Lance Armstrong stripped of Tour de France titles and banned.

[Tiberius]

But the point I've made is that by not contesting them you are basically showing yourself to be guilty, at least in my view.

Your view is wrong. "No contest" =/= "Guilty". No contest means you don't want to fight the charges anymore; you'll let the court (or overviewing body) decide.

I think his whole career at stake would be of reasonable importance that you would fight such charges all the way, not just dismiss them.

His career is already over. I suspect he doesn't want to be dragged through a judicial system which he already suspects to be corrupt (now confirmed by the fact they assumed him guilty without a trial), and sit in front of people he used to call his friends as one by one they accuse him of doping. If he doesn't care what will be a small minority of people think about him, why bother? He already knows he's won fairly; he already knows the titles are his. If he wants to just slip into the background and live the rest of his life quietly without all this drama, the more power to him.

Also note that the USADA have no right to take anything away from him in the first place. They are just making noise for the media. The USADA can only make recommendations, and it is up to the actual sporting bodies to act on them or not.

This is all how it just seems to me though, I hadn't even heard he'd been battling these charges for so long until today, so I may be completely wrong.

He's been battling accusations all his cycling career, and every single time he has shown up to a drug test and been presented with a negative result. This has been going on for over a decade now; he even came out of his first retirement because of the allegations. If I were him, I'd feel like there was no way I could prove my innocence; some people clearly just won't accept the truth.

I actually find the number of people willing to testify against him quite overwhelming. But I guess you're going into conspiracy territory as to whether they are reliable witnesses etc.

Not necessarily a conspiracy, but some of the witnesses seem to be suggesting that the entire Armstrong team was doping. It wouldn't surprise me if all those team members are testifying against Armstrong in return for immunity against doping charges against them.