Lance Armstrong kept performance-enhancing drugs in his own medicine cabinet — and his US Postal Service team used legal loopholes and cloak-and-dagger techniques to dope their way to cycling glory, say two men once in his inner circle.
The cyclist’s reputation has eroded from inspirational cancer survivor to notorious cheat since he gave up his fight against doping allegations.
His former personal assistant, Mike Anderson, writes in Outside magazine 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,” Anderson writes.
His revelation comes as a tell-all written by former US Postal Service cyclist Tyler Hamilton is set to hit the shelves tomorrow, chronicling covert and weird acts by Armstrong and his teammates.
In “The Secret Race,” Hamilton alleges:
* Armstrong and the 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. This helped them avoid being tested during the period they called “glowtime,” when drugs would still be detectable.
* Armstrong had a mysterious motorcyclist closely following USPS racers along the Tour de France route. The man, nicknamed “Motoman,” 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.
* The racers had a code words for their little pick-me-ups — “red eggs” (testosterone pills), “Edgar” (erythropoietin) and “oil” (testosterone drops).
Hamilton writes of getting a text from his doctor on a prepaid phone on a Tour de France rest day. It read, “The restaurant is 167 miles away,” meaning he was to get a blood transfusion in hotel Room 167.
The blood transfusions were necessary to cover up banned substances. Hamilton said all the cheating seemed routine and was done without second thought — but the transfusions freaked him out.
“With the other stuff, you swallow a pill or put on a patch or get a tiny injection,” Hamilton writes.
“But here you’re watching a big, clear plastic bag slowly fill up with your warm, dark red blood. You never forget it.”
Anderson says he was helping Armstrong with a move to Spain in January 2004 when he tripped on a haphazardly stored banned substance.
“I found a prescription box in the medicine cabinet — to the side of the vanity in the bathroom — that sent everything spiraling,” Anderson writes.
“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.
“I looked it up on a laptop computer Armstrong had given me months before,’’ Anderson says. “I was searching for valid reasons why he would have this substance, a banned steroid. There were none. I put it back and did my best to forget about it.”
An Armstrong rep mocked Anderson’s claim, saying a long-distance bicyclist would not take androstenedione.
“The alleged substance produces the antithesis of an endurance athlete. [It] leads to increased muscle size and strength,” said Armstrong spokesman Mark Fabiani, who called Anderson a “disgruntled former employee.”
Armstrong’s win-at-all-costs attitude apparently extended to his marriage. Anderson recalls the cyclist coldly telling his wife, Kristin, he wanted a divorce on a Santa Barbara, Calif., beach in the summer of 2003.
“Clearly, he wanted his marriage to be over. But he showed no emotion, and the way he handled it — dropping the bomb and then leaving Kristin alone on the beach — seemed abrupt and cruel,” he writes.
On Aug. 23, Armstrong gave up his years-long fight to clear himself of doping charges and accepted a judgment from the US Anti-Doping Agency that banned him from competition and stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles.