Armstrong races for Tour record, drug charges in pursuit

When Lance Armstrong sets off Saturday in his quest for a record-breaking sixth victory in the Tour de France, he will be dogged by more than a pack of younger riders snapping at his heels.

He will also be pedaling under a cloud of fresh doping allegations against him, amid a wider scandal that has barred some top teams and riders from competing in this year's Tour. Some experts say those charges may drive, rather than distract, Armstrong's ambition.

"He is furious" about accusations in a new book that he has used performance-enhancing drugs, says Jeremy Whittle, editor of the British monthly magazine Procycling. "If he can produce the kind of strength of character and competitive rage" that propelled him last year, "he can do it."

The charges of Mr. Armstrong's drug use - echoing similar allegations about other top US athletes in recent weeks - come in "L.A. Confidential: The Secrets of Lance Armstrong," a book written by a top British sportswriter and a French colleague.

The authors quote Armstrong's former masseuse, who insinuates that in 1999 he took EPO, a banned drug that boosts oxygen-carrying red blood corpuscles, and tells how she collected unidentified tablets for him in Spain and disposed of his syringes.

A former colleague of Armstrong's in the Motorola team in 1995, the New Zealander Steven Swart, also accuses the US rider of approving a team decision to use EPO. "He's sold his fairy tale to everyone that he's as pure as snow, but there are a lot of gaps that he hasn't filled in," Mr. Swart told the New Zealand Herald.

Armstrong, threatening to sue the book's authors and their sources, has decried their allegations as "absolutely untrue. I can absolutely confirm that we don't use doping products," he said two weeks ago at a press conference. His supporters point out that a two-year French police investigation of Armstrong's alleged drug use was closed without any charges being leveled.

But the US rider, whose recovery from cancer and five consecutive Tour victories have made him a hero to millions, is finding it increasingly hard to make his claims of innocence heard over the din of recent doping scandals that suggest illegal drug use is widespread in professional cycling.

Time trial World Champion David Millar was banned on Monday from this year's Tour because he was taken in for questioning by French police following up their discovery of banned drugs at the offices of Cofidis, Mr. Millar's team.

Millar is one of eight Cofidis members under investigation, implicated by the testimony of fellow rider Philippe Gaumont, who has told investigators and the press that doping with steroids, human growth hormones, EPO, and amphetamines is systematic on his team.

His allegations match those of another cyclist to have broken his profession's code of silence, Jesus Manzano, a Spanish rider who told a Madrid sports paper last March that he had been forced by his team, Kelme, to take banned substances during last year's Centennial Tour. He also went into considerable technical detail about how riders avoid detection.

Tour organizers subsequently banned Kelme from this year's race, in a bid to stave off a repetition of 1998's "Tour of Shame," when police found a Festina team car's trunk full of illegal substances. That race was marred by police raids on riders' hotels, a sit-down-strike by the cyclists, and the withdrawal of several teams.

Page: 1 | 2