Lance Armstrong Stripped Of Tour de France Titles
FIONNUALA SWEENEY, HOST: Tonight on Connect the World...</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling.</s>SWEENEY: Stripped of his Tour de France titles, Lance Armstrong's fall from grace moves up a gear.</s>ANNOUNCER: Live from CNN Center, this is Connect the World.</s>SWEENEY: Tonight, as cycling faces its biggest crisis to date with doping so common, we'll debate whether it should be controlled rather than banned. Also this hour...</s>KOFI ANNAN,: : I cry every day for the Syrians.</s>SWEENEY: Former UN special envoy for Syria Kofi Annan tells us why military intervention is not the answer. And from celebrity DJ to suspected pedophile, how this man is at the center of a growing crisis in the BBC. Once idolized by millions of fans around the globe, Lance Armstrong has lost the seven cycling titles that made him a legend. Let's bring in World Sport's Don Riddell. I mean, Don, in the end, was there any real decision to be made here?</s>DON RIDDELL, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Well, there was a chance that the International Cycling Union would not agree with U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's damning findings. They don't have a particularly good relationship with USADA. But in the end, given all the evidence against them which is just so utterly damning, isn't it, I think you're right there really was not much of a decision to be made. But the UCI wanted to make it clear that they'd had time to review all the evidence. In the end their president Pat McQuaid and said that he was sickened by some of the testimony that he'd read and so as you say no real decision to be made. Lance Armstrong now stripped of the seven Tour de France titles and banned from the sport. And it was a difficult for the UCI, really, given that they tested Armstrong hundreds of times. They tested other riders hundreds of times and all of these guys passed these tests. So the UCI had a really difficult day. And frankly something of an apology to be made.</s>PAT MCQUAID, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL CYCLING UNION: The UCI always had a commitment to the fight against doping, always had a commitment to try and protect clean riders and to try and get cheats out of our sport. And if I have to apologize now on behalf of the UCI, what I will say is that I am sorry that we couldn't catch every damn one of them red handed and thrown them out of the sport.</s>RIDDELL: So the question, Fionnuala, now is what's going to happen to those seven Tour de France titles from 1999 to 2005. The UCI will meet again during the week and give us that verdict on Friday. But the Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme has said I'd rather you just didn't give them to anybody, put a line through it, because doping was so widespread during that era who can you give them to?</s>SWEENEY: It's really extraordinary, because you remember - I remember all the times that he won. And he was just an incredibly magnificent sportsman, but it seems he's got more to lose than titles, sponsors as well.</s>RIDDELL: Well, absolutely. Well, I think only the sponsors have now gone. Of course we had the big one with Nike last week, various other sponsors all kind of left him in the last few days. And then today the final straw, the sunglasses manufacturer Oakley, they left him behind as well. So his future earnings, really, are gone. And you now have to wonder about his past earnings. He won $4 million in prize money with the Tour de France in those years that I mentioned. I think they're now going to ask for their money back. What about all the bonuses he was awarded? What about all the money he was given through his endorsements? What about all the lawsuits and the libel cases he won, those guys might now come back and say, well, we think we're entitled to our money back now. This could run into tens of millions of dollars for Lance Armstrong.</s>SWEENEY: Civil suits at least. Thanks very much, Don Riddell, for that update. Well now that Armstrong has been stripped of his titles, new winners will need to be crowned, but that is tricky as Don was pointing out, because it also points to the sheer scale of doping in cycling. Consider this photo of the 2005 Tour de France podium, for example. Here you see Lance Armstrong on the podium with second place finisher Ivan Basso on the left and third place finisher Jan Ullrich on the right. Now Basso was given a two year ban for a doping related offense in 2007, Ullrich was banned for doping in 2006. The rest of the top seven in the 2005 Tour de France have also either been involved in doping scandals, or in the case of Michael Rasmussen seen here on the bottom right, been suspended for missing a doping test. Some have argued that doping is now so common it should be allowed, that is the view of Harvard University's Yascha Mounk who joins me now from CNN Boston. But the head of anti-doping UK disagrees. Andy Parkinson is live from CNN London. Thank you very much. My first question to you in Boston would be why do you believe that there should be at least a lifting of a ban on controlled substances?</s>YASCHA MOUNK, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Thank you so much for having me on, Fionnuala. Well, first of all, I just want to say it's very clear that what Lance Armstrong did is wrong. As long as there are rules that ban performance enhancing substances in sports it's clearly very wrong for one individual to lie to all of the viewers and to get a competitive advance over his competitors. So we have good reason to be very disappointing with what Lance Armstrong did. But I think we have to make sure that we don't misdirect that anger at people who cheat when doping is illegal into thinking that we should always ban these performance enhancing drugs. From my perspective, it's very clear through what's happened with the sport of cycling and other sports in the last 10, 20 years that we're never going to have a completely clean sport. And it's also clear that the distinction we make between what supposedly a performance enhancing drug and what are drugs that we allow like aspirin or like caffeine is not as clear as some people would believe. So the simplest solution is to allow everybody access to safe drugs and the medical supervision, that way we have a level playing field which is what we really care about as sports viewers. And I think it will be a much better solution.