Cycling: Teammate backs up Kiwi's dope claims

A former teammate of Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and Kiwi cyclist Stephen Swart has given evidence about a conversation in which Swart claims it was decided they would dope with banned drugs.

Armstrong, who retired last year after overcoming cancer to win a record seventh tour, has repeatedly said he has never used banned performance enhancing drugs.

Swart, who now works in the construction industry and lives in Auckland, has claimed they discussed going on a doping programme while on a training ride in Italy in 1995. It was decided they would begin a "medical programme" doping with endurance-boosting drug EPO.

Armstrong's attitude was "you have to do what you have to do", Swart testified in January.

Regarding the same training ride and alleged EPO discussions, a second teammate, American Frankie Andreu, testified at the same hearing about "a general tone of stepping up, meaning in training and possibly maybe even participating, maybe taking EPO ... because there were many riders that were doing it".

Armstrong testified: "I was never party to that conversation. If it took place - I'm not calling Frankie a liar, but there ... are many other people he could have had that talk with."

The testimony - including exhibits and thousands of pages of testimony leaked from a record of confidential arbitration proceedings in Dallas - was published this month by the Los Angeles Times.

The Times said that rumours had long shadowed Armstrong's career, but for the first time assertions had been made under oath and were the first on-the-record outlines of a possible case against one of the most popular US athletes.

The record showed no eyewitnesses to Armstrong's alleged drug use and in his own sworn testimony Armstrong unequivocally denied ever doping. He has never been sanctioned for a failed doping test.

"I would never beat my wife and I never took performance-enhancing drugs," Armstrong testified.

According to Swart's testimony he and his teammates had their blood tested during one of the mountain stages of the 1995 tour to check the percentage of red blood cells, known as the hematocrit level.

Although a test for EPO was not introduced until 2001, anything above 50 per cent leads experts to suspect EPO use; a high percentage also prompts medical concerns as a dense population of red cells can turn the blood sluggish. The world cycling union later introduced a rule barring a rider with a percentage higher than 50 per cent from starting in races.

Swart testified that his percentage was 47, and that all other team members including Armstrong were higher than 50, The level for most males is 42.

The Times said Armstrong was asked at the hearing whether he recalled any Motorola riders having recorded a level above 50. "No ... Certainly not myself," Armstrong responded.

As part of a project in 2004 to refine lab procedures, researchers used archived urine samples from earlier years, including a collection of Armstrong's samples from the 1999 tour.

Australian scientist Michael Ashenden, who helped develop the EPO test used at the Sydney Olympics, told arbitrators the project's results showed Armstrong's levels rising and falling - consistent with a series of injections of EPO during the tour.

Armstrong, who has since accused the research lab of misconduct, flatly rejected Ashenden's analysis, calling the claims a "pure witch hunt". "I'll go to my grave knowing that when I urinated in the bottle, it was clean," he testified.