Pierre Bordry has announced new tougher testing for this year's Tour de France.(Image credit: AFP)
Lance Armstrong with fans(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
Pierre Bordry(Image credit: AFP)
Pierre Bordry, head of the French anti-doping agency (AFLD) has announced that he is prepared to collaborate fully with the United States federal investigation into alleged doping practices at the US Postal Service team.
According to an AP report, Bordry stated that he will hand over former US Postal rider Lance Armstrong’s B samples from the 1999 Tour de France to federal investigators should such a request be made. The investigation is being led by Jeff Novitzky of the Food and Drug Administration.
"They can ask us anything, we will do it," Bordry said. "We can either send them the samples or do the testing ourselves."
The urine samples in question were frozen after the 1999 Tour and stored for retrospective testing as a recognised urine test for EPO did not exist at the time. The samples were subsequently unfrozen and tested at the AFLD’s Châtenay-Malabry laboratory.
In August 2005, L’Équipe reported that six of the samples revealed the use of synthetic EPO. The six samples in question were those taken after the prologue and stages 1, 9, 10, 12 and 14 of the 1999 Tour de France.
A UCI investigation subsequently cleared Armstrong and in 2008 the American refused to agree to the AFLD’s offer to retest the samples.
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Barry Ryan is Head of Features at Cyclingnews. He has covered professional cycling since 2010, reporting from the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and events from Argentina to Japan. His writing has appeared in The Independent, Procycling and Cycling Plus. He is the author of The Ascent: Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and the Rise of Irish Cycling’s Golden Generation, published by Gill Books.
