PARIS, 24 August 2005 — Seven-times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong has denied ever taking performance-enhancing drugs following a report in French newspaper L’Equipe that he used the blood-boosting drug EPO in 1999.
Tour de France executive director Jean-Marie Leblanc said he felt let down by Armstrong after L’Equipe alleged the American had used the banned drug in 1999, the year he first won the world’s greatest cycle race.
Armstrong, who recovered from testicular cancer to become the most successful rider in the Tour’s history, has been forced to rebut several doping allegations during his career and he repeated yesterday that his sporting successes were ‘clean’. “I will simply restate what I have said many times: I have never taken performance-enhancing drugs,” the 33-year-old, who retired in July, said in a statement on his personal website. L’Equipe, saying it had access to laboratory documents, reported yesterday that six of Armstrong’s urine samples collected on the 1999 Tour de France showed “indisputable” traces of EPO (erythropoietin).
L’Equipe published what it claimed to be a results sheet from the lab which appeared to show six figures revealing traces of EPO. The newspaper also published documents from the French cycling federation showing exactly the same figures under Armstrong’s name.
The Chatenay-Malabry lab said in a statement that the samples they tested did not have names attached and they could not confirm if any of the samples were Armstrong’s. The lab said all test results had been sent to WADA, the agency in charge of the fight against doping in world sport, on the condition they did not use them to take disciplinary action.
