Published January 24, 2013 10:58AM
Bradley Wiggins lashed out at Lance Armstrong at Sky’s training camp media day this week, saying he lost trust in the banned American late in the 2009 Tour de France. Wiggins, winner of the 2012 Tour, told Cycling Weekly that he believes Armstrong was doping during his comeback in 2009.
“That was the thing that upset me the most about 2009 and 2010. I thought, ‘you lying bastard.’ I can still remember going toe-to-toe with him, watching him and his body language. The man I saw at the top of Verbier in 2009 to the man I saw on the top of Ventoux two weeks later, it wasn’t the same bike rider. Watch the videos and see the way the guy was riding. I just don’t believe anything that comes out of his mouth anymore,” said Wiggins.
Wiggins finished fourth in the 2009 Tour, one place behind Armstrong, and lost time to the American on Mount Ventoux after dropping him two weeks earlier on the Verbier. The UCI wiped Armstrong’s name from the results sheet in October, but did not promote Wiggins to third, deciding to leave his Tour results from 1999 on blank.
“When he started welling up about his 13-year-old son asking him what it’s all about — I never have to have that conversation with my own son. His father’s won the Tour clean; there’s this element of being smug about the whole thing to be honest. Then I got a ‘you deserve everything you get’ kind of thing. By the end, I was feeling no sympathy for him behind all the welling up and the tears,” said Wiggins.
On his website, Michele Ferrari on Tuesday detailed the likely effects of testosterone, EPO, and blood transfusions on elite cyclists, including Lance Armstrong, and claimed that the Texan would have won the Tour de France by employing altitude training instead of doping.
“I think Lance is wrong,” wrote Ferrari, who is banned for life in connection to the U.S. Postal Service doping investigation. “If his way of taking testosterone was the one reported by several teammates (microdoses diluted in olive oil, under the tongue), this could not have more than a placebo effect.”
Ferrari continued, addressing EPO and autologous transfusions.
“EPO and auto-transfusions, always in the manner reported by teammates (micro-doses of EPO and one to two units of blood) correspond to an increase of Hb-mass by five to 10 percent for an endurance athlete weighing 75kg, who has nine to 10 liters of blood.
“Such increments of Hb-mass correspond to performance improvements in the order of three to six percent… Equal increases in Hb-mass can be achieved with appropriate periods of altitude training.”
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Editor’s note: It appears as though the original post on Michele Ferrari’s website is returning an error.