Whether that will change now, short of the finding of that alleged positive test from 2001 or an indictment against Armstrong, is anyone's guess. On Monday, the former international cycling chief Hein Verbruggen told the AP that there was never any cover-up to save Armstrong. As of now, Armstrong's business thus far has been as bulletproof as his adamant responses that he never took performance enhancing drugs.
On another tangent, it seems that because of what Armstrong has done for cancer, some people don't care about whether he used performance-enhancing drugs and certainly aren't happy about the government spending time on an investigation. In a Twitter poll I took on Sunday night, 85.2 percent of the 459 people who voted said that it was not important for the government to find out if Armstrong cheated, 7.8 percent said it was very important, while 7 percent said it was somewhat important.
What's interesting about the government's involvement is that it concerns them because Armstrong's teams were funded by the US Postal Service. The USPS paid $31.9 million to fund the team from 2001-2004. At issue, is whether the government was defrauded by paying for the sponsorship as the cyclists used performance enhancing drugs. Fraud or not, what's funny is the fact that the United States Postal Service hired two firms that showed that the sponsor received $103.6 million in domestic exposure from the sponsorship. That seems like pretty effective marketing to me. Plus, it seems a little bit misguided when you consider that the US Postal Service is on track to lose $7 billion this year. That's down from the $8.5 billion they lost last year.
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