I hate professional cycling a little bit more...
2 Ex-Teammates of Cycling Star Admit Drug Use
By JULIET MACUR
Two of Lance Armstrongs eight teammates from the 1999 Tour de France have admitted for the first time that they used the banned endurance-boosting drug EPO in preparing for the race that year, when they helped Armstrong capture the first of his record seven titles.
Their disclosures, in interviews with The New York Times, are rare examples of candor in a sport protected by a powerful code of silence. The confessions come as cycling is reeling from doping scandals, including Floyd Landiss fall in July from Tour champion to suspected cheat.
One of the two teammates who admitted using EPO while on Armstrongs United States Postal Service team is Frankie Andreu, a 39-year-old retired team captain who had been part of Armstrongs inner circle for more than a decade. In an interview at his home in Dearborn, Mich., Andreu said that he took EPO for only a few races and that he was acknowledging his use now because he thought doping was damaging his sport. Continued doping and denial by riders may scare away fans and sponsors for good, he said.
There are two levels of guys, Andreu said. You got the guys that cheat and guys that are just trying to survive.
The other rider who said he used EPO spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he did not want to jeopardize his job in cycling.
The environment was certainly one of, to be accepted, you had to use doping products, he said. There was very high pressure to be one of the cool kids.
Neither rider ever tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, but both said they felt as if they had to take EPO to make the Tour team in 1999. Andreu would not say specifically when he took the drug, and the second rider said he did not use EPO during the Tour. Anti-doping experts say the benefits of taking EPO, the synthetic hormone erythropoietin, which boosts stamina by bolstering the bodys production of oxygen-rich red blood cells, can last several weeks or more.
Both of Armstrongs former teammates also said they never saw Armstrong take any banned substances.
Armstrong, who turns 35 next week, has long been dogged by accusations that he doped before and after his remarkable recovery from cancer, a comeback that made him a transcendent cultural figure and a symbol to cancer patients and survivors worldwide. He has repeatedly denied using performance-enhancing drugs and has aggressively defended himself in interviews and through lawsuits, even more than a year into his retirement.
Multiple attempts to interview Armstrong for this article through his lawyers, his agent and a spokesman were unsuccessful. His agent, Bill Stapleton, wrote in an e-mail message yesterday that Armstrong would not comment because he was attending a meeting of the Presidents Cancer Panel in Minneapolis.
Armstrong once said that cycling had no secrets and that hard work was the key to winning. Recent events and disclosures, however, demonstrate that cycling does, indeed, have secrets.
Dozens of interviews with people in the sport as well as court documents in a contract dispute between Armstrong and a company called SCA Promotions reveal the protective silence shared by those in professional cycling. A new picture of the sport emerges: a murky world of clandestine meetings, mysterious pills and thermoses that clink with the sound of drug vials rattling inside them.
This years Tour began with a doping investigation that implicated nearly 60 riders and ended with Landiss testing positive for synthetic testosterone. He became the third of Armstrongs former lieutenants to fail a drug test after setting off on his own career as a lead rider.
Theres no doubt that cyclists have bought into the institutional culture of cheating, and thats a big, big problem for the sport, said Steven Ungerleider, a research psychologist, antidoping expert and consultant for college, Olympic and professional sports organizations. He described that culture as a mob psychology.
A Widespread Problem
In his 12 years as a professional cyclist, Frankie Andreu was a domestique, a worker bee whose job was to help a top rider like Armstrong win.
He said his introduction to performance-enhancing drugs came in 1995, when he and Armstrong were with the Motorola team. He said some of the teams riders felt that they could no longer compete with some European teams that had rapidly improved and were rumored to be using EPO.
Motorolas top riders asked their doctor, Massimo Testa, about the drugs safety because more than a dozen young riders in Europe had died mysteriously of heart attacks. Some cyclists had linked those deaths to rumored EPO use.
Dr. Testa, now a sports medicine specialist at the University of California at Davis, said in a telephone interview that he had given each rider literature about EPO, in case any of them decided to use it on their own.
Dr. Testa said he urged the riders not to take the drug, but he wanted them to be educated.
If you want to use a gun, you had better use a manual, rather than to ask the guy on the street how to use it, he said. I cannot rule out that someone did it.
One of Armstrongs teammates, Steve Swart, has admitted using EPO while riding for Motorola. He discussed his time with the team in the book L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong, which was published in 2004, only in French.
