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The announcement by the seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong that he is abandoning his challenge to the drugs charges levelled against him by the US anti-doping agency cannot but leave a bitter taste.
He may indeed, as he says, be tired of the fight and simply want to put the whole affair behind him. Unless he offers a more satisfactory explanation than his anger at what he calls a one-sided process, however, the suspicion will linger, rightly or wrongly, that he was going to lose. The many fans who have given him the benefit of the doubt deserve better.

As a cycling hero and cancer survivor, Armstrong acquired a huge and devoted following around the world. But a shadow has long hung over his reputation. If at any time he used drugs to enhance his performance, he needs to admit this in public, explain how his cheating went undetected and voluntarily surrender his honours. He will then have to choose whether to withdraw from public life or continue his fund-raising in an effort to make amends.

If he is certain of his innocence, then he owes it to himself and his fans to pursue his fight against the US agency to the end. If he does not, the uncertainties that attended his later career will dog him as long as he remains in the public eye and risk compromising his charity, Livestrong. It is not an outcome that will do him credit.

MILAN (VN) — A certain Ferrari is leaving plenty of pollution in its wake. Italian Michele Ferrari, despite being banned by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in Lance Armstrong’s doping case, is still operating and causing headaches.

Filippo Pozzato, suspended yesterday for three months, is but one of a number of riders facing scrutiny over ties to the banned Italian doctor.

“He was my trainer, but there was never anything illegal going on,” Pozzato said, according to Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport.

But for the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), the connection was too much. The doctor from Ferrara has been banned from practicing in Italy since 2002 and as of July 10, banned worldwide. Pozzato (Farnese Vini-Selle Italia) worked with him for five years, from 2005 to 2010, and paid up to €50,000 for what he said were training plans. Yesterday, the Italian anti-doping tribunal (TNA) issued him a three-month ban and officially linked him to doping for life — a mark that excludes Pozzato indefinitely from riding with the Italian National Team.

Others find themselves in the crosshairs as well.

Michele Scarponi (Lampre-ISD) inherited last year’s Giro d’Italia title after Alberto Contador (Saxo Bank-Tinkoff Bank) lost it in a separate doping investigation. Along the way, according to La Gazzetta dello Sport, he worked with Ferrari. Twice in 2010 he visited the doctor south of Modena in Monzuno for tests. Scarponi has a hearing coming up with the CONI and could face a lifetime ban as he already sat out as part of the Operación Puerto investigation.

Giovanni Visconti (Movistar) wanted to race on Italy’s worlds team this month, but has been in hot water since public prosecutors started tracking payments to Ferrari’s alleged Swiss bank accounts. He, Leonardo Bertagnolli and several Katusha riders had their belongings searched in April 2011 by anti-narcotics police. Visconti, the Italian national road champion in 2007, 2010 and 2011, met with the CONI prosecutor, Ettore Torri on June 27 and waved goodbye to any chance of racing for the national team. As the Italian cycling federation (FCI) president Renato Di Rocco told VeloNews, “The CONI prosecutor assured me it has significant evidence” against Visconti.

Dr. Evil
Daniel Coyle described Ferrari with dark hair and darty eyes in his book, “Lance Armstrong’s War”. He wrote, “he wore… a broad, teasing smile” and was referred to as Dr. Evil. The name came partly from his connection to doping. He trained under Professor Francesco Conconi, who guided some of the first pros towards EPO use.

“Cyclists went to be tested by Conconi and would come back flying. Incredible!” the late, respected trainer, Aldo Sassi told Cycle Sport in 2010. He added with a laugh, “he is a very good trainer!”

Ferrari took Conconi’s methods and expanded on them with his clients, the most famous of which was Armstrong. As part of the Armstrong case, USADA charged him with supplying the Texan and some of his teammates with EPO and testosterone and helping with banned methods, like blood transfusions. When Ferrari failed to respond to the charges, USADA banned him for life. He continues to contribute regular training articles to the website www.53×12.com, however.

