Lance Armstrong, his teammates and the doctors and employees of the U.S. Postal Service and Discovery Channel teams employed a wide variety of techniques to attempt to avoida positive drug test. It has been a frequent refrain of Armstrong and his representatives over theyears that Lance Armstrong has never had a positive drug test. As discussed in the affidavit of Dr. Larry Bowers, that does not mean, however, he did not dope. Nor has Armstrong apparently had nearly as many doping tests as his representatives have claimed.
Mr. Armstrong’s counsel stated on the television show Nightline after his retirement in 2005 that Armstrong had successfully completed more than 300 doping tests over the course of a fourteen year career in professional cycling. Armstrong was retired until late 2008 and then came out of retirement to compete again for a little over two years. Yet, by the time of his second retirement his lawyers’ claims about the number of tests completed by Armstrong had mushroomed to “500 to 600 tests.” During his lawsuit Mr. Armstrong refused to respond to USADA’s requests for information about the number of tests he claimed to have had.
USADA has tested Mr. Armstrong on less than sixty occasions.741 The UCI has been
quoted as saying their records indicate slightly over 200 tests for Mr. Armstrong.742 Thus, the number of actual controls on Mr. Armstrong over the years appears to have been considerably fewer than the number claimed by Armstrong and his lawyers.
Moreover, it appears likely that the UCI blood draws for their health test program and for the biological passport program have been included in their test number estimates. These blood draws, however, are not true drug tests in the sense that the UCI has never traditionally tried to detect prohibited substances such as testosterone, EPO or corticosteroids in these blood samples.743 Rather, the UCI has simply used the blood samples to measure blood parameters such as hemoglobin, hematocrit and reticulocytes. Of course, this information has value when the measurements obtained over a period of time are compared. However, counting these blood draws in a number of successfully completed tests is misleading because the tests do not attempt to directly test for any prohibited substance.
In any case, as described below, the risk of Lance Armstrong ever testing positive was always relatively low and could be, and was, managed through precautions and evasive measures that were regularly employed by him and his team. Therefore, the contention that an absence of positive drug tests is proof that a cyclist is clean does not bear serious scrutiny.744
It was pretty easy to "beat" those tests. The easiest way was simply for the cyclists to avoid the testers. They wouldn't answer the door or else take off someplace.
There's lots more in the report, with the testing avoidance by the cyclists starting at page 131.
The system was extremely easy to game.
link
The New York Times also summarizes what is in the USADA's report on how Lance beat the system:
According to the report, Armstrong abruptly dropped out of one race after his teammate George Hincapie warned him through a text message that drug testers were at the team’s hotel. Armstrong had, Hincapie said in an affidavit, just taken a solution containing olive oil and testosterone.
Riders on Armstrong’s team, the agency said, also kept a constant lookout for testers and relayed information about them to one another. Team officials often seemed to know when a supposedly unannounced drug test would occur.
When the testers could not be avoided, Armstrong and his teammates turned to drug masking. The report indicated that during the 1998 world championships, testers were diverted to other riders on the United States team while one of Armstrong’s doctors “smuggled a bag of saline under his raincoat, getting it past the tester and administering saline to Armstrong before Armstrong was required to provide a blood sample.”
The saline infusion restored Armstrong’s blood values to a level that would not attract attention.
The report also showed how Armstrong, often in conjunction with Ferrari and the team director Johan Bruyneel, was careful to use techniques and drugs that were untraceable through tests.
What a cheater. Worse still is what a contemptable, vindictive, vicious person he is when he feels he is being crossed. The report is as damning about his character as it is about his doping. He would go out of his way to destroy anybody who was in his way. Ask Greg LeMond about it when he tried to blow the whistle on doping in cycling. Armstrong made his life hell.
Meanwhile, George Hincapie is likely no longer a friend of Strongarm's.
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