Armstrong and Roving Bands of the Morally Outraged

An American nonprofit body called the USADA is taking Lance Armstrong's French medals away. They successfully blocked Armstrong's complaints in an American court. Will the USADA now send their police to pick the medals up?

Armstrong's original lawsuit challenged the USADA's right to bring any judgment against him and criticized the USADA for ignoring "500 to 600" drug tests they say Armstrong had passed. His attorneys said the USADA was, instead, bringing a case based on witness testimony, known as "non-analytical positive testing."

Non-analytical positive testing.

Armstrong has said the agency violates his constitutional rights to due process. USADA officials say their process is fair and widely recognized by sports agencies across the globe.

That is apparently not entirely true.

In fact, the latest charges from USADA has spawned a turf war between competing sports agencies. The Switzerland-based International Cycling Union said USADA did not have jurisdiction to pursue the case and urged the American agency to turn over evidence to them to determine if an investigation should proceed. On the other hand, the World Anti-Doping Agency supported USADA's claims of jurisdiction. Any similarity     between these and the jurisdictional disputes of FBI and the CIA are coincidental; the FBI and the CIA are not self-appointed.

The International Cycling Union is the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the world governing body for sports cycling that oversees international competitive cycling events, issues licenses, enforces rules--particularly doping--classifies races and manages the points ranking system across mountain, road and track biking for both men and women, amateur and professional. It also oversees world championships.

The World Anti-Doping Agency was created in 1999 by the International Olympic Committee after it stole the march on the other nonprofits and held the world's first World Conference on Doping in Sports (in Lausanne, of course).

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) itself  is the national anti-doping organization for the Olympic movement in the United States. It is non-profit (of course) and non-governmental (it receives $10 million a year from the U.S.).

The particulars of the case are not so important (although arson, child molestation and armed robbery have shorter statutes of limitation than many of the charges against him.) Armstrong's personal achievements far outstrip his athletic ones. For this reason he is held in some considerable regard and, consequently,  self-appointed disciplinary agencies should be on firm footing when dealing with him. Otherwise they run the risk of appearing to be scolding, free-booting, blue-nose self-righteous clerics looking for a witch to dunk and retrieving awards they did not give--reminiscent of those constantly outraged groups that periodically put George Bush on trial in abstentia in college classrooms during lunch.

Here is a statement from Armstrong's site: http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance-armstongs-statement-of-august-23-2012