It is not only cyclists that have mixed with Ferrari. The 2008 Olympic race walk champion Alex Schwazer admitted he consulted Ferrari after being booted out of the London Games for a failed doping test. He said he used EPO, but that he only received training advice from Ferrari. It is a similar story to what Pozzato said yesterday in Rome, and what Scarponi, Visconti and the others linked to “Dr. Evil” say.

adam wrote:sorry... had a lovely day visiting clients up the Riverland

you can not dismiss the testimony of somebody just because they have previously lied and have now come clean.

and if you say that the testimony would not stand up, then surely you would test it!

Denis the bank robber wrote:he blagged the bookies with a sawn off shot gun

UCI boss Pat McQuaid said they would not appeal "unless Usada's decision and case file give reason to do otherwise".

Lance Armstrong’s refusal to fight charges shouldn’t cast doubt on his work for cancer

I have finally achieved a goal I’ve been striving toward for many, many years. I have the same number of Tour de France wins as Lance Armstrong!

Several weeks ago, for all intents and purposes, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his prestigious titles after giving up defending the allegations of drug use and blood doping, the result of an investigation into his alleged misconduct that has lasted for years.

He will never admit to any wrong-doing, as is his prerogative. But when you state that the fight to prove innocence has become too cumbersome to continue, and you are willing to forfeit seven titles as a result, the suspicion of guilt creeps closer and closer to reality.

Perhaps the strongest smear on the sport of cycling is that four of the runners-up in Armstrong’s seven championships cannot claim the prize either, for they are under investigation or have been charged with the same misdemeanors!

Cycling isn’t alone in this netherworld of deception. There are well documented cases in football, baseball, track and field, etc...remember Ben Johnson being stripped of his gold medal at the Olympics?

Why is it that athletes who are so gifted, so fortunate to attain the plateaus they have reached, feel the need to cheat to enhance their prowess?

On the other hand, could they have been stacking the deck in their favour all along? I’m quite certain there are coaches and trainers, doctors and scientists whose main focus is to find that next miracle “enhancer”, the ultimate deception beyond the realm of conformity and detection.

Finding ways to cheat or “beat the system” is a full-time business for some and could ruin the integrity of not only professional athletics, but amateur as well.

It’s unfortunate really, for it negates what began as a natural talent and casts shadows over accomplishment, so that now, whenever records are achieved or broken, whether it be in cycling or baseball or track or whichever sport you choose, there will always be questions as to the legitimacy of the win.

In the case of Lance Armstrong, his past reputation as a cycling champion gave him the means to create a foundation called Livestrong that gives millions and millions of dollars every year to cancer research and benefits those dealing with, and the survivors of cancer, of which Mr. Armstrong can include himself.

Hopefully the revelations over the past few weeks won’t deter people from donating to such a worthy organization, but when trust and honesty are compromised, so too are compassionate hearts.

God is an Englishman wrote:and still you haven't proved you aren't a bank robber.

How Tyler Hamilton sheds light on doping world and Lance Armstrong

The disgraced rider's book makes claims of elaborate methods that cycling's drug cheats adopted to conceal their guilt

William Fotheringham
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 September 2012 18.17 BST

Lance Armstrong, left, alongside his compatriot Tyler Hamilton during the Tour de France in 2003. Photograph: Bernd Thissen/EPA
I met Tyler Hamilton in the lobby of a Toulouse hotel during the 2003 Tour de France. Hamilton was performing what seemed at the time like one of the greatest rides in the history of the race, appropriately in the centenary Tour; he was fighting his way through it with a double crack in his collarbone and was highly placed overall. It made a great interview for the Observer; my companion and I left feeling quietly impressed with the guy. I had heard that the American, from Marblehead, Massachusetts, was quiet, even boring, but he was perfectly eloquent at talking about the pain he was enduring.

