Former NCAA Attorney Speaks Out
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Summary
Bill Bach is a former NCAA official who served as the General Counsel of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for 13 years, representing clients such as Lance Armstrong. He has extensive experience with sports law and drug testing, including representing clients in high-profile investigations and litigation including the Armstrong case.
Transcript
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With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a weighting depth of 900 millimeters,
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Of course, we have had athletes on the podcast.
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I encourage you to go watch the episode with Kim Jones to hear from the perspective of a mom
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of an athlete who has been impacted by the movement of allowing men into women's sports.
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A few weeks ago, we had Dave and Judy Brown, coaches out in Oregon,
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who bravely and courageously took a stand and resigned their coaching position
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after being forced to participate in the farce.
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But a piece we have been missing is someone actually involved in the NCAA,
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someone who was willing to stand up to the seemingly undefeatable NCAA.
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He has substantial experience with sports law and sports during drug testing.
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He was actually the general counsel of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for 13 years.
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He's represented clients in high-profile investigations and litigation, including Lance Armstrong.
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So his expertise and knowledge in the fact of testosterone and how it affects the body,
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performance-enhancing drugs more broadly, is a valuable one.
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His story and how he has now left the NCAA is even more important.
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Make sure you check out the interview here with Bill Bach.
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Well, Bill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
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I kind of just wanted to start by asking you about your interest in sports in general
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I wasn't seeing myself on the field, but always loved sport.
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We always had whatever sport was in season, either in our family we were playing it or we had it on TV.
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And so after I got my law degree, I looked around for how I could get involved in supporting athletes
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Kind of had five-ring fever, loved the whole idea of competition in the Olympics
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and the motivation, the sacrifice that was made by athletes.
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And so I had the opportunity to support some athletes that had an Olympic dream kind of on their journey,
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help them with just navigating fundraising, navigating the rules.
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And as that progressed, I'm in a city that has national governing bodies.
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In addition to the NCAA, USA Track and Field is in Indianapolis and other nationally governing bodies in sport.
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And so I've had a lot of opportunities over the years to help athletes.
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And that eventually led to me being involved with the formation of the United States Anti-Doping Agency
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and serving as USADA's general counsel for 14 years, being involved with a lot of cases and investigations
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regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.
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But, you know, athletes have always, and the need for a level playing field has been a big part of my career.
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Talk about some of your involvement there, particularly, I think the most interesting, at least from what I know,
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is how you litigated on the Lance Armstrong case.
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You know, the Armstrong case was one of the larger cases that we handled.
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But, you know, things kind of kicked off that USADA opened its doors in 2000.
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And by late 2002, 2003, we were involved in the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative case
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that involved doping by Marion Jones and C.J. Hunter and Barry Bonds and others.
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But the Armstrong case kind of resulted in part from an investigation of doping and cycling
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that USADA was involved in for a good six-, eight-year period,
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But whistleblowers came forward, courageous athletes,
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some of whom who had used performance-enhancing drugs.
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We were able to sit down with and give them an opportunity to kind of redeem their experience in the sport,
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to come forward and tell the truth and try and set their sport of cycling back on the right track.
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And as a result of working with those athletes,
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we were able to kind of break the so-called Omerita,
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the conspiracy of silence that plagued cycling,
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or you didn't get allowed back into the sport if you talked about doping in the sport.
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And so it was, you know, it took a while to convince people that that was the right,
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that honesty was the best policy and that was the right course.
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We had very courageous young men that had been on Lance Armstrong's cycling team,
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and they knew because Lance had demonstrated it,
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He was a very powerful individual in the sport,
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They lost opportunities when they got on the wrong side of him.
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and we had enough witnesses that eventually, you know,
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the outcome was that Lance Armstrong got stripped of his seven Tour de France titles,
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He was surrounded by an entourage of people that had been in the sport for quite a long time,
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a team director and doctors that were running the doping program.
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And so we were fortunate to obtain sanctions with most of his closest doping doctors
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and make sure that those individuals were no longer in a position to continue to dope other athletes.
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we had the opportunity to assist anti-doping agencies in Europe,
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because, you know, as we kept pulling the threads,
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and ultimately there were dozens of cases that went forward,
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and it gave cycling an opportunity for a new start,
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The International Federation got a new president.
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First time that there had been a contested election,
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and a newcomer from outside the UCI had come in,
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and a British individual by the name of Brian Cookson took over as the new head of the International Federation.
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And they established what they called an independent cycling commission that received a lot of evidence
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and wrote a report and kind of set cycling on a new path.
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because we knew that Lance Armstrong didn't start doping and cycling.
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And so it was important not just to pursue a case against Lance Armstrong,
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but to pursue an effort to really try to clean up the sport
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and get to the root of some of the problems in the sport.
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we had Lance Armstrong's case really setting the precedent,
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the USADA's involvement in banning performance-enhancing drugs.
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But their policy they had in place for 12-ish years
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was merely 12 months of hormone replacement therapy,
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and that was enough to mitigate the testosterone advantages
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and allowed them to compete in the women's category.
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before we get into the stance that you have now taken with the NCAA
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compared to eligibility for a male and a female category.
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As you say, any amount of a performance-enhancing drug,
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if it's taken by an athlete, shows up in a test,
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and these are the NCAA's rules, they're USADA's rules,
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if the most minute quantity of prohibited substance
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they're found to have committed a rule violation.
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So there is zero tolerance for any amount of a performance-enhancing substance
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Contrast that with a male in the female category
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which does next to nothing in terms of mitigating
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of having enormously higher levels of testosterone
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which allows men to have greater power and strength
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when it comes to protecting the female category in sport.
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did this ever come up as an infraction discussion?
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Did you see any sort of silencing of this issue
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that issue didn't ever come before the committee.
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Now, we know now that the reason it didn't come before the committee
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is that the NCAA's rules have been consistently lax,
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as have the rules of many other sports organizations
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So it didn't really present as an issue in a big way,
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when you competed against formerly Will Thomas,
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started competing in the female category for Penn in 2022.
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I want you to talk about what happened a week ago or so,
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and to all the members of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions,
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the managing director of the staff for the committee,
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that I needed to, at this point, resign in protest,
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So I was hoping that there'd be a fresh look at this issue,
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because the rules have only been cosmetically changed,
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but it violates the fundamental tenet of sport,
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given their unwillingness to change those policies.
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have not heard from anybody at the NCAA on this issue.
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that everybody would be happy with the decision.
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We need to give women's opportunities to women.