Lance Armstrong steps down as chairman of cancer charity, dumped by Nike

A week after being labelled ring-leader of the biggest doping fraud in sports history, cyclist Lance Armstrong has stepped down as chairman of his cancer awareness charity and lost the backing of his sponsor Nike. The company said Wednesday that it was acting in the face of “seemingly insurmountable evidence” that its former client doped and “misled Nike for more than a decade.” The public rebuke came shortly after Mr. Armstrong acknowledged the toll the doping accusations were taking and their interference with his charity work. In a statement Wednesday, Mr. Armstrong said he was acting to prevent the foundation suffering “negative effects as a result of controversy surrounding my cycling career.” The move comes after attempts by Mr. Armstrong to use his cancer-awareness status to change the channel in the face of damning accusations of doping. In the late summer, shortly after the United States Anti-Doping Agency labelled him a drug cheat and called for his seven Tour de France titles to be stripped, Mr. Armstrong used an appearance at the World Cancer Congress in Montreal to insist that he had won those races. Last week, when USADA released more than 1,000 pages of documents to buttress its case, Mr. Armstrong tweeted that that night he would be “Hanging with my family, unaffected, and thinking about this,” followed by a link to the charity. In its statement, Nike said that it would continue to support the Livestrong charity but “does not condone the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs in any manner.” Their decision was announced a day after a small protest, including a former teammate of Mr. Armstrong, demonstrated outside the company’s Oregon headquarters with signs such as “For clean sport; No drugs; No bullies; No lies.” Also Tuesday, the company denied an allegation it helped pay to cover up a positive drug test by Mr. Armstrong. According to USADA, Mr. Armstrong presided over a years-long doping conspiracy that involved cheating on an epic scale and pressuring supporting riders on his team into using illegal drugs to further his career. “Armstrong said, ‘we had one goal and one ambition and that was to win the greatest bike race in the world and not just to win it once, but to keep winning it’,” USADA said in the report summarizing its evidence. “However, the path he chose to pursue that goal ran far outside the rules. His goal led him to depend on EPO, testosterone and blood transfusions but also, more ruthlessly, to expect and to require that his teammates would likewise use drugs to support his goals if not their own.” The USADA case was supported by banking information, communication intercepts, lab results and testimony from 26 witnesses, 11 of them former team-mates of Mr. Armstrong. Some of these witnesses have been publicly on the outs with him but others had no apparent axe to grind and the testimony George Hincapie, in particular, is seen as particularly damaging. Mr. Hincapie, who was described by Mr. Armstrong as his “best bro” and rode alongside him throughout his career, said that he saw the Texan use banned drugs and was given such drugs by him for his own use. In his affidavit, Mr. Hincapie said that he had knowledge of Mr. Armstrong breaking the rules by taking the blood-booster EPO, testosterone, illicit blood transfusions and human growth hormone, though he is alleged to have stopped using the latter after surviving cancer. He also related being asked to go to Mr. Armstrong’s Spanish apartment after he retired “to make sure there was nothing there,” which he took to mean a sweep for doping materials. Mr. Armstrong chose not to contest the evidence gathered by USADA, which the anti-doping agency is treating as a tacit admission of guilt. Their case was forwarded last week to the Union Cycliste Internationale, which governs the sport professionally. The UCI has until the end of the month to approve USADA’s punishment, formally stripping Mr. Armstrong of all results since August of 1998, or can appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.