In a report to air on Sunday’s ’60 Minutes,’ a Lance Armstrong teammate says he witnessed the seven-time Tour de France champ use EPO, an illicit performance-boosting drug.
“I saw it in his refrigerator,” Tyler Hamilton tells journalist Scott Pelley. “I saw him inject it, more than one time.”
The 39-year-old cancer survivor has always denied steroid use, but the allegations remain under federal investigation.
Hamilton claims knowledge of Armstrong’s doping as far back as 1999, the first year the beloved racer won the Tour de France. Other cyclists have shared similar testimony with investigators.
Now Armstrong has come out swinging, enlisting a Bill Clinton strategist to launch a new website, Facts4Lance.com, which disputes the charge that performance enhancers contributed to the athlete’s astounding winning streak.
Though the site says Armstrong “has passed nearly 500 tests over 20 years of competition,” Hamilton claims Armstrong once confessed to failing a 2001 test administered during the Tour de Swiss.
“Everyone would be frustrated” by how CBS treated him, Armstrong tells The Daily Beast, in discussing why he dropped out of a sit-down with Pelley (who will soon take over as CBS news anchor). The cycling champ says the ’60 Minutes’ producer is not “a straight shooter…my version of events has never changed on this, and won’t.”
The Armstrong camp claims ’60 Minutes’ refused to divulge the accusers’ names in advance. But producers counter that Armstrong’s lawyers “would guess who it was in our story and try to assassinate their character” and provide “all kinds of negative things” including “dark motivation” to discredit any witness accusing him of doping.
As for Armstrong’s legions of fans and LiveStrong.org members, the Associated Press reports that plenty remain loyal to their hero, despite the scandal. “I don’t believe it to be true,” said Raifie Bass, a bicycling fan and cancer survivor. “But if that was the case, it would hurt his legacy as a cyclist. But it’s not how many Tours he won or what he’s done for cycling. It’s what he’s done for cancer.”
