Armstrong Stripped of Tour De France Victories, Banned from Sport - East Idaho News
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Armstrong Stripped of Tour De France Victories, Banned from Sport

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Getty S 102212 Armstrong?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1350905906440Tom Pennington/Getty Images(GENEVA) — The International Cycling Union (UCI) sided with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) on Monday, stripping Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and banning him from the sport for life.

Announcing the decision from a news conference in Geneva, UCI President Pat McQuaid said, “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling.”

In August, the USADA banned Armstrong for life from professional competition and stripped him of his record-setting Tour titles amid allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs.  UCI, cycling’s governing body, waited on implementing its own sanctions against the former cyclist while it reviewed the USADA’s findings.

On Oct. 10, the USADA released a report in which 11 of Armstrong’s former teammates allege they helped him take performance enhancing substances.

The agency went on to say that Armstrong, his coaches and teammates “ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”

The USADA said its investigators had interviewed 26 people with direct knowledge of Armstrong’s doping and had nearly 1,000 pages of evidence bolstering their claim that the cyclist used performance enhancing drugs.

The mounting evidence that Armstrong allegedly doped pushed him to step down as the chairman of his cancer-fighting foundation, Livestrong, last week.  Shortly after, a number of companies — including Nike, Anheuser-Busch, 24 Hour Fitness and Trek Bikes — pulled their sponsorship deals with him.

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