Huh. I assumed this was going to be a collision of acronyms but erythropoietin is the same EPO used medicinally to treat anemia and abused by several generations of endurance athletes (complications include strokes and heart attacks from blood clot).
It’s a stress-signaling hormone produced by the kidneys when they detect hypoxia and triggers more red blood cell production in bone marrow.
Or, consider that the causation could have been the other way around. The EPO could have made him more susceptible to cancer.
There is a mountain of evidence that the drug cheating was systematic. You can read The Secret Race, or draw your own conclusions from the $5 million false claims act settlement.
He was on steroids post treatment as well. Chemotherapy likes to cause anemia. In fact I think that’s where I first heard of EPO. Some survivor crowing about the efficacy at making them feel human again.
And they’ve discovered in more recent studies that steroid use has effects that last about twice as long as it’s detectable in your body (2 vs 1 year?). If sports weren’t such a young person’s game, I’d worry about people taking off for “surgery” and coming back built like a linebacker but testing clean.
Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test. The CEO of the insurance company responsible for underwriting bonus payments for Tour de France wins had read a book full of circumstantial evidence of the US Postal Service team doping and contested paying out the bonus. He knew they'd lose, but wanted to force the hands of some investigative body with real power to actually look into it. Federal prosecutors took up the case for a couple years, but then dropped it. Then USADA finally got a bunch of his former teammates and medical staffers to testify against him. Lance didn't even contest the finding because the evidence was so overwhelming, he figured his best course of action at that point was trying to keep the report confidential and winning in the court of public opinion instead, convincing all of his adoring fans that he was the victim of a witch hunt.
Obviously, that didn't work, but I guess he was just ahead of his time. These days, he could have run for president.
> Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test
That's not how I read this part of the Wikipedia article[1]:
> In June 2012, USADA accused Armstrong of doping and drug trafficking, based on blood samples from 2009 and 2010
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#20...
Fair enough. I should specify he never failed a drug test from the period in which all of his UCI and Olympic wins were rescinded, which I believe was 1998 to 2005. I'm also reasonably sure he never got popped specifically for EPO. There has been a test to find recombinant EPO since 2000, but it can only detect its presence for something like 18 hours after injection and you only need to inject weekly. Out of other ways to blood dope, only tranfusion from another person is detectable by any means whatsoever. It's why they use the athlete biological passport instead and look for increases in red blood cell count or hematocrit that are not physiologically possible without doping.
He was working with doctors who were knowledgeable of techniques the UCI was not testing for yet, and in masking. That’s why he got popped on the stored samples. They have rules against doping that are set up to cover substances they don’t have tests for yet and that is part of why they store samples.
But they were also using “blood doping” which is essentially giving blood transfusions to yourself. One of his lieutenants, Tyler Hamilton, got busted for it a few years before Lance got caught. He claimed he was innocent and maybe it was chimerism or an absorbed twin. But this dumb fucker had already been caught doping several times before, one of which stuck and the other failed on a technicality (frozen backup sample could not be tested) My guess is they switched bags and he’s lucky he got a compatible bloodtype and didn’t stroke out. He got caught doping again in 2009 and received an 8 year ban, and retired. And later was stripped of his gold medal as well.
The only legal form of blood doping is altitude training and that effect doesn’t last long enough for the Tour or the Gira. But could allow someone to get an early lead.
As for Lance not getting caught between 1998 and 2005, that’s only barely technically true. He was caught using corticosteroids in a test in 1999, but explained it away with a topical steroid allegedly for saddle sores. He confessed later that it was a cover up for his doping. He also tested positive for EPO six times during this period but as the tests were still experimental, there was some clever lawyering that kept it from sticking.
Laurent Fignon and Eddie Merckx have both been accused of stimulant use which cost them only one or two races instead of years.
Richard Virenque was a popular French rider who won the King of the Mountain many many times, when he went down it was for an entire cocktail of drugs including HGH.
And I had forgotten that Christian Vande Velde was caught in the postal service bust. He’s a commentator for NBC now. I wonder what Liggett thinks of that.
Sources: a bit of memory but mostly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cyclin... which, by the way, has become ridiculously, alarmingly long. Jesus Christ.
What makes this mildly funny, though I admit in quite poor taste, is the fact that Armstrong did indeed suffer of cancer to which he lost a testicle before his comeback to win multiple Tour de France back to back. So theoretically his EPO positive results could be attributed to those tumors producing it, if this research is to be believed. Maybe not all of the times though.