Cycling chiefs helped to cheat, cover up: Armstrong

IT was the story he had denied. The story Emma O’Reilly went some way to telling when she exposed Lance Armstrong as a drug cheat. But when the conversation moved to the subject of that positive test in 1999, he not only agreed with her that she had been right but went a stage further.

O’Reilly always believed there was a bigger conspiracy and with her sitting before him he finally revealed the full scale of the cover-up, naming Hein Verbruggen as a central figure in his escape from punishment.

Certainly, Armstrong used this opportunity to his full advantage. He wants his life ban reduced and he wants to work with cycling’s UCI governing body to achieve this. They will surely see his latest bombshell as a chance to open further discussions with him at their proposed truth and reconciliation committee hearing.

In his Sportsmail interview, Armstrong claims the former head of world cycling knew about his drug abuse and encouraged him to cover up his doping. He says the then president of the UCI,  Verbruggen, was complicit in the skulduggery that allowed him to continue in the 1999 Tour de France despite a positive drugs test.

And he goes into greater detail than ever before about the backdated prescription provided by the US Postal medical  staff which allowed him to escape punishment.

Yesterday’s allegations contradict Verbruggen’s insistence that he has never been involved in doping cover-ups. Armstrong has no desire to protect senior UCI officials if he appears before the independent inquiry that has been called for by Englishman Brian Cookson, world cycling’s new president.

It has been made clear to Armstrong that his cooperation could be rewarded with a reduction of his lifetime ban to eight years.
And he told Sportsmail: “To think I am protecting any of these guys after the way they treated me, that is ludicrous. I’m not protecting them at all. I have no loyalty towards them. I’m not going to lie to protect these guys. I hate them. They threw me under the bus. I’m done with them.”

Despite Sportsmail’s repeated attempts to contact Verbruggen, he was unavailable for comment. However, in a letter to the national cycling federations earlier this month to mark his departure from the UCI, where he had been serving as honorary president, Verbruggen defended himself.-Sportsmail.