Saugy denies the Texan tested positive at Tour of Switzerland
Martial Saugy, the chief of the Lausanne laboratory that conducted the suspicious Lance Armstrong test from the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, says that was not the only questionable test result that Armstrong provided.
The American’s former teammates Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis told the US Anti-Doping Agency that Armstrong revealed to them he tested positive for EPO at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland but that his people would make the result go away.
Saugy however says the test was suspicious but was in no way a positive test even by today’s standards. “There was no positive test on the Tour of Switzerland in 2001,” he told AFP. “There’s no way today that this could be defended as a positive result, it’s impossible,” added Saugy.
“Since 2003, procedures oblige to take into account the risks of a false-positive which could verify that urine had not been affected by the physiology of the cyclist or degraded by bacteria.
“This was not done at the time and the urine no longer exists because the rules did not require keeping it.”
However the lab chief did reveal it was not the only suspicious test Armstrong gave. According to Saugy, the International Cycling Union told him about another test result in 2002.
“Armstrong had another suspect result during the 2002 Dauphine Libere. The politics of the UCI at that time, if there was such a result involving an important competitor, was to meet them and ask for an explanation,” claimed Saugy.
“That was their approach to prevention. The UCI said to me at the end of June 2002: ‘we warned the rider for whom you had a suspect result in 2001, he gave another suspect return at another lab and he would like to know by which method it was tested’.
“The rider was Armstrong. It was then that I learned about it.”
The UCI has scheduled a press conference for Monday morning where they will rule on the USADA report, either enforcing the lifetime ban for Armstrong or taking the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.