Seven-time champion Lance Armstrong hit out Saturday only hours before the start of his final Tour de France campaign at more "false" doping accusations leveled by former teammate Floyd Landis.
Landis, in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal, claimed that he, Armstrong and some other members of the U.S. Postal team received performance-enhancing blood transfusions during the 2004 Tour de France, which Armstrong won for the sixth of his seven Tour titles.
Only hours before the start of the race's opening prologue in Rotterdam, the 38-year-old RadioShack team rider once more hit back at Landis's "baseless" claims.
"Today's Wall Street Journal article is full of false accusations and more of the same old news from Floyd Landis, a person with zero credibility and an established pattern of recanting tomorrow what he swears to today," a statement from Armstrong said.
"The article repeats many of Landis's baseless and already-discredited claims against many successful people in cycling, and even includes some newly created Landis concoctions.
"Landis’ credibility is like a carton of sour milk: once you take the first sip, you don’t have to drink the rest to know it has all gone bad.
"For years, sensational stories -- based on the allegations of ax-grinders -- have surfaced on the eve of the Tour for publicity reasons, and this article is simply no different.
"Lastly, I have too much work to do during this, my final Tour, and then after my retirement in my continued fight against cancer, to add any attention to this predictable pre-Tour sensationalism."
Landis said nine days into the 2004 Tour, the U.S. Postal team, checked into a hotel near the village of Saint-Leonard-de-Noblat. According to Landis, one room at the hotel had been set aside for a secret procedure.
"Outside its door, Landis said, team staff members were stationed at each end of the hall to make sure nobody showed up unannounced," the Journal reported.
"The riders were told before they went into the room not to talk when they got inside, he said. The smoke detectors had been taken down, he said, plastic was taped over the heater and the air-conditioning unit, and anything with a hole in it was taped over.
"The purpose, Landis figured, was to obscure the view of any hidden camera.
"The riders on the team who participated in this procedure lay down on the bed, two at a time, Landis said, with a doctor on each side. Landis said he got a blood transfusion.
"He said he also saw Armstrong and two other team members, George Hincapie and Jose Luis Rubiera, taking blood. He said he didn't see any other riders getting transfusions that day."
The procedure, which enhances performance by boosting a rider's red-blood-cell counts, is considered cheating by the International Cycling Union, the sport's governing body.
Landis said that he wasn't sure what happened to the empty blood bags, but that on other occasions he had seen team staffers dispose of them by cutting them into tiny pieces and flushing them down the toilet.
Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title after a positive dope test and earlier this year sought expose what he called systematic doping in the sport.
In hours of interviews with the Journal in May, Landis detailed how he had used performance-enhancing drugs extensively during his career, and alleged that Armstrong and some others had done the same.
A separate article in the Journal Saturday described Landis' allegation that bicycles provided by Trek were sold, rather than given to team riders, to raise funds for the team's doping program.
Doping allegations have dogged Armstrong through much of his career. He has strenuously denied them and has never failed a doping test.
Armstrong and former U.S. Postal team manager Johan Bruyneel -- now at the helm of Armstrong's current RadioShack team -- have categorically denied all the accusations, AFP reported.
"Three other former U.S. Postal riders told the Journal in interviews that there was doping on the team during the time Mr. Armstrong was its lead rider, and one of them admitted that he himself had doped," the Wall Street Journal said.
"Several other riders said they had never observed such activity
during their time with the team."(This article is provided by
NewsCore, which aggregates news from around News Corporation.)
