PARIS: The Tour de France will have no official winner for the seven races from 1999-2005 if Lance Armstrong is stripped of his victories by the International Cycling Union.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Tour director Christian Prudhomme called the US Anti-Doping Agency’s report on Armstrong “damning”. It raises doubts, he said, about “a system and an era”.
Tour officials are still waiting on the UCI’s decision on whether to go along with USADA’s decision to ban Armstrong for life and erase his racing results. A spokesman for the sport’s governing body, Enrico Carpani, said it was “too early to say” what would happen. The UCI must decide by the end of the month whether to appeal USADA’s ruling.
UCI President Pat McQuaid declined to comment on USADA’s report but defended his organisation’s efforts to catch drug cheats.
The report cost Armstrong’s former team manager, Johan Bruyneel, his job as general manager of RadioShack Nissan Trek. The team said on Friday the decision was taken by “mutual agreement” and that Bruyneel “can no longer direct the team in an efficient and comfortable way”.
The Belgian has his own legal battle with USADA and has opted for arbitration to fight charges that he led doping programmes for Armstrong’s teams.
If Armstrong’s Tour victories are not awarded to other riders, that would leave a gaping seven-year black hole in Tour de France record books. It would also mark a shift in how Tour organisers treated similar cases in the past.
When Alberto Contador was stripped of his 2010 Tour victory for a doping violation, organisers held a ceremony to award the race winner’s yellow jersey to Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck. In 2006, Oscar Pereiro was awarded the victory and a place in the record books after the doping disqualification of American rider Floyd Landis.
Prudhomme wouldn’t address the differences in approach.
McQuaid said inadequacies in the anti-doping system were failing to catch drug-using athletes. The UCI tests athletes repeatedly for doping, he said, but the federation can do little if the results are negative. He insisted the anti-doping system had improved since the 1998-2009 period of Armstrong’s career examined in the report.
For Frankie Andreu, the report offered relief. A former Armstrong teammate, he had previously admitted doping.
“We’re kind of getting to the end of this, where we can have some closure on this,” Andreu said. “There’s more riders, more people out there, talking about what happened in the past.”
