Teammate of Lance Armstrong at the US Postal, Tyler Hamilton returned to the sophistication of the doping methods put in place by the Texan and Johan Bruyneel.
After nearly fifteen years of denying any doping, Lance Armstrong had finally split the armor against Oprah Winfrey. Convicted of doping a few months earlier by the American authorities and dispossessed of all his victories since 1998, including his seven victories in the Tour de France, the American rider had finally admitted to having massively doped during his entire career or almost.
The former leader of the US Postal had nevertheless remained vague on the practical details of his doping. But if the Texan had remained silent on the subject, some of his former teammates were much more talkative like Tyler Hamilton, who had sat down to the table in front of the investigators and had even published a book on the subject.
Interviewed as part of the documentary broadcast on LCP, the former runner went into detail about the system put in place by Lancé Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel. the former athletic director of the US Postal. ” Lance had a gardener named Philipp who liked to ride motorcycles. He was the one who…everything was organized in advance. He passed by at different points in the race where he deposited the EPO for the team. So we kept EPO with us for only maybe an hour. The rest of the time, we didn’t touch it. An injection lasts ten or fifteen seconds,” he explained.
The two thinking heads of the American team had planned everything. ” Then we threw the syringe in an empty can or something like that. Then we crushed the can to make it look like trash. Then the team doctor would pick it up, put it in his backpack and get rid of it further, discreetly, that was the most important thing. “, he continued.
And the doctors of the American training were not left out. ” Sometimes when a rider was very close to the 50% limit and an “unannounced” doping control was scheduled for the next morning, the doctors prepared it the night before. They’d give you a bag of saline solution and inject it into you, just to bring the hematocrit down. »