</s>SWEENEY: Would we actually have a level playing field? Won't you have people trying to push the boundaries again?</s>MOUNK: Well, I think that if the main drugs that allow people to perform better were to be allowed and were to be controlled, first of all the incentive would be much smaller, because with other drugs would give (inaudible) slower competitive advantage. So I think that once we dealt with incentives, no, that's not going to be the case.</s>SWEENEY: Andy Parkinson, presumably you're going to disagree. But could you ever realistically see the day when some kind of controlled substances might be allowed in sports such as cycling?</s>ANDY PARKINSON, ANTI-DOPING UK: Well, yeah, I think what we've seen over the last 10 years is evolution of what's banned and what isn't. And that takes into account firstly the health of the athlete. All right, here's a substance damaging to an athlete's health and secondly does it give a performance enhancement. And what we've really seen, the big evolution, actually, if you look at the United States Anti-Doping Agency's activities is that you've got governmental involvement and governmental ambition to try and clean up sport, which is something that we never had 10 years ago. So really what we need to be doing is working together to find out what are the substances that we genuinely care about that do damage athlete's health and do change the level playing field that was spoken about before and really target our efforts in that direction.</s>SWEENEY: And do you think, Andy Parkison, what's happened with Lance Armstrong in recent weeks and the scale of it is going to allow the evolution of what you would described where people come together and decide should there be controlled substances allowed and what should be banned?</s>PARKINSON: Well, it's already been happening for the last 10 years. And probably the most positive thing out today is with the cycling federation agreeing with the United States Anti-Doping Agency, that's a tremendous step forward because now we can start to plan what does cycling look like post Lance Armstrong. And I mean, we've got to take our hat off to the United States Anti- Doping Agency. They've done a tremendous job in presenting this case in a very thorough way.</s>SWEENEY: Yascha Mounk, if I could ask you, do you believe that Lance Armstrong still believes that he wasn't doping himself. But I mean, this is a difficult question, obviously, for you to answer in terms of speculation, but people might have different moral values when it comes to what they believe is doping or not.</s>MOUNK: Right. I mean, I'm not a psychologist. I don't know what exactly is going on inside Lance Armstrong's head. I mean, given all the evidence that we've seen I think it's very, very obvious that he did dope. And it's difficult to imagine - he would have to be quite delusional to really think that he wasn't cheating. But I think this is a problem with performance enhancing drugs, right, that we're tempting people into this. We give them such strong incentives to cheat. And then all the conversation becomes about that. And so I think that we should really go quite far in saying drugs like EPO aren't necessarily dangerous in themselves, what's dangerous is elevated levels of red blood cells. And how you gain those elevated level of red blood cells doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether we do that through EPO or whether you do that through, you know, training in very high altitudes, and some cyclist have naturally high levels of red blood levels. So I think what really matters is that we make sure that only those athletes who are not at health risk compete in sports. And that we should think less...</s>SWEENEY: If I may jump in there. If presumably we're talking about the kind of medical technology available, also, to determine whether there is something in one's system.</s>MOUNK: Yes, of course. So I think what needs to be - we need to have a panel of doctors who decide which kind of drugs should be legal in sports, because they're safe enough. And we should of course have tests for those drugs that are clearly unsafe. But I think by limiting our attention to those drugs that are unsafe, we can make more progress. If we see over the last 20 years there's been hundreds and thousands of tests of athletes and clearly nevertheless people were able to dope despite this. So I think it makes sense to target our efforts at those drugs that are really dangerous.</s>SWEENEY: Andy Parkison, a final word to you. If you could perhaps address this issue of can medical technology keep up with any changes that there might be made or lifting of certain bans on controlled substances in sport.</s>PARKINSON: Well, I mean, again what we've seen from the Armstrong case is that testing and analytical techniques are only one part of the fight against doping. If we can encourage law enforcement agencies and other agencies to help, then we've got a much stronger ability to tackle doping both at the grass roots level all the way up to elite level.</s>SWEENEY: We'll leave it there. Andy Parkinson and Yascha Mounk, thanks very much indeed for joining us both from Boston and London. And still to come tonight, a country on edge, the ongoing threat to Lebanon's stability. New images surface of Fidel Castro. But are they enough to stop rumors about his health? And a former TV presenter accused of sexual abuse, but did his employers know? All that and much more when Connect the World continues.