It was difficult not to be inspired by the suffering Hamilton was going through, just as it was difficult not to raise eyebrows and wonder what the hell was going on when he rode away from the entire field in the Pyrenees, up the steepest climb of the race, broken collarbone and all, to win in Bayonne. Struggling to stay in contact with the leaders seemed within the bounds of possibility; winning a stage by four minutes did not add up.

So it was not a massive surprise to learn that Hamilton had injected a bag of blood the night before the stage to Bayonne, increasing his performance by 3%, or so he writes in his account of his doping journey, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups and Winning at All Costs. That is pretty much what the book, written jointly with the American journalist Daniel Coyle, inspired in me: not surprise so much as the occasional jolt of shock at the grimy practicalities and the odd drop of my jaw at the means Hamilton says that he, Lance Armstrong and others used to stay ahead of the testers and the police.

In the broader sense this book is old news, at least compared with Willy Voet's Breaking the Chain, which I translated following its publication in 1999. Voet's revelations were fresh; the Festina scandal had broken less than a year before it appeared. In the same way that the Armstrong saga has been a 10-year drip-feed of revelation, we have had eight years to get used to the idea that Hamilton was riding on blood transfusions, because he was busted for blood doping in 2004, while leaks during the Operación Puerto inquiry left no room for error about his prolific drug-taking.

What Hamilton's account does do is offer an initial, and deep, insight into the evidence that Armstrong refused to confront when he opted out of arbitration in the case that the US Anti-Doping Agency had built against him and his associates. Armstrong's surrender – with its implicit acceptance of the charges the Usada had raised against him – made a contorted kind of sense on 25 August, as it does now, given the material in the book.

Looking back to 1999, I was naive to assume that year that the threat of police raids would make the cyclists leave their drugs at home. While the fear seems to have made many of them ride clean (a vast percentage of the samples from 1999 tested later for erythropoietin were clean), that in turn rewarded those who took special measures and doped up. In the case of Armstrong and Hamilton this meant hiring a motorcyclist, nicknamed Motoman, to transport their EPO.

The following year, with a new test in the pipeline for that blood booster, Armstrong and US Postal switched to microdoses of EPO (to reduce "glowtime", as they call the period when a rider will test positive after an injection) but primarily to blood transfusions – a bigger boost to performance but involving trips to Spain by private jet to have blood removed before it was reinjected for the key moments in the race. Blood doping later became more sophisticated, once Hamilton had left Postal and taken up with the egregious Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, alleged supplier of blood doping services extraordinaire, albeit one who insists he is innocent. Blood is taken out and reinjected in epic quantities; it is frozen and manipulated. Occasionally it goes off, to disastrous effect.

The methods used for concealment are the stuff of the underworld: multiple pay-as-you-go mobile phones, constantly changed, codes for the numbers of rooms in obscure hotels where blood is taken out and put back in, elaborate measures to dispose of evidence, on one occasion hiring a flat in Monaco for one transfusion, hidden there for a month with Hamilton and his then wife, Haven, keeping an eye on it. But above all, constant paranoia, fear of the opposition, fear of discovery. It is sport but not as mere mortals can imagine it or report it, in the case of my colleagues and I. We suspected and conjectured, while being unable to put our disquiet into print; quite how we could have uncovered it I cannot imagine, given the elaborate measures to which the drugtakers were resorting to ensure secrecy.

Amid the blood there are telling insights into Armstrong: "He believed – still believes – that he wasn't cheating, because in his mind all the contenders in the race … had their own version of Motoman, everybody was doing everything they could to win and, if they weren't, they were choads [an insult particular to Armstrong, somewhere between a chump and a toad] and didn't deserve to win."

If there is a note of optimism that can be taken from this book, it is not from Hamilton's story, but the background: testing, more and more stringently, particularly out of competition, clearly does have an effect: it piles on the pressure, forcing the drug takers and the men who run the blood banks into mistakes, such as traces of banned drugs unintentionally finding their way into a bag of blood which then show up positive. Testing does not net them all – Armstrong never failed a test – but it catches enough to make a difference.

