former Armstrong teammate admits using EPO in 1999

[daryn]

from NYTimes
Fears for Sport Made Cyclist Come Clean
By JULIET MACUR
Published: September 12, 2006

Frankie Andreu, who twice helped Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France, stood in the kitchen of his suburban Detroit home last month and faced the question: Had he ever doped?

As his three young children played in the next room, Andreu, 39, bowed his head. At first, he said he did not know what to say. He did not want to answer. Then, he said that thinking about all of the athletes who had lied about drug use compelled him to tell the truth. So he revealed his secret.

“I tried my best never to use performance-enhancing drugs,” he said. “I did make a couple of bad choices, but that was a long, long time ago. It’s not something to be proud of. I did use EPO, but only for a couple of races.”

Andreu, a widely respected competitor throughout his career and a member of the USA Cycling board, spoke at considerable risk. The United States Anti-Doping Agency can investigate and punish athletes who say they have used performance-enhancing substances.

Even so, he said, the guilt of using EPO, a synthetic drug that helps boost endurance, had been eating at him. He compared using the drug for a few races to robbing a bank: “Does it matter if you stole 10 cents or 10 million dollars?” he asked. “It’s still stealing.”

Andreu, once Armstrong’s teammate and roommate, said he hoped his admission would help expose the tradition of doping in cycling and perhaps begin to change it. He said he wanted his children to be able to ride professionally someday and not have to use drugs to succeed.

Someday, he said, he and his wife, Betsy, would tell their children, who are all under 8, about his decision to use EPO and to later make a stand against it. Until now, however, none of his family members except his wife have known about his past.

“I think our kids will appreciate the fact that their father just could not lie,” Betsy Andreu said. “It will teach them to be honest, no matter what the consequences are.”

Until July, Frankie Andreu, a two-time Olympian, was co-director of the Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team, which races in the United States. He was fired because he missed a race, a team spokeswoman said.

Shortly before learning of Andreu’s dismissal, Tony Cruz, a rider on the team, said: “We all like Frankie. He is very good at his job.”

Betsy Andreu said she thought Frankie was let go because they had testified in a contract dispute between Armstrong and a company called SCA Promotions, which had withheld a bonus from Armstrong because of allegations of doping. In February, Armstrong and the company that owned his race team settled their suit against SCA, receiving the bonus as well as interest and legal fees.

The Andreus said they were reluctant to testify, but they were required to do so under a court order. Under oath, they said they both overheard Armstrong, who had been found to have cancer, tell his oncologists that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong testified that no one at the hospital had asked him if he had used performance-enhancing drugs, and he denied using such drugs. He also challenged the motives of the Andreus.

Nearly a dozen people in cycling declined to be interviewed about the Andreus, saying they feared for their jobs because of Armstrong’s influence in the sport.

The Andreus wonder how Frankie’s confession will affect his future. He has been a television commentator at the Tour and does motivational speaking about cycling. He has a small real estate business in Dearborn, Mich., to fall back on, but he says he still dreads being called “a rat, a narc or a traitor.”

Nonetheless, he says he hopes others come forward. He said a program should be established for athletes to disclose details about doping without facing punishment.

“Everybody’s afraid to talk because they don’t want to implicate themselves,” he said. “But there are guys out there who love the sport and who hate doping. They are the guys who have to speak up if the sport is going to survive.”

[daryn]

a viewpoint from one of the writers on sportsIllustrated.com

The truth is out there
Smoking gun may be finally catching up with Lance
by E.M. Swift

Is the truth finally catching up with Lance Armstrong, and is this one race the seven-time Tour de France champion may not be able to win?

In Tuesday's New York Times, two of Armstrong's former U.S. Postal Service teammates admit to having used EPO, an illegal performance-enhancing drug, at some point in 1999, the first year Armstrong won the Tour de France. While neither said they saw Armstrong do the same, the implication was that the drug use was common knowledge within the team. "The environment was certainly one of, to be accepted, you had to use doping products," said one of Armstrong's teammates, who requested anonymity, fearing reprisals from the notoriously vindictive Armstrong, who still wields considerable power in cycling.

