Who is Lance Armstrong?
Lance Armstrong is a former professional road racing cyclist who has won many international cycling competitions. His career was halted by testicular cancer, but Armstrong returned to Tour de France races beginning in 1999 by winning a record seven consecutive times. Later he was stripped of those titles in the year 2012 due to evidence of using the banned performance-enhancing drug. In 2013 Lance admitted that he took illegal drugs as a professional athlete throughout his cycling career, following years of denials.
Early years of Armstrong
Lance Armstrong was born on September 18, 1971, in Plano, Texas, and was raised by his mother, Linda, in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. Armstrong was athletic from an early age. At the age of 10, he began running and swimming, and at 13 took up competitive cycling and triathlons. At 16, he became a professional triathlete and he was the national sprint-course triathlon champion in 1989 and 1990.
During his senior year of high school, he was invited by the U.S. Olympic development team to give him training at Colorado Springs, Colorado. Armstrong left high school temporarily to do so, but later took private classes and received his high school diploma in 1989. In 1990, he became the U.S. national amateur champion and defeated many professional cyclists to win the First Union Grand Prix and the Thrift Drug Classic.
After the 1992 Olympics, Armstrong turned professional immediately joining the Motorola cycling team In 1993, Aarmsstrron went on winning three cycling championships “Triple Crown”—the Thrift Drug Classic, the Kmart West Virginia Classic, and the U.S. Professional Championship named the CoreStates Race.
In August 1993, at the age of 21 Armstrong as the leader of the Motorola team, won his most important race the World Road Race Championship in Oslo, Norway, an event covering 161 miles a day overcoming the difficult conditions.
In 1996, Armstrong was chosen for the Olympic team in Atlanta, Georgia. He finished sixth in the time trials and was placed 12th in the road race. Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005 after recovering from testicular cancer.
Battling with cancer
In October 1996, came the shocking news that Armstrong had been diagnosed with testicular cancer. The tumors had spread to his abdomen, lungs, and lymph nodes. After having a testicle removed, and beginning aggressive chemotherapy, doctors gave him a 65 to 85 percent chance of survival. Fortunately, a subsequent surgery of his brain tumors was declared successful, and after several rounds of chemotherapy, Armstrong was declared cancer-free in February 1997. Throughout his terrifying struggle with cancer, Armstrong continued to maintain that he was going to race again. Finally, with the United States Postal Service team, he signed a contract of a $200,000-per-year position.
What went wrong with Armstrong
In 2001 an Irish sportswriter David Walsh became suspicious of Armstrong’s behaviour and sought to highlight the rumors of drug use in the sport. He wrote a story linking Armstrong to Italian doctor Michele Ferrari, who was supplying performance enhancers to cyclists, and later the doctor was being investigated for that. In 2010, a former U.S. Postal rider Floyd Landis had been stripped of his 2006 Tour de France win for drug use and later he admitted to doping and accused his celebrated teammate of doing the same. In June 2012, after a federal investigation, the U.S Anti-Doping Agency brought formal charges against Armstrong. The cycling champion denied all the charges framed against him of using illegal drugs to boost his performance, and the 2012 USADA charges were no exception and calling them “baseless.” On August 23, 2012, Armstrong publicly announced for giving up his fight with the USADA’s recent charges and that he had declined to enter arbitration with the agency.
on August 24, 2012, the USADA confirmed that Armstrong would be stripped of his seven Tour titles—as well as other titles or prizes that he received from 1999 to 2005—and he was also banned from cycling for life. The agency in its report mentioned that Armstrong had used banned performance-enhancing substances. In October 2012, the USADA provided evidence against Armstrong, like laboratory tests reports, emails, and monetary payments as a source of evidence against Armstrong. “The evidence proved that the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team ran one of the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping programs that the sport had ever seen,” USADA said in a statement.
Fraud Settlement
In 2018, before his trial, Armstrong agreed to settle their claims of being defrauded and decided to pay the U.S. Postal Service $5 million. In the end, the settlement ended “all litigation against Armstrong related to his 2013 confession of using performance-enhancing drugs.
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