Lance Armstrong relied on the short lifespan of performance-enhancing drugs in the bloodstream to evade anti-doping testers for years, he has said.
Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France victories and banned from cycling for life for his prolific doping, after eventually coming clean in a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey following years of rumours, accusations and denials. He paid $5m to the US government in a settlement following a $100m federal indictment built on the testimony of whistleblowers including his former teammate Floyd Landis.
Now 52, Armstrong is a prominent media personality, and recently detailed the methods which kept him on top of the sport for a decade during an appearance on comedian Bill Maher‘s Club Random podcast.
“You would foil the system,“ Armstrong said. “What I always said, and I’m not trying to justify what I said as something I would want to repeat again, but one of the lines was, ‘I’ve been tested 500 times and I’ve never failed a drug test’.
“That’s not a lie. That’s the truth. There was no way around the test. When I pissed in the cup and they tested the piss in the cup, it passed. Now, the reality and the truth of all of this is, some of these substances, primarily the one that is the most beneficial, has a four-hour half-life. So certain substances, whether it be cannabis or anabolics, or whatever, have much longer half-lives.
“You could smoke that joint and go to work driving your tractor [and] in two weeks test positive, because the half-life is much longer. With EPO, which was the rocket fuel that changed not just our sport but every endurance sport, you have a four-hour half-life, so it leaves the body very quickly. With a four-hour half-life, you can just do the math.”