The books allegations that Armstrong doped prompted the lawsuit between Armstrong and SCA Promotions, which was settled out of court in February. Because of Armstrongs suspected drug use, SCA withheld a $5 million bonus after he won the 2004 Tour de France. Armstrong and Tailwind Sports, the company that owned his cycling team, sued SCA for the money.
Testimony in the case was never supposed to become public. A confidential settlement awarded Armstrong and Tailwind Sports the bonus, and $2.5 million in interest and lawyers costs. The Times obtained the legal documents in July.
In testimony in the case, Swart, a retired rider from New Zealand, said top riders on Motorola discussed EPO in 1995. He testified that Armstrong told teammates that there was only one road to take to be competitive. In a sworn deposition, Swart said the meaning of Armstrongs comment was clear: We needed to start a medical program of EPO.
EPO, cortisone and testosterone were common in European cycling, Swart said in a telephone interview. He said using cortisone, a steroid, was regarded as sucking on a candy stick. Cyclists acquired the drugs from European pharmacies and took them in private, Swart said. You basically became your own doctor, he said.
He said signs of drug use were widespread at the 1994 and 1995 Tours, when there was no testing for EPO.
Everyone was walking around with their own thermos, and you could hear the sound tinkle, tinkle, tinkle coming from the thermoses because they were filled with ice and vials of EPO, Swart said. You needed to keep the EPO cold, and every night at the hotel, the guys would be running around trying to find some ice to fill up their thermos.
It Was for Lance
In the weeks before the 1999 Tour, Andreus wife, Betsy, found one of those thermoses in her refrigerator. She was furious.
I remember Frankie saying: You dont understand. This is the only way I can even finish the Tour, she said. After this, I promise you, Ill never do it again.
Betsy Andreu said she grudgingly watched her husband help Armstrong traverse the mountains at the Tour that year. Later, she said, she was angry when her husband said he had once allowed a team doctor to inject him with an unidentified substance.
To this day, she blames Armstrong for what she said was pressure on teammates to use drugs. Her husband, she said, didnt use EPO for himself, because as a domestique, he was never going to win that race.
It was for Lance, she said.
Three years earlier, she and Frankie, who were engaged at the time, visited Armstrong at an Indiana hospital after he received his cancer diagnosis. Last fall, under court order to testify in the SCA Promotions case, the Andreus said that they had overheard Armstrong tell doctors he had used steroids, testosterone, cortisone, growth hormone and EPO.
2 Ex-Teammates of Cycling Star Admit Drug Use
By JULIET MACUR
Two of Lance Armstrongs eight teammates from the 1999 Tour de France have admitted for the first time that they used the banned endurance-boosting drug EPO in preparing for the race that year, when they helped Armstrong capture the first of his record seven titles.
Their disclosures, in interviews with The New York Times, are rare examples of candor in a sport protected by a powerful code of silence. The confessions come as cycling is reeling from doping scandals, including Floyd Landiss fall in July from Tour champion to suspected cheat.
One of the two teammates who admitted using EPO while on Armstrongs United States Postal Service team is Frankie Andreu, a 39-year-old retired team captain who had been part of Armstrongs inner circle for more than a decade. In an interview at his home in Dearborn, Mich., Andreu said that he took EPO for only a few races and that he was acknowledging his use now because he thought doping was damaging his sport. Continued doping and denial by riders may scare away fans and sponsors for good, he said.
There are two levels of guys, Andreu said. You got the guys that cheat and guys that are just trying to survive.
The other rider who said he used EPO spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he did not want to jeopardize his job in cycling.
The environment was certainly one of, to be accepted, you had to use doping products, he said. There was very high pressure to be one of the cool kids.
Neither rider ever tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, but both said they felt as if they had to take EPO to make the Tour team in 1999. Andreu would not say specifically when he took the drug, and the second rider said he did not use EPO during the Tour. Anti-doping experts say the benefits of taking EPO, the synthetic hormone erythropoietin, which boosts stamina by bolstering the bodys production of oxygen-rich red blood cells, can last several weeks or more.
Both of Armstrongs former teammates also said they never saw Armstrong take any banned substances.
Armstrong, who turns 35 next week, has long been dogged by accusations that he doped before and after his remarkable recovery from cancer, a comeback that made him a transcendent cultural figure and a symbol to cancer patients and survivors worldwide. He has repeatedly denied using performance-enhancing drugs and has aggressively defended himself in interviews and through lawsuits, even more than a year into his retirement.
Multiple attempts to interview Armstrong for this article through his lawyers, his agent and a spokesman were unsuccessful. His agent, Bill Stapleton, wrote in an e-mail message yesterday that Armstrong would not comment because he was attending a meeting of the Presidents Cancer Panel in Minneapolis.