Hamilton's downfall, that positive for blood doping in 2004, it seems, is most probably due to an error by Fuentes, who was seemingly supplying so many names in the peloton that he may have given the American the wrong bag. (In a wry-smile footnote that you simply couldn't make up, it seems that his sidekick may have suffered from dementia.)

This is not an account that will engender a great deal of sympathy, at least not in my mind. Hamilton suffered severe depression, sacrificed his marriage and lost a million dollars fighting for years to maintain the lie that he had raced clean. He does not paint himself as a victim: he had a choice and he made the choice. His story, and that of the seven-times Tour winner with whom it runs in parallel, is a defining example of what we all tell our children: one lie leads to another, they grow and take on a life of their own.

Any residual feeling I might have felt for a man who fouled up his life as Hamilton did evaporates on page 19, after his account of that stage win in Bayonne, where he writes: "You can call me a cheater and doper until the cows come home. But the fact remains that in a race where everybody had equal opportunity, I played the game and I played it well." The ultimate drug taker's argument: they all did it, so I had to do it. Not everyone in that race had access to Fuentes or Motoman. Hamilton did not have to do it. They do not have to do it.

DAM wrote:

God is an Englishman wrote:and still you haven't proved you aren't a bank robber.

adam wrote:and so it begins....

Andy the Assasin wrote:Yeah I saw him, he was wearing a mask and came out of the bank shooting. he definitely robbed that bank.

The next month, during the Tour de France, the cyclists lay on beds with those blood bags affixed to the wall. They shivered as the cool blood re-entered their bodies. The reinfused blood would boost the riders’ oxygen-carrying capacity and improve stamina during the second of Armstrong’s seven Tour wins.

The following day, Armstrong extended his overall lead with a swift ascent of the unforgiving and seemingly unending route up Mont Ventoux.

At a race in Spain that same year, Armstrong told a teammate that he had taken testosterone, a banned substance he called “oil.” The teammate warned Armstrong that drug-testing officials were at the team hotel, prompting Armstrong to drop out of the race to avoid being caught.

In 2002, Armstrong summoned a teammate to his apartment in Girona, Spain. He told his teammate that if he wanted to continue riding for the team he would have to follow the doping program outlined by Armstrong’s doctor, a known proponent of doping.

The rider said that the conversation confirmed that “Lance called the shots on the team,” and that “what Lance said went.”

Those accounts were revealed Wednesday in hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony from teammates, e-mail correspondence, financial records and laboratory analyses released by the United States Anti-Doping Agency — the quasi-governmental group charged with policing the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Olympic sports.

During all that time, Armstrong was a hero on two wheels, a cancer survivor who was making his mark as perhaps the most dominant cyclist in history. But the evidence put forth by the antidoping agency drew a picture of Armstrong as an infamous cheat, a defiant liar and a bully who pushed others to cheat with him so he could succeed, or be vanquished.

“The U.S.P.S. Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices,” the agency said. “A program organized by individuals who thought they were above the rules and who still play a major and active role in sport today.”

Armstrong, who retired from cycling last year, has repeatedly denied doping. On Wednesday, his spokesman said Armstrong had no comment.

When Armstrong decided in August not to contest the agency’s charges that he doped, administered doping products and encouraged doping on his Tour-winning teams, he agreed to forgo an arbitration hearing at which the evidence against him would have been aired, possibly publicly. But that evidence, which the antidoping agency called overwhelming and proof of the most sophisticated sports doping program in history, came out anyway.

Under the World Anti-Doping Code, the antidoping agency was required to submit its evidence against Armstrong to the International Cycling Union, which has 21 days from the receipt of the case file to appeal the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Once it makes its decision, the World Anti-Doping Agency has 21 days in which to appeal.

The teammates who submitted sworn affidavits — admitting their own doping and detailing Armstrong’s involvement in it — included some of the best cyclists of Armstrong’s generation: Levi Leipheimer, Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie, one of the most respected American riders in recent history. Other teammates who came forward with information were Frankie Andreu, Michael Barry, Tom Danielson, Floyd Landis, Stephen Swart, Christian Vande Velde, Jonathan Vaughters and David Zabriskie.

