Quote:
Originally Posted by bob_in_pa
My problem is Trek's doubling down. Companies the size of Trek should spend their money on lawyers to keep them out of financial trouble, not get them out of it by all means necessary once they realize they've made a mistake.
What I mean by that is they should have asked the question "what happens if he turns out to be a cheat and we lose money because of it" before signing the contract. Not "who can we go after now that the world thinks he's cheat and we've lost a bunch of money". It's a matter of not owning your bad decisions.
|
The problem here is that when Lemond leveled his allegations, he had no proof of Armstrong's doping, and indeed Armstrong was not officially established as having doped until the USADA's Reasoned Decision in 2012 (4 years after Lemond and Trek settled out of court). An interesting bit of trivia is that USADA investigated and sanctioned Armstrong under the leadership of Travis Taggart. But in 2006, when SCA Promotions tried to get out of paying a bonus to Armstrong for winning the Tour de France claiming that he had committed fraud by doping, one of pieces of evidence that Armstrong presented in his arbitration hearing was an affidavit from Travis Taggart (then general counsel for USADA) saying that the USADA had no evidence that he had doped.