year ban for Bruyneel and eight-year bans for Celaya and Marti in 2014.
But the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) pushed for more, saying it wanted longer sanctions for all three as it appealed their cases to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
The CAS ruling came Wednesday, based in large part on the testimony of seven cyclists and another key witness: team doctor Luis Garcia del Moral, who cooperated with the panel in 2016.
“Mr. Bruyneel was at the top of the pyramid of one of the largest doping programs which ever existed in any sport on the planet,” the CAS panel said in its 104-page report. “There is ample and convincing evidence in the record from the seven riders who testified and from Dr. del Moral that, in that capacity, he not only knew the doping program of every rider on his Tour de France teams from 1999 through 2007 but was also intimately involved in the active implementation of that program, from initiation to oversight.”
This ruling would seem to wrap up the legal and disciplinary fallout from a scandal that has spanned decades and brought down an American icon. Armstrong won the Tour de France seven straight times from 1999 to 2005 but was exposed by USADA in 2012, when it released a massive file of evidence against him that detailed his use of banned drugs and blood transfusions to cheat in races.
Earlier that same year, Armstrong decided not to fight the case and was hit with a lifetime ban as a result. After more than a decade of denials, he finally confessed to doping in January 2013.
Bruyneel previously denied doping allegations and refused to testify in a prior hearing in his case in 2013. In another hearing with CAS after that, he denied responsibility and testified, in effect, that he was “aware of the doping but not involved in it,” according to the CAS panel.
Bruyneel posted a letter on Twitter Wednesday that said “a lot of mistakes have been made in the past.”