Cycling: IOC willing to help in Armstrong-Pound clash

MUNICH - The International Olympic Committee said today it was willing to help resolve a bitter dispute between Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency Dick Pound.

Armstrong has written to IOC chief Jacques Rogge asking him to take disciplinary action against Pound, an IOC member, for what the American says were violations of IOC rules by Pound over a doping investigation involving the cyclist.

"The IOC is not directly a party to it," IOC director of communications Giselle Davies said after the first day of the IOC's Executive Board meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland.

She added: "If it can help facilitate that the parties could agree to an independent inquiry, it would be willing to do so."

In an eight-page letter sent to Rogge earlier this month, Armstrong accused Pound of violating IOC rules by his conduct during the independent investigation into doping allegations made last August against Armstrong by French newspaper L'Equipe.

Armstrong, seven times a Tour de France winner but now retired, was cleared in May.

Lawyer Emile Vrijman, who led the probe, said WADA and the French national doping laboratory had effectively pronounced Armstrong guilty of a doping violation without sufficient basis.

Pound rejected the Vrijman report as "bordering on the farcical."

- REUTERS