Their accounts painted an eerie and complete picture of the doping on Armstrong’s teams, squads that dominated the sport of cycling for nearly a decade.

“His goal led him to depend on EPO, testosterone and blood transfusions but also, more ruthlessly, to expect and to require that his teammates would likewise use drugs to support his goals if not their own,” the agency said in its 202-page report.

Drug use was casual among the top riders, and some shared EPO — the banned blood booster erythropoietin — as if borrowing cups of sugar from a neighbor. In 2005, Hincapie on two occasions asked Armstrong, “Any EPO I could borrow?” and Armstrong obliged without question. In 2003, Armstrong showed up at Hincapie’s apartment in Spain and had his blood drawn for a future banned blood transfusion, Hincapie said, adding that he was aware that Armstrong used blood transfusions from 2001 to 2005.

Kristin Armstrong, Armstrong’s former wife, handed out cortisone tablets wrapped tightly in foil to the team at the 1998 world championships.

Riders were given water bottles containing EPO as if they were boxed lunches. Jonathan Vaughters said the bottles were carefully labeled for them: “Jonathan — 5x2” meant five vials of 2,000 international units each of EPO were tucked inside. Once when Vaughters was in Armstrong’s room borrowing his laptop, Armstrong injected himself with EPO and said, now “that you are doing EPO too, you can’t go write a book about it.”

Landis was asked to baby-sit the blood inside the refrigerator of Armstrong’s apartment, just to make sure the electricity did not go out and the blood did not spoil.

Zabriskie, a five-time national time-trial champion, recalled serenading Johan Bruyneel, the longtime team manager, with a song about EPO, to the tune of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

“EPO all in my veins; Lately things just don’t seem the same; Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why; ’Scuse me while I pass this guy.”

Tyler Hamilton, another teammate, said Armstrong squirted a mixture of testosterone and olive oil into Hamilton’s mouth after one stage of the 1999 Tour.

At the same time the drug use was nonchalant, it was also carefully orchestrated by Armstrong, team management and team staff, the antidoping agency said.

“Mr. Armstrong did not act alone,” the agency said in its report. “He acted with the help of a small army of enablers, including doping doctors, drug smugglers, and others within and outside the sport and on his team.”

Armstrong relied on the Italian doctor Michele Ferrari for training and doping plans, several riders said. Armstrong continued to use Ferrari even after he publicly claimed in 2004 — and testified under oath in an insurance claims case — that he had severed all business ties with Ferrari.

The antidoping agency noted that Armstrong had sent payments of more than $1 million to Ferrari from 1996 through 2006, based on financial documents discovered in an Italian doping investigation.

Ferrari was a master at reducing the riders’ chances of testing positive, several cyclists said, so much so that Hincapie said he was not fearful he would test positive at the 2000 Tour because of Ferrari’s tricks.

As an example of the extreme care the team would take to avoid positive tests, the doctor suggested that the riders inject EPO directly into their veins instead of under their skin, which would lessen the possibility that the drug would be picked up by tests. He pushed the use of hypoxic In Teammates’ Doping Stories, Armstrong Cast as Enforcer

To start what was deemed a new and better doping strategy, Lance Armstrong and two of his teammates on the United States Postal Service cycling squad flew on a private jet to Valencia, Spain, in June 2000, to have blood extracted. In a hotel room there, two doctors and the team’s manager stood by to see their plan unfold, watching the blood of their best riders drip into plastic bags.
chambers, which he said also reduced the effectiveness of the EPO test.

Bruyneel, Armstrong’s longtime team manager, and team doctors played a key role in the doping scheme. They would often indoctrinate young riders into the doping program, the riders said.

In his affidavit, Vande Velde recalled Bruyneel took over as the team director after the 1998 season and brought in the new team doctor, Luis Garcia del Moral, who was fond of giving riders injections.

