For years, cycling’s top officials turned a blind eye to doping, operating in deference primarily to one rider — Lance Armstrong — according to a reform commission that spent the past year excavating the sport’s doping problems.
The three-member commission issued a scathing indictment of the sport’s officials Sunday, laying much of the blame on a governing body that, it said, had interests that ran counter to any genuine efforts to expose doping. The 227-page report detailed how Mr. Armstrong’s extraordinary influence had not only compelled officials to ignore drug use but had also enabled his lawyer to secretly write and edit the report of an earlier investigation into Mr. Armstrong’s doping practices.
Lance Armstrong in 2011. SCA Promotions asked a Texas state judge to force him to pay it $10 million.Sports of The Times: Lance Armstrong’s Ugly Detour From Road to RedemptionFEB. 16, 2015
Lance Armstrong, left, with Johan Bruyneel, sporting director of the Discovery team, after Armstrong’s win in the 2005 Tour de France.Sports of The Times: A Double Standard in Doping PunishmentsAPRIL 22, 2014
In court documents made public Wednesday, Lance Armstrong reluctantly submitted answers to 16 questions about his doping.Sports of The Times: Lance Armstrong’s Positive, if Reluctant, Step in a Sport’s PurificationAPRIL 10, 2014
The panel was appointed by the main target of its criticism, the International Cycling Union, commonly known as U.C.I., in January 2014 as part of an effort by its newly elected president to rebuild the sport after revelations of the sophisticated doping program of Mr. Armstrong and his team. In October 2012, the United States Anti-Doping Agency exposed Mr. Armstrong’s years of cheating in devastating breadth and detail.
“For a long time, the main focus of U.C.I. leadership was on the growth of the sport worldwide, and its priority was to protect the sport’s reputation; doping was perceived as a threat to this,” the report said, adding that “the emphasis of U.C.I.’s antidoping policy was, therefore, to give the impression that U.C.I. was tough on doping rather than actually being good at antidoping.”
Mr. Armstrong, the report suggests, personified the problem. Through interviews and internal documents, the commission found that his first Tour de France victory, a year after a police raid nearly shut down the 1998 race, was seen by the cycling union’s leaders as the salvation of both the sport and their organization. His stardom, the report suggests, effectively blinded the cycling union’s leadership.
“Lance Armstrong was considered as a veritable icon by the institution: a cancer survivor who had managed to beat his disease, helped the sport to recover and to return some credibility to U.C.I.,” the panel wrote. “The U.C.I. leadership did not know how to differentiate between Armstrong the hero, seven-time winner of the Tour, cancer survivor, huge financial and media success and a role model for thousands of fans, from Lance Armstrong the cyclist, a member of the peloton with the same rights and obligations as any other professional cyclist.”
Elliot Peters, a lawyer who represented Mr. Armstrong before the commission, said Sunday: “Certainly by the later years, he had to understand that he was being treated differently. The paradox of the situation Lance is in now is that people want him to provide information which, if it’s embarrassing to somebody else, it’s embarrassing to him, too. He’s strived to be very transparent with these folks.”
The sweeping report, which documents the history of doping in cycling as well as current doping practices, also focuses much of its attention on Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid, two former presidents of the cycling union who were close allies. The rise of powerful forms of doping based on synthetic human hormones like EPO, a blood booster, coincided with substantial growth in the size, power and finances of the cycling union under the leadership of Mr. Verbruggen and Mr. McQuaid.
After reading an advance copy of the report, Mr. Verbruggen dismissed it as unfair in an interview with ANP, a Dutch news agency.
“There is a lot of what we could have done better, but that’s easy to say 25 years later,” he said. “And there is a lot of criticism of me; I was a dictator and was too close to Armstrong. They had obviously come up with something.”
Mr. McQuaid did not respond to requests for comment.
Two of the three members of the commission, selected by Brian Cookson, the current cycling union president, have investigative backgrounds. Dick Marty, the leader of the commission, is a Swiss politician and former prosecutor who investigated the illegal trafficking of human organs in Kosovo and led Europe’s investigation into secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons. Another commission member, Peter Nicholson, a former Australian Army officer, conducted war crimes investigations for the United Nations.
The third member, Ulrich Haas, is a German professor specializing in antidoping laws and regulations.
For Mr. Armstrong, the report provides a small amount of vindication. While the commissioners did find that Mr. Armstrong’s special position had kept him from serious scrutiny and led to cover-ups, they did not conclude that donations he had made to U.C.I. were bribes, although they chastised U.C.I. for accepting them. The commission also rejected allegations that Mr. Armstrong had tested positive during the Tour of Switzerland and then successfully covered up. It did, however, find that he had suspicious test results at that race and was given special treatment afterward.
