🚴 Lance Armstrong stripped of 7 Tour titles; Nike and Trek walk

Lance Armstrong did not fight the biggest charge sheet of his career. In August 2012, with the US Anti-Doping Agency accusing him of running what it called "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen," he chose not to fight USADA's charges. That one decision cost him seven Tour de France titles and nearly every sponsor with his name on a contract.

The titles

USADA's report, released in October 2012, ran to around a thousand pages and rested on sworn testimony from 26 people - 11 of them former teammates - describing systematic doping on the U.S. Postal Service team. On October 22, 2012, the UCI, cycling's governing body, accepted USADA's findings, locking in a lifetime ban and the loss of every result Armstrong had posted since August 1, 1998 - all seven of his Tour wins among them.

The sponsors

The money followed the titles out the door within days. Armstrong stepped down as chairman of his own cancer charity, Livestrong, on October 17, 2012; the same day, Nike announced it had terminated its contract with him, citing "seemingly insurmountable evidence" of doping and saying it had been misled for more than a decade. RadioShack dropped him the same day, and Anheuser-Busch said it would not renew its deal at year's end. Trek and Giro cut ties in the same stretch; SRAM ended its agreement on October 19. Oakley alone held off, saying it would wait for the UCI's verdict. A tidy week's work, for an industry that spent a decade insisting it had no idea.

"All the fault and all the blame here falls on me."

Lance Armstrong, in his January 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey

The confession

Armstrong held out until January 17, 2013, when he told Oprah Winfrey on camera that he had doped through all seven of his Tour wins. He called it "one big lie" and said his "mythic perfect story" was not true. He said that at the time it had not felt like cheating - and maintained that he stopped doping after the 2005 Tour, placing third clean in 2009 and racing again in 2010.

He had denied it for years - in statement after statement, in interviews, right up until he gave up the fight in August 2012. The denial ended on Oprah's couch. The titles have not come back.