“He would run into the room and you would quickly find a needle in your arm,” Vande Velde said, adding that when he would ask questions about the treatment, del Moral “would say things like I was ‘bloated’ or ‘blocked’ and needed ‘vitamins.’ ” Vande Velde added that “whatever he injected was always described as vitamins.”

In 1999, del Moral offered Vande Velde testosterone, and Vande Velde knowingly doped for the first time, using testosterone mixed in olive oil. The cyclist then discussed the program with Bruyneel because he was nervous about it. “He said not to worry if I felt bad at first, that I would feel good at the end,” Vande Velde said.

Eventually, Armstrong confronted Vande Velde for not closely following Ferrari’s training program. Armstrong said his good standing on the team would be jeopardized, Vande Velde said. Feeling threatened, Vande Velde stepped up his drug use.

Zabriskie was also anxious about using drugs and asked Bruyneel how safe it was to use them.

He barraged him with questions: Would he be able to have children? Would it cause any physical changes? Would he grow larger ears? Bruyneel’s response: “Everyone is doing it.”

The team’s doctors came up with fake maladies so that riders could receive an exemption to use drugs like cortisone, several riders said. When Armstrong tested positive for cortisone during the 1999 Tour, Armstrong produced a backdated prescription for it, for saddle sores. Hamilton said he knew that was a lie.

Riders said they felt that they needed to dope to stay at the top of the sport and stay on the team. Armstrong was instrumental in the hiring and firing of team personnel and pressured riders to stay on a doping program, the antidoping agency said.

The evidence made clear, the agency said, that Armstrong’s drug use was extensive, and that he also was the linchpin holding the team’s doping program together. It said that is why it barred him from Olympic sports for life and stripped him of his record seven Tour victories.

“It was not enough that his teammates give maximum effort on the bike, he also required that they adhere to the doping program outlined for them or be replaced,” the antidoping agency said in its report. “He was not just a part of the doping culture on his team, he enforced and reinforced it.”

But none of that changes the fact that it now appears Lance Armstrong engaged in prolonged, systematic doping.

The cult of Lance is over now. He’s no longer locking anyone with those eyes. His credibility is dead in the water.

Mind you, it doesn’t say much about the health of the sport of cycling that he was allowed to win seven Tours de France in the first place.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/entran ... 6493713158

God is an Englishman wrote:which one is adam?

PATRICK SMITH
Armstrong a fraud and frauds can't be heroes. Not now, not ever
BY: PATRICK SMITH From: The Australian October 13, 2012 12:00AM

LANCE Armstrong is a creep. A liar, cheat and a bully. So awful is Armstrong, you are right to question whether all his work for cancer patients is not just calculated camouflage to protect his abuse of drugs, his competitors, teammates and supporters.

He is not just part of the drug regime that saturated cycling when he was at his peak, but he has been that culture's bodyguard. Its enforcer. And he remains so today, arrogantly dismissing the US Anti-Doping Agency findings by telling the world through Twitter that he was "unaffected" by the release of the 1000-page investigation findings. No one in sport has lived a bigger lie. Tiger Woods led two lives, one in public and one in bedrooms other than his own. But he did not cheat his sport as an athlete. Woods is flawed. Armstrong, who used his bedroom as a blood bank, is a crook.

Lance Armstrong case creates an unlikely hero

You have probably never heard of Scott Mercier, a little-known former professional cyclist.
Yet his name came up time and time again during the United States Anti-Doping Agency's (Usada) investigation into Lance Armstrong and the US Postal team.

So Travis Tygart, Usada's crusading chief executive, knew he needed to track Mercier down and talk to him.
"I got this call, out of the blue, and thought it must be a joke," remembers Mercier, now a financial adviser living in Grand Junction, Colorado.
"Travis said 'I want to thank you. And I want to find out why you were able to do what no-one else could'."