The commission also found that Mr. Armstrong’s doping practices had not differed from those of many of his rivals. But it added, “All of this is of course no excuse or justification for Lance Armstrong’s behavior, and there cannot be a shadow of a doubt that such behavior warrants a harsh sanction.”
Largely through internal cycling union documents, the commission pieced together an exceptional whitewashing involving Mr. Armstrong. In 2005, L’Equipe, the French daily sports newspaper that is part of the same corporation as the Tour de France, reported that Mr. Armstrong had tested positive for EPO during the 1999 Tour. Because the results came from retesting the old samples to verify an improved test for the hormone, they could not be used to penalize Mr. Armstrong.
Nevertheless, the report set off a panic at the cycling union as it fended off attempts by the World Anti-Doping Agency to open an investigation of its own. Instead, the cycling union said it would appoint Emile Vrijman, a Dutch antidoping official, to conduct an independent inquiry into the lab tests and their findings. For reasons not explained in the report, Bill Stapleton, Mr. Armstrong’s agent, helped write the news release announcing the move.
The news release indicated that Mr. Vrijman would investigate everything raised by the story. But the commission found that Mr. McQuaid had sent Mr. Vrijman a private note by fax telling him that the “investigation must clearly be restricted” to how the lab test results became public and ignore the test results.
“It could potentially be read from the message that U.C.I.’s primary concern was not to examine the veracity of the allegations,” the commission wrote.
Mr. Armstrong’s involvement in the ostensibly independent inquiry did not end with the news release.
After Mr. Vrijman produced a confidential draft report in February 2006, Mark S. Levinstein, a prominent sports lawyer from Washington then representing Mr. Armstrong, began revising the text.
While the reason for the lawyer’s involvement was not explained, the commission found that Mr. Levinstein had “inserted substantial amounts of text,” mostly criticizing WADA and the French lab that ran the drug test. Mr. Levinstein also added a section to the report that the commission said was “highly critical” of Dick Pound, the head of WADA at the time as well as the director of the French antidoping lab.
Despite Mr. Levinstein’s writing and editing assistance, Mr. Verbruggen was unhappy with what Mr. Vrijman had presented as his final draft. “You are running with such an incredible bow around WADA that I am asking myself if they are the client,” he wrote to the independent investigator. In a note to Mr. Levinstein, Mr. Verbruggen complained that the report had ignored “full evidence that Dick Pound has been targeting” Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Levinstein replied that he would work with Mr. Vrijman on it.
Mr. Stapleton also sought to reassure Mr. Verbruggen. “The document is going after WADA as I know you (and we) want them to do and as they should,” he wrote.
The commission concluded that the “main goal was to ensure that the report reflected U.C.I.’s and Lance Armstrong’s personal conclusions.”
Mr. Pound said Sunday: “The fact that you’re investigating Armstrong and using his lawyers to draft your independent report is even worse than everyone expected.”
Sometimes the cycling union and Mr. Armstrong exchanged favors. Mr. Armstrong wanted to use Australia’s Tour Down Under, which had promised him a $1 million appearance fee, to return from retirement early in 2009. But he had not joined a long-term athlete tracking program far enough in advance to enter under the antidoping rules. At first Mr. McQuaid said publicly that he would not bend the rules. But two days after Mr. Armstrong privately told Mr. McQuaid that he planned to ride in the Tour of Ireland, a small and struggling event partly organized by Mr. McQuaid’s brother, the cycling union president personally gave Mr. Armstrong his waiver.
Much of the report reviews the sport’s doping history. While a series of court cases, investigations, confessions and books had previously detailed that story, the commission added revelations about technique and the lackluster nature of the cycling union’s antidoping operation.
One major problem with the technique of removing blood from riders in the off-season, freezing it and then putting it back in during races was getting blood bags past the border police. The report indicated that riders’ circulatory systems had been turned into smuggling devices.
“One rider provided information confirming that he would be given two to three units of blood in Madrid and he would then travel to France, where the units would be removed immediately, to be used later throughout the Tour,” the commission found.
Clinics in Slovenia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe sold frozen blood to teams, according to the commission.
The commission found that more sophisticated antidoping efforts in recent years had led to a significant decline in drug use, but that doping had hardly been eradicated from the sport.
“The commission did not hear from anyone credible in the sport who would give cycling a clean bill of health in the context of doping today,” the report said. “However, the general view was that doping is either less prevalent today or that the nature of doping practices has changed such that the performance gains are smaller. There was a general feeling that this has created an environment where riders can now at least be competitive when riding clean.”
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