Cycling body to study USADA claims

Report states Armstrong was at centre of widespread doping conspiracy.

PARIS: Cycling’s world governing body said it would look at a US Anti-Doping Agency report that accused seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong of being at the centre of a widespread doping conspiracy.

“The UCI [Union Cycliste Internationale] will examine all information received in order to consider issues of appeal and recognition, jurisdiction and statute of limitation, within the term of appeal of 21 days, as required by the World Anti-Doping Code,” it said in a short statement on its website.

“The UCI will endeavour to provide a timely response and not to delay matters any longer than necessary.”

The USADA claimed that Armstrong’s US Postal Service cycling team ran ‘the most sophisticated and successful doping programme the sport has ever seen’.

Armstrong ‘did not merely use performance-enhancing drugs. He supplied them to his teammates. He was not just a part of the doping culture on his team. He enforced and re-enforced it’.

Eleven of the Texan’s former teammates testified against him, forming the basis for the USADA’s 202-page ‘reasoned decision’ into why it banned Armstrong for life in August, with more than 1,000 pages of evidence.

Armstrong appears unaffected

Meanwhile, Armstrong gave off an air of indifference to claims that he was at the centre of the biggest doping scandal in sporting history, saying that he was concentrating on his charitable work.

“What am I doing tonight? Hanging with my family, unaffected, and thinking about this,” he wrote on his Twitter account, linking to his Livestrong foundation website and a series of fund-raising events for cancer research.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2012.