Mercier admits he's often wondered "where would I have ended up" if he had have doped
Because Mercier, 44, was the US Postal rider who resisted the pressure to dope.
To do so, he had to turn down the offer of a new contract with the team and quit the sport he loved.
He can still clearly remember the day he made up his mind, in May 1997, at the age of 28, after a conversation with the team's doctor, Pedro Celaya.
"Pedro called each member of the team into his hotel room, one by one. When my turn came, he handed me a bag containing a bottle of green pills and several vials of clear liquid.
"I was also given a 17-day training schedule and each day had either a dot or a star. A dot represented a pill and a star was an injection.
"He said 'they're steroids, you go strong like bull'. Then he said 'put it in your pocket, if you get stopped at customs say it's B vitamins'.
"That was when I decided I didn't want to be a pro cyclist any more. I got home and decided 'no thank you'.
"I love cycling, it's a beautiful sport, but it would have been very challenging for me to look someone in the eye and say I was clean when I knew I wasn't.
"People talk about the health aspects, but to be totally honest I wasn't so concerned about that.
"For me, it was the lying and the hypocrisy."
Several other former US Postal riders detailed Celaya's involvement in doping during the Usada investigation and he was charged with "possession, trafficking and the administration of doping materials and methods".

Celaya, now the team doctor with Radioshack , has contested the charges and his case is due to go before the Court of Arbitration for Sport later this year. He also strongly disputed Mercier's claims when contacted by BBC Sport.

Mercier said this was the the first time he was given drugs, although it had been obvious that his team, and indeed many of the others, were doping.
There was the refrigerator in the team truck which they nicknamed "the special lunchbox", because it was filled with EPO. "You could hear the glass vials shaking together when you moved it," he recalls.
His wife remembers him talking about the steroids they found in team-mate George Hincapie's shoebox. And Celaya had talked about him needing to take "extra B vitamins" to boost his haematocrit levels, which he clearly took as meaning he should take EPO.
Mercier had tried doing the training programme without using drugs, but found it impossible. "I could do the first two days, but by about the fifth hour on the third day I couldn't do the efforts, I was getting fatigue and had to take a recovery day."
He also found he couldn't keep up with riders he had beaten easily a few months earlier on tours in North America and Asia. There was no test for EPO at the time, so it was essentially open season for riders who wanted to take it.
"You get frustrated when your peers are beating your head into the gutter," he says, the frustration still in his voice. "When you're at an Amstel Gold Race and you can barely hold the wheel of the guy in 80th place.

"That same guy, you smoked three months previously. And you're thinking 'I've been training. I've lost two, three kilos. How is this guy suddenly so much better than me?'"
He remembers asking Hincapie, his team-mate, friend and flat-mate, about doping over a coffee in Girona one day in March 1997.
"He didn't give me a yes or a no, he just said 'you'll have to make your own decision'. I took that to mean that yes, there is a fair amount and if you want to be a pro you'll have to do it."
On Wednesday, Hincapie expressed his regret at having doped throughout his career .
After leaving the sport, Mercier moved to Hawaii to run a restaurant with his father. He then settled in Colorado and became a financial adviser. He is married and has a son and daughter, but admits he has spent some of the last 14 years wondering what might have been.
"I would see the likes of Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie having great success in the Tour and wonder 'where would I have ended up?'
"It was difficult for me because I knew what they were doing. They were walking around with this air of superiority, which really grated me.

"Clearly I would have made more money. Those guys were making seven figures and I haven't made anywhere close to that, but life works."
Mercier's world was far removed from that of professional cycling until a few months ago, when Usada began to investigate Armstrong and US Postal.
"It certainly gives me some validation for the decision I made," he says. "It wasn't that I wasn't good enough, it was just that I made different choices. They talk about winning at all costs, but are you willing to push well beyond the limits?

"I'm not, I think there's more to life than that. Sport should be a level playing field and it wasn't. It was who had the best team and resources and the best medicine and that wasn't the game I wanted to play."

After Usada's full findings came out on Wednesday, Mercier's wife called him. "She said 'imagine you're sitting down with your son and daughter, explaining hey, daddy's a liar and a cheat'. I don't have to do that."