The other teammate was 39-year-old Frankie Andreu, a domestique who competed professionally for 12 years and was once Armstrong's close friend and roommate. He's now a motivational speaker and real-estate dealer in Dearborn, Mich. He said he only used EPO "for a couple of races" and was speaking out in hopes of cleaning up his tainted sport.

More interesting -- to me, anyway -- was the testimony the Times uncovered that Andreu and his wife, Betsy, gave last fall during a lawsuit between Armstrong and SCA Promotions. The company had withheld a $5 million bonus it owed Armstrong after he won the '04 Tour because of doping allegations.

The suit was eventually settled out of court in Armstrong's favor, but in their sworn testimony the Andreus said that when they visited Armstrong in the hospital after he'd been diagnosed with testicular cancer, they'd heard him tell his oncologists that he'd used "steroids, testosterone, cortisone, growth hormone and EPO." In the same trial, Armstrong testified that his doctors never asked him if he'd used performance-enhancing drugs, and that he'd never used those substances.

Which testimony is more credible? Ask yourself which party had the most to gain by lying. And why is that particular testimony significant? Because one of the possible side effects of prolonged steroid use is testicular cancer. It's impossible to prove, but if what the Andreus testified to under oath is true, then Lance Armstrong, role model and hero to so many cancer survivors, may very well have helped bring about his own cancer through his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Young athletes tempted to go down that road need to know if that's the case.

None of what was reported in the Times is a shock to me. In 1999 I went to see Willy Voet, the Belgian trainer of the French-based Festina cycling team who was at the center of the '98 Tour de France scandal when he was arrested while crossing the border with literally hundreds of vials of EPO, growth hormones and testosterone.

Voet ended up spending time in prison, and by the time he talked to me he was a man filled with remorse. He, too, was interested in helping to clean up his sport, and had written a book in French, the title of which translates as Chain Massacre: Revelations of 30 Years of Cheating. It made him an outcast in cycling but painstakingly chronicled the drug culture that only now is recognized as having infected the sport.

In the 1970s, Voet said, the drug of choice was amphetamines. In the '80s it was anabolic steroids and cortisone. In the '90s it was growth hormones and EPO. He described leaning out a car window to give a shot to a cyclist in the middle of a race. He recalled hiding condoms of clean urine in the anus of cyclists to fool drug-testers. He spoke of dripping IV bags of saline solution into their bodies after a race to lower the ratio of red-blood-cell volume to total blood volume to avoid EPO detection in the event of a surprise drug test.

Of the 500 cyclists he'd worked with over the years, only two had ever failed a drug test. "A racer who gets caught by doping control is dumb as a mule," Voet told me.

And how many of those 500 cyclists he worked with did not take drugs to enhance their performance? "I can count them on two hands. Maybe two hands and two feet if I'm generous," Voet said. And where did the clean ones finish? I wondered.

"The back of the pack," Voet said.

Armstrong never finished at the back of the pack. Neither did his onetime teammate, Tyler Hamilton, the '04 Olympic champion who was suspended for two years for blood doping. Neither did another former teammate, Floyd Landis, who failed a doping test after winning this year's Tour de France. Neither did Italy's Ivan Basso, or Germany's Jan Ullrich, or Spain's Francisco Mancebo, who finished second, third and fourth to Armstrong in the '05 Tour, all of whom have been implicated in the Spanish doping investigation that rocked the start of this year's Tour. Each disputes the allegations.

There's nothing new in any of this. Voet was telling the truth, but not enough people were listening. The sport of cycling is dirty, was dirty and will continue to be dirty until more athletes like Andreu and trainers like Voet come forward and break the code of silence. Remember those names. They're the heroes.

Here's the thing about truth: It may take a while. It may take years. But truth's a tenacious battler. Eventually it will come out.

original article here