Disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong has explained how he was able to evade detection for using performance-enhancing drugs in competition, before his sporting career came to a crashing halt.
The 52-year-old athlete's reputation and legacy were tarnished after it emerged that he had used performance-enhancing drugs for much of his career. He was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned from competitive cycling for life in 2012.
Amid the fallout, Armstrong agreed in April 2018 to pay $5 million to the U.S. government as settlement for accusations of fraud in a lawsuit that could have cost him $100 million. He had failed to block the lawsuit in 2017.
The lawsuit was filed in 2010 by Floyd Landis, a former teammate of Armstrong in the U.S. Postal team who was stripped of his 2006 Tour title after testing positive for a banned substance.
Now, more than a decade after the scandal broke, Texas native Armstrong revisited his actions during a recent appearance on comedian Bill Maher's Club Random podcast.
During their conversation, Armstrong spoke about being approached to be a part of Bryan Fogel's Oscar-winning 2017 documentary Icarus, which set out to document the truth about doping in sports and unexpectedly uncovered a scandal about Russian sports.
Armstrong told Maher: "[Fogel] calls me says, 'I have this idea. I'm gonna make this documentary, and I'm gonna take all the drugs that you guys supposedly took and I'm gonna prove that you can't get caught. You can get around it.' And I'm like, 'I don't think I can help you. I think this is a bad idea.'"
Calling Icarus "an amazing documentary," Armstrong went on to answer Maher's questions over whether it is possible for an athlete to mask their use of the drugs.
"Yes, you can. But... it's not so much masking," Armstrong explained. "In a sense, you would foil the system, but what I always said—and I'm not trying to justify what I ever 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 is the truth. There was no way around the test. When I p***** in the cup and they tested the p*** 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... in two weeks and test positive, because the half-life is much longer."
Armstrong went on to explain that he was one of "thousands" of endurance athletes who had been taking erythropoietin (EPO), which involves a doping of the blood. Per the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), EPO is used to "increase one's red blood cell mass, which allows the body to transport more oxygen to muscles and therefore increase stamina and performance."
"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," Armstrong told Maher. "With a four-hour half-life, you can just do the math."
During the interview, Maher insisted that there must be side effects for using the drug.
Responding, Armstrong said that he didn't "want to encourage anybody to do something that they just don't have to do," before explaining: "The truth is, you had a drug that was undetectable, that was wildly beneficial to performance and recovery. Both are important, but primarily to performance... And, as we were led to believe, which I don't disagree with, if taken under the care of a doctor was safe."
According to the USADA, EPO use "has significant clinical utility and therapeutic benefit when used appropriately, but its misuse to gain a performance benefit can result in serious health consequences."
As well as causing a thickening of the blood that can lead to increased risk of such potentially fatal conditions as heart disease, stroke and cerebral or pulmonary embolism, athletes who "misuse recombinant human EPO are also at risk of serious autoimmune diseases," said the USADA.
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