And what does he think of Armstrong, who joined US Postal the season after he left?
The duo were on the same team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and had sporadic contact in the years after that.
"He was a brash young man back then, but clearly had drive and talent," Mercier says.
"To come back from the illness he had was truly astounding, no-one can take that away from him.
"But the methods he used to achieve his success were fraudulent. His story is the greatest in sport but it's also the biggest fraud."
Celaya was sacked by US Postal in 1999 and replaced by Dr Luis Garcia Del Moral. The reason, according to another US Postal rider, Jonathan Vaughters in his evidence to Usada, was that "Armstrong did not feel that Celaya was aggressive enough in running the 'program'."
Mercier now thinks there should be an anonymous telephone number that whistleblowers can call to report their suspicions of doping, and that sanctions should be strengthened so that teams as well as individual riders can be banned.
He also believes the current leadership of the UCI must be replaced because they are "part of the problem, not the solution".
Above all, he hopes no rider ever again has to leave the sport they love because they want to ride clean.

David Millar calls on cycling union chief to resign over Lance Armstrong scandal

THE Scots cyclist says Hein Verbruggen should step down for failing to act while serving as president of the International Cycling Union.


Lance Armstrong
SCOT David Millar insists cycling chief Hein Verbruggen should resign for failing to act on Lance Armstrong’s doping shame – which he insists was an open secret in the sport.

Cyclist Millar served a two-year ban after admitting to doping in 2004 and has since become an anti-doping campaigner.

He wasn’t in the least bit surprised by the US anti-doping agency report that stated seven-time Tour De France winner Armstrong was at the centre of a huge doping programme within his US Postal team in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

And he has now called on Verbruggen, who was the International Cycling Union president during Armstrong’s heyday, to pay the price for the latest doping scandal to engulf the sport.

Dutchman Verbruggen is now honorary president of the UCI’s management committee and as recently as last year insisted Armstrong had “never, never, never” used doping.

But with Millar insisting everyone in cycling was aware that most of the top riders were doping during Armstrong’s period of domination, he reckons it’s time for Verbruggen to answer for his failings.

Millar said: “The UCI have to accept they must carry some responsibility – it was obvious what was going on.

“The UCI had all the blood data, the medical reports, it was part of the culture of the sport and in the big races the majority of riders were doing it on drugs.

“There was only a tiny minority getting good results without drugs and they really were the outsiders.

“The first step for the UCI is that Verbruggen has to be removed.

“There is no doubt about that – (current president) Pat McQuaid has to distance himself because it was under Verbruggen’s reign that it was at its worst and yet there were denials coming from the UCI.

“He was at the head of organisation with the biggest doping problem in the history of sport. He’s still there. He doesn’t have to commit hari kari, he should just admit that mistakes were made.”

The USADA report states that in May last year, responding to a claim from former US Postal Service team member Tyler Hamilton that the UCI had failed to act on a positive Armstrong drug test, Verbruggen reacted angrily, saying: “That’s impossible.”

The Dutchman added: “I repeat again: Lance Armstrong has never used doping. Never, never, never. And I say this not because I am a friend of his, because that is not true. I say it because I’m sure.”

The UCI have said they will examine the USADA report and evidence within the next three weeks but will not delay a response “longer than necessary”.

And Millar is adamant the strength of the USADA report – with 11 riders giving evidence against Armstrong – had been necessary to ensure there were no lingering doubts.

The Scot added: “That’s been the thing with Lance – you couldn’t do it unless there was this level of depth and detail.

“There’s no way there could be any doubts or holes left open.

“I am quite impressed this has actually happened. A lot of people thought he was going to get away with it.”

Millar reckons cycling is finally shedding the image of a sport ravaged by doping but admits young athletes will still suffer.

He said: “That’s what so sad. A whole generation are going to have clean careers and results that should never be doubted. But we will still carry this baggage.”

'arry the 'atchet wrote:He was an 'orrible cunt that adam, he was always robbing banks.