Cycling's governing body Monday accepted the findings of a
U.S. Anti-Doping Agency report about an elaborate doping program involving
Lance Armstrong and stripped the famed athlete of his seven
Tour de France titles and banned him from competition for life.
International Cycling Union (UCI) President Pat McQuaid said in Geneva he was "sickened" by the
USDA findings, adding, "Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling.… He deserves to be forgotten."
USADA
sent 1,000-plus pages to UCI, including a report from 26 witnesses,
including 11 former Armstrong teammates, who alleged Armstrong and his
teams used
steroids, the
blood-booster EPO, blood transfusions and
testosterone in a sophisticated doping scheme during his Tour de France title run.
"It's a very nasty story," said Don Catlin, the
International Olympic Committee medical commission member who has presided over sports drug testing since the 1980s. "Doping control has a lot of problems."
Armstrong
has long denied the doping allegations and has said he's passed
hundreds of drug tests. On Monday he declined to comment. At a charity
fundraiser Sunday in Texas for
Livestrong, his
cancer charity, he told a crowd he's faced a "very difficult" few weeks.
He
also lost another longtime sponsor Monday, as Oakley sunglasses dropped
Armstrong. Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme wants Armstrong
to repay prize money for the championships he won from 1999 to 2005 and
says the record books should be wiped clean without any champion named
for that period.
Some Livestrong donors also want their money
back. Michael Birdsong, of Salt Lake City, said he's contributed to
Livestrong. "The charity was established and publicized and got their
funds based on a fraud," he told CNN.
Yet, in assessing the USADA report, some close to the world of doping lament a harsher reality.
"This
is a blueprint for all sport that still applies this very minute," said
Victor Conte, the notorious mastermind of the Bay Area Laboratory
Co-Operative (BALCO) that supplied steroids and other banned substances
to home run king
Barry Bonds, Olympic sprinter Marion Jones and former world-champion boxer Shane Mosley.
Conte,
who now identifies himself as an advocate for clean sports, said part
of the blame falls on inadequate drug testing by sports agencies.
The
USADA report alleges Armstrong used testosterone on the Tour to heal
micro-sized tears and cuts in his muscle tissue from endurance racing.
Conte
says USADA itself does not employ enough of the more sophisticated and
expensive Carbon Isotope Ratio test for testosterone. The CIR test
detects any presence of synthetic testosterone; the cheaper test
requires highly elevated testosterone levels to declare a positive.
"It's
the biggest loophole in all of drug testing, because when you ask what
the most anabolic drug is for power and speed, it's testosterone," Conte
said. "The CIR test can detect use for up to two weeks. There wouldn't
have been seven Tour de France titles by Lance Armstrong if they had
done this."
In its report, USDA said, among other things, Armstrong and teammates:
--
Used small doses of performance-enhancing testosterone and EPO at
night, taking advantage of the courtesy testers gave not to interrupt
the riders' rest after a daylong competition. Before or just after dawn,
they would be back below positive levels.
-- Duped testers by
methods including a fraudulent prescription, hiding behind locked doors,
self-testing blood, receiving tips of testers' visits and handsomely
paying doctors to direct a doping plan.
The cat-and-mouse games were underway for Armstrong in 1998, a year before the Texan battled back from
testicular cancer to win the first of his seven straight Tours, according to the report.
At
that year's World Championships in the Netherlands, a UCI tester
entered a bed-and-breakfast common area linking the bedrooms of
Armstrong, fellow riders
Christian Vande Velde and
Jonathan Vaughters and team doctor Pedro Celaya.
Alarmed that Armstrong's use of EPO would generate a positive test showing the volume of his
red blood cells
above the acceptable 50%, Celaya shuffled to his car to "retrieve a
liter of saline," then used it to lower Armstrong's red blood cells
toward a normal male's 45% level.
The doctor allegedly tucked the saline "under his raincoat and
smuggled [it] right past the UCI tester and into Armstrong's bedroom,"
according to the report. "Celaya closed the bedroom door and
administered the saline to Armstrong … without alerting the UCI tester
to their activities."
Catlin fumes that, "We should not be sitting
here 25 years after this type of doping began, and still not have a
great test for EPO." EPO is a biotech drug developed to treat anemia,
which has been used to illegally benefit athletes in many endurance
sports.
The USADA "report shows how smart people are being about
knowing when they're 'hot,' and avoiding that window of detection,"
Catlin said. "And our efforts in testing don't rise to the level of the
problem."
According to the USADA report, athletes who altered their
red-blood-cell levels could mask such enhancement with as little as 20
minutes' notice.
Rider
David Zabriskie, a former Armstrong teammate, said in the USADA report team director
Johan Bruyneel and team masseuses "seemed to have an outstanding early-warning system regarding drug tests … an hour's notice prior to tests."
More details came from Armstrong's former teammate
Tyler Hamilton, in his book published this year, "The Secret Race."
Hamilton
claimed the Armstrong group remained "way, way ahead of the tests,"
thanks to its reliance on team Dr. Michele Ferrari and a
well-orchestrated scheme that employed motorcycle deliveries of EPO on
the Tour in 1999, with the emptied syringes disposed in Coke cans.
When
Armstrong tested positive that year for a cortisone, Hamilton claimed, a
prescription was backdated for cortisone cream treatment of a supposed
saddle sore, and there was no discipline.
In the 2000 Tour,
Hamilton claimed he and Armstrong filled bags with their own blood
before the competition in Spain, then took the transfusions of the rich
blood before the crucial, mountainous stage 12 by hooking up to the bags
taped to a wall above their beds.
In the USADA report, Hamilton explained, "UCI frequently would be lax in penalizing missed tests."
Armstrong once simply withdrew from a lesser race, according to ex-teammate
George Hincapie, when Hincapie texted him that testers were nearby.
Hamilton
claimed Armstrong told him he tested positive for EPO in the 2001 Tour
of Switzerland. Again, there was no discipline against the heroic cancer
survivor and brightest star in the sport.
In 2009, a Tour testing
agency reported Armstrong's team that year "benefited from privileged
information or timing advantages during doping control tests," according
to USADA.
Fallout from this could be to institute a church-and-state separation between sport and the testers.
"It's
not in their interest to have positives," Catlin said in a general
reference aimed at UCI. "So the way you stop surprise tests is to make
sure there's no surprise."
WADA Director General David Howman called the USADA report "powerful and compelling," and said Hamilton's book was "devastating."
Howman
said it might also be appropriate for law enforcement to play a role in
testing to deal more harshly with the illegal nature of some
performance-enhancing substances.
There also needs to be a deeper investment in testing, Catlin said.
WADA
has an annual budget of nearly $30 million, Catlin said, but that
should be increased by 20 times to find scientists who can develop more
sophisticated tests. "As long as the sports world cannot or will not pay
for adequate testing, they'll have to deal with the fact people are
getting away with it."
source: latimes.com
