Judge orders Lance Armstrong to give three more hours of testimony
A federal judge has ordered Lance Armstrong to give three more hours of testimony to government attorneys in order to "fully explore" the disgraced cyclist's prior statements about his use of PEDs.
This comes in addition to the seven hours of testimony Armstrong had given under deposition on July 23, as part of the government's lawsuit to recover millions of dollars in sponsorship money the U.S. Postal Service paid to the disgraced cyclist's teams from 1998-2004. According to the Associated Press, penalties could approach $100 million.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued this ruling on Wednesday, as reported by USA Today Sports.
"Having reviewed the July 23 deposition transcript, the Court agrees that the Government is entitled to reopen Armstrong's deposition," Cooper wrote. "The Government has identified several lines of inquiry that it was not able to fully explore in the first seven hours, most notably Armstrong's own prior statements addressing allegations that he had used PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs). These statements -- many of them unequivocal denials -- are relevant to the Government's theory that Armstrong concealed his drug use from (the U.S. Postal Service). The Government is entitled to explore whether Armstrong will seek to disavow or qualify those earlier assertions at trial."
Armstrong's lawyers had fought against the "gratuitous" request for extra time, stating the government wasted "an enormous amount of record time establishing facts Armstrong has already admitted publicly," USA Today reported.
After years of fervent denials, Armstrong confessed in 2013 that he had doped to win the Tour de France seven times. He has since been stripped of his titles.
According to the USA Today report, Armstrong's attorneys are arguing that even though Armstrong doped in cycling, the USPS still got more than its money's worth out from its sponsorship contract.