Armstrong once said that cycling had no secrets and that hard work was the key to winning. Recent events and disclosures, however, demonstrate that cycling does, indeed, have secrets.
Dozens of interviews with people in the sport as well as court documents in a contract dispute between Armstrong and a company called SCA Promotions reveal the protective silence shared by those in professional cycling. A new picture of the sport emerges: a murky world of clandestine meetings, mysterious pills and thermoses that clink with the sound of drug vials rattling inside them.
This years Tour began with a doping investigation that implicated nearly 60 riders and ended with Landiss testing positive for synthetic testosterone. He became the third of Armstrongs former lieutenants to fail a drug test after setting off on his own career as a lead rider.
Theres no doubt that cyclists have bought into the institutional culture of cheating, and thats a big, big problem for the sport, said Steven Ungerleider, a research psychologist, antidoping expert and consultant for college, Olympic and professional sports organizations. He described that culture as a mob psychology.
A Widespread Problem
In his 12 years as a professional cyclist, Frankie Andreu was a domestique, a worker bee whose job was to help a top rider like Armstrong win.
He said his introduction to performance-enhancing drugs came in 1995, when he and Armstrong were with the Motorola team. He said some of the teams riders felt that they could no longer compete with some European teams that had rapidly improved and were rumored to be using EPO.
Motorolas top riders asked their doctor, Massimo Testa, about the drugs safety because more than a dozen young riders in Europe had died mysteriously of heart attacks. Some cyclists had linked those deaths to rumored EPO use.
Dr. Testa, now a sports medicine specialist at the University of California at Davis, said in a telephone interview that he had given each rider literature about EPO, in case any of them decided to use it on their own.
Dr. Testa said he urged the riders not to take the drug, but he wanted them to be educated.
If you want to use a gun, you had better use a manual, rather than to ask the guy on the street how to use it, he said. I cannot rule out that someone did it.
One of Armstrongs teammates, Steve Swart, has admitted using EPO while riding for Motorola. He discussed his time with the team in the book L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong, which was published in 2004, only in French.
The books allegations that Armstrong doped prompted the lawsuit between Armstrong and SCA Promotions, which was settled out of court in February. Because of Armstrongs suspected drug use, SCA withheld a $5 million bonus after he won the 2004 Tour de France. Armstrong and Tailwind Sports, the company that owned his cycling team, sued SCA for the money.
Testimony in the case was never supposed to become public. A confidential settlement awarded Armstrong and Tailwind Sports the bonus, and $2.5 million in interest and lawyers costs. The Times obtained the legal documents in July.
In testimony in the case, Swart, a retired rider from New Zealand, said top riders on Motorola discussed EPO in 1995. He testified that Armstrong told teammates that there was only one road to take to be competitive. In a sworn deposition, Swart said the meaning of Armstrongs comment was clear: We needed to start a medical program of EPO.
EPO, cortisone and testosterone were common in European cycling, Swart said in a telephone interview. He said using cortisone, a steroid, was regarded as sucking on a candy stick. Cyclists acquired the drugs from European pharmacies and took them in private, Swart said. You basically became your own doctor, he said.
He said signs of drug use were widespread at the 1994 and 1995 Tours, when there was no testing for EPO.
Everyone was walking around with their own thermos, and you could hear the sound tinkle, tinkle, tinkle coming from the thermoses because they were filled with ice and vials of EPO, Swart said. You needed to keep the EPO cold, and every night at the hotel, the guys would be running around trying to find some ice to fill up their thermos.
It Was for Lance
In the weeks before the 1999 Tour, Andreus wife, Betsy, found one of those thermoses in her refrigerator. She was furious.
I remember Frankie saying: You dont understand. This is the only way I can even finish the Tour, she said. After this, I promise you, Ill never do it again.
Betsy Andreu said she grudgingly watched her husband help Armstrong traverse the mountains at the Tour that year. Later, she said, she was angry when her husband said he had once allowed a team doctor to inject him with an unidentified substance.
To this day, she blames Armstrong for what she said was pressure on teammates to use drugs. Her husband, she said, didnt use EPO for himself, because as a domestique, he was never going to win that race.
It was for Lance, she said.
Three years earlier, she and Frankie, who were engaged at the time, visited Armstrong at an Indiana hospital after he received his cancer diagnosis. Last fall, under court order to testify in the SCA Promotions case, the Andreus said that they had overheard Armstrong tell doctors he had used steroids, testosterone, cortisone, growth hormone and EPO.
