Armstrong: It's preposterous
2005-08-25 08:21
Chicago - Lance Armstrong went on the offensive on Wednesday, saying it was "preposterous" for the Tour de France director to suggest the cycling great "fooled" race officials and the sporting world by doping.
Comments by Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc appeared in the French sports daily L'Equipe on Wednesday, a day after the newspaper reported that six urine samples provided by Armstrong during the first of his seven Tour championships in 1999 tested positive for the red blood cell-booster EPO.
"I actually spoke to him for about 30 minutes and he didn't say any of that stuff to me personally," Armstrong said, referring to Leblanc.
"But to say that I've fooled the fans is preposterous. I've been doing this a long time.
"We have not just one year of only 'B' samples; we have seven years of 'A' and 'B' samples. They've all been negative," he said during a conference call from Washington.
Leblanc
In his comments to L'Equipe, Leblanc sounded convinced that Armstrong was guilty of doping, saying the onus was on him to explain the newspaper's findings.
"For the first time - and these are no longer rumours, or insinuations, these are proven scientific facts - someone has shown me that in 1999, Armstrong had a banned substance called EPO in his body," Leblanc told the newspaper.
"The ball is now in his court. Why, how, by whom? He owes explanations to us and to everyone who follows the tour. Today, what L'Equipe revealed shows me that I was fooled. We were all fooled."
The Tour did not respond on Wednesday to a request by The Associated Press to interview Leblanc.
The tour director was hardly the only target of Armstrong's ire on Wednesday.
He also questioned the validity of the science involved in testing samples that were frozen seven years ago and how those samples were handled since.
Paris laboratory
He also charged officials at the suburban Paris laboratory that processed them with violating the World Anti-Doping Agency code by releasing the results to the newspaper.
"It doesn't surprise me at all that they have samples. Clearly they've tested all of my samples since then to the highest degree.
But when I gave those samples," he said, referring to 1999, "there was not EPO in those samples. I guarantee that."
Fellow cyclists came to Armstrong's defense on Wednesday.
"Armstrong always told me that he never used doping products," five-time winner Eddy Merckx told Le Monde newspaper. "Choosing between a journalist and Lance's word, I trust Armstrong."
L'Equipe is owned by the Amaury Group whose subsidiary, Amaury Sport Organization, organizes the Tour de France and other sporting events.
Raised questions
The paper has often raised questions about whether Armstrong has ever used performance enhancing drugs. On Tuesday, the banner headline of its four-page report was "The Armstrong Lie."
EPO, formally known as erythropoietin, was on the list of banned substances at the time Armstrong won the first of his seven Tours, but there was no effective test then to detect it.
The allegations took six years to surface because EPO tests on the 1999 samples were carried out only last year - when scientists at the national doping test lab outside Paris opened them up again for research to perfect EPO screening, with the blessing of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Another five-time Tour champion, Miguel Indurain, said he couldn't understand why scientists would use samples from the '99 Tour for their tests.
"I feel the news is in bad taste and out of place, given that it happened six years ago after his first Tour victory, and after he won six more," Indurain wrote in the Spanish sports daily Marca.
"With the little I have to go on, it is difficult to take a position, but I think at this stage there's no sense in stirring all this up."
- AP