Cycling Union Ignored Doping and Shielded Armstrong

For years, cycling's top officials turned a blind eye to doping, operating in deference primarily to one rider - Lance Armstrong - according to a reform commission that spent the past year excavating the sport's doping problems.

The three-member commission issued a scathing indictment of the sport's officials Sunday, laying much of the blame on a governing body that, it said, had interests that ran counter to any genuine efforts to expose doping.

The 227-page report detailed how Armstrong's extraordinary influence had not only compelled officials to ignore drug use but had also enabled his lawyer to secretly write and edit the report of an earlier investigation into Armstrong's doping practices.

The panel was appointed by the main target of its criticism, the International Cycling Union, commonly known as UCI, in January 2014 as part of an effort by its newly elected president to rebuild the sport after revelations of the sophisticated doping program of Armstrong and his team. In October 2012, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency exposed Armstrong's years of cheating in devastating breadth and detail.

"For a long time, the main focus of UCI leadership was on the growth of the sport worldwide, and its priority was to protect the sport's reputation; doping was perceived as a threat to this," the report said, adding that "the emphasis of UCI's anti-doping policy was, therefore, to give the impression that UCI was tough on doping rather than actually being good at anti-doping."

Armstrong, the report suggests, personified the problem. Through interviews and internal documents, the commission found that his first Tour de France victory, a year after a police raid nearly shut down the 1998 race, was seen by the cycling union's leaders as the salvation of both the sport and their organization.

His stardom, the report suggests, effectively blinded the cycling union's leadership.

"Lance Armstrong was considered as a veritable icon by the institution: A cancer survivor who had managed to beat his disease, helped the sport to recover and to return some credibility to UCI," the panel wrote. "The UCI leadership did not know how to differentiate between Armstrong the hero, seven-time winner of the Tour, cancer survivor, huge financial and media success and a role model for thousands of fans, from Lance Armstrong the cyclist, a member of the peloton with the same rights and obligations as any other professional cyclist."

Representatives for Armstrong said Sunday that they had not seen the report. Armstrong has confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs for much of his cycling career.

The sweeping report, which documents the history of doping in cycling as well as current doping practices, also focuses much of its attention on Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid, two former presidents of the cycling union who were close allies. The rise of powerful forms of doping based on synthetic human hormones like EPO, a blood booster, coincided with substantial growth in the size, power and finances of the cycling union under the leadership of Verbruggen and McQuaid.

After reading an advance copy of the report, Verbruggen dismissed it as unfair in an interview with ANP, a Dutch news agency.

"There is a lot of what we could have done better, but that's easy to say 25 years later," he said. "And there is a lot of criticism of me; I was a dictator and was too close to Armstrong. They had obviously come up with something."

McQuaid did not respond to requests for comment.

For Armstrong, the report provides a small amount of vindication. While the commissioners did find that Armstrong's special position had kept him from serious scrutiny and led to cover-ups, they did not conclude that donations he had made to UCI were bribes, although they chastised UCI for accepting them.

The commission also rejected allegations that Armstrong had tested positive during the Tour of Switzerland and then successfully covered up. It did, however, find that he had suspicious test results at that race and was given special treatment afterward.

The commission also found that Armstrong's doping practices had not differed from those of many of his rivals. But it added, "All of this is of course no excuse or justification for Lance Armstrong's behavior, and there cannot be a shadow of a doubt that such behavior warrants a harsh sanction."

Much of the report reviews the sport's doping history. While a series of court cases, investigations, confessions and books have previously detailed that story, the commission added revelations about technique and the lackluster nature of the cycling union's anti-doping operation.

One major problem with the technique of removing blood from riders in the offseason, freezing it and then putting it back in during races was getting blood bags past the border police. The report indicated that riders' circulatory systems had been turned into smuggling devices.

"One rider provided information confirming that he would be given two to three units of blood in Madrid and he would then travel to France, where the units would be removed immediately, to be used later throughout the Tour," the commission found.

Clinics in Slovenia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe sold frozen blood to teams, according to the commission.

The commission found that more sophisticated anti-doping efforts in recent years had led to a significant decline in drug use, but that doping had hardly been eradicated from the sport.

"The commission did not hear from anyone credible in the sport who would give cycling a clean bill of health in the context of doping today," the report said. "However, the general view was that doping is either less prevalent today or that the nature of doping practices has changed such that the performance gains are smaller. There was a general feeling that this has created an environment where riders can now at least be competitive when riding clean."

© 2015 New York Times News Service