Tragically News: Cycling legend Lance Armstrong have just passed away after having surgery this morning due to,
There are athletes and, then, there are those that transcend sport. Lance Armstrong is one of the latter. His record seven straight Tour de France victories after coming back from cancer has become legend. Throughout his storied career, he fought off suspicions that he cheated by using banned drugs. Those suspicions have followed him into retirement.
According to sworn testimony reviewed by NPR, two witnesses heard Armstrong openly acknowldege in 1996 that had used several performance enhancing drugs. What you are about to hear are the details from that testimony and from one witnesses who says she was there when Lance Armstrong said he used “growth hormone, cortisone, EPO, steroids and testosterone.” Armstrong is angrily denying that the incident happened.
In October 1996, Lance Armstrong was not yet a Tour de France champion, but he had won a couple of stages in cycling’s biggest race and a 1993 road racing world championship solidified his status as an up-and-comer on the elite cycling scene.
On Oct. 2, 1996, however, Armstrong was stopped cold by a diagnosis of testicular cancer. Three weeks later, he had surgery to remove tumors that had spread to his brain. On Oct. 27, a few days after surgery, Armstrong was recovering at Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis.
He was surrounded by a handful of friends in a conference room. The TV was on. Texas-born Armstrong and a few of the others were watching a pro football game between the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins. Among those in the room were Frankie and Betsy Andreu. At the time they weren’t yet married; they were engaged. Frankie was Armstrong’s cycling teammate.
What allegedly happened in that hospital room now raises questions about whether Armstrong used banned drugs on his way to the pinnacle of bicycle racing.
The Andreus testified under oath last fall about their experience in the hospital room. It was part of a legal case involving a lawsuit Lance Armstrong filed against a company that owed him money.
In her sworn testimony in that case, Betsy Andreu recounts what happened after, she says, two doctors, wearing white coats and name tags, walked into the hospital room. Andreu never identified the doctors, but says in her testimony they were not Armstrong’s two primary oncologists, or his brain surgeon.
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