Ex-pals reveal Armstrong’s ‘brazen’ drug use to achieve ‘cycling glory’

Washington: Former colleagues of former world record breaking cyclist Lance Armstrong have claimed that he used to keep performance-enhancing drugs in his own medicine cabinet, while his US Postal Service team used ‘legal loopholes’ and ‘cloak-and-dagger’ techniques to dope their way to cycling glory.

Armstrong’s former personal assistant, Mike Anderson, wrote in a magazine, Outside, that the cyclist routinely stored steroids in the bathroom, seemingly for anyone to find. Armstrong allegedly didn’t deny using them when confronted by Anderson. “ ‘Everyone does it,’ he said nonchalantly, looking me straight in the eyes. That floored me. I didn’t say anything else, but the implication was clear enough,” “I knew what it was. Not exactly at first, but I sensed from my rudimentary knowledge of medicine that this box shouldn’t be in the bathroom of a professional cyclist. The label said Androstenedione,” he wrote. Anderson’s revelation comes as a tell-all written by former US Postal Service cyclist Tyler Hamilton, titled ‘The Secret Race’, is set to hit the shelves tomorrow, exposing the unscrupulous acts of Armstrong and his teammates. In the book, Hamilton alleges Armstrong and his team took advantage of a French law that barred drug testers from hitting up cyclists for samples from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. The cyclists juiced in small amounts, or “microdosed,” at the stroke of 10 p.m. so the drugs would be out of their system eight hours later. He also claims that Armstrong had a mysterious motorcyclist, nicknamed “Motoman”, who closely followed USPS racers along the Tour de France route and carried banned erythropoietin and prepaid cellphones to quietly set up juice drops. “The drugs were dished out by Armstrong to teammates in white lunch bags after stages of the famous French race,” Hamilton alleges. On Aug. 23, Armstrong gave up his long fight against the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to clear himself of doping charges, which may ban him from cycling and strip him of his seven Tour de France titles, if the International Cycling Union approves of the USADA judgment. ANI