Lance Armstong is one of the most accomplished athletes on the planet, but he’s also one of the most high-profile cheaters to ever compete in professional sports. In a recent interview, he explained exactly how he did it.
After winning an unprecedented seven Tour de France titles, Lance Armstrong eventually came clean, admitting to gaining a competitive end by doping. As a result, he was banned from professional cycling for life and stripped of his seven Tour de France championships.
But despite the prolific doping scheme, Armstrong never actually failed a drug test and kept the ruse up for decades. And during a recent appearance on comedian Bill Maher‘s Club Random podcast, he explained how.
“You would foil the system,“ Armstrong said according to The Independent. “What I always said, and I’m not trying to justify what I said as something I would want to repeat again, but one of the lines was, ‘I’ve been tested 500 times and I’ve never failed a drug test’.
“That’s not a lie. That’s the truth. There was no way around the test. When I pissed in the cup and they tested the piss in the cup, it passed. Now, the reality and the truth of all of this is, some of these substances, primarily the one that is the most beneficial, has a four-hour half-life. So certain substances, whether it be cannabis or anabolics, or whatever, have much longer half-lives.
“You could smoke that joint and go to work driving your tractor [and] in two weeks test positive because the half-life is much longer. With EPO, which was the rocket fuel that changed not just our sport but every endurance sport, you have a four-hour half-life, so it leaves the body very quickly. With a four-hour half-life, you can just do the math.”
Armstrong insists he was far from the only cyclist who was doping at that time, but his legacy was still tarnished after he admitted to using the banned substances.
