The 2002 Tour de France was a multiple-stage bicycle race held from 6 to 28 July, and the 89th edition of the Tour de France. The event started in Luxembourg and ended in Paris. The Tour circled France counter-clockwise, visiting the Pyrenees before the Alps. It has no overall winner—although American cyclist Lance Armstrong originally won the event, the United States Anti-Doping Agency announced in August 2012 that they had disqualified Armstrong from all his results since 1998, including his seven Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005; the Union Cycliste Internationale confirmed the result.
Jan Ullrich is a German former professional road bicycle racer. Ullrich won gold and silver medals in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. He won the 1999 Vuelta a España and the HEW Cyclassics in front of a home crowd in Hamburg in 1997. He had podium finishes in the hilly classic Clásica de San Sebastián. His victorious ride in the 1997 Tour de France led to a bicycle boom in Germany. He retired in February 2007.
The 2004 Tour de France was a multiple stage bicycle race held from 3 to 25 July, and the 91st edition of the Tour de France. It has no overall winner—although American cyclist Lance Armstrong originally won the event, the United States Anti-Doping Agency announced in August 2012 that they had disqualified Armstrong from all his results since 1998, including his seven Tour de France wins from 1999 to 2005; the Union Cycliste Internationale confirmed the result.
Tyler Hamilton is an American former professional road bicycle racer. He is the only American rider to win one of the five Monuments of cycling, taking Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 2003. Hamilton became a professional cyclist in 1995 with the US Postal Service cycling team. He was a teammate of Lance Armstrong during the 1999, 2000 and 2001 Tours de France, where Armstrong won the general classification. He was a key asset for Armstrong, being a very good climber as well as time-trialist. Hamilton appeared at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics. In 2004, he won a gold medal at the individual time trial. The first doping test after his Olympic victory gave a positive result, but because the backup sample was frozen, no doping offence could be proven. After he failed further doping tests at the 2004 Vuelta a España, Hamilton was suspended for two years from the sport.
U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team was a United States-based professional road bicycle racing team. On June 15, 2004, the Discovery Channel signed a deal to become sponsor of the team for the 2004–2007 seasons and its name changed to Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team. From 2005 until 2007, the team was one of the 20 teams that competed in the new UCI ProTour. As part of the sponsorship deal, Lance Armstrong, the team's undisputed leader, provided on-air appearances for the Discovery Networks TV channels. The deal did not affect the rights of secondary sponsor OLN, later known as NBCSN in the US, to air major cycling events such as the Tour de France, although the two channels are competitors.
Viatcheslav Vladimirovich Ekimov, nicknamed Eki, is a Russian former professional racing cyclist. A triple Olympic gold medalist, he was awarded the title of Russian Cyclist of the Century in 2001.
Robert "Bobby" Julich, popularly called Bobby Julich, is an American former professional road bicycle racer who last rode for Team CSC in the UCI ProTour racing series. He got his international breakthrough when he finished 3rd overall in the 1998 Tour de France, becoming only the second American to finish on the podium. He is a strong time trialist who won a silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Individual Time Trial, and combined with his high versatility he has won a number of stage races on the international circuits including the 2005 edition of Paris–Nice. In September 2008, he announced his retirement as a professional cyclist.
Blood doping is a form of doping in which the number of red blood cells in the bloodstream is boosted in order to enhance athletic performance. Because such blood cells carry oxygen from the lungs to the muscles, a higher concentration in the blood can improve an athlete's aerobic capacity (VO2 max) and endurance. Blood doping can be achieved by making the body produce more red blood cells itself using drugs, giving blood transfusions either from another person or back to the same individual, or by using blood substitutes.
Francisco "Frankie" Andreu is an American former professional cyclist whose career highlights include riding as team captain of the U.S. Postal Service cycling team in 1998, 1999 and 2000. During his career, he won a number of race stages and finished fourth in the cycling road race at the 1996 Olympics. His testimony played a key part in the United States Anti-Doping Agency's investigation of fellow U.S. Postal cyclist Lance Armstrong's doping practices.
There have been allegations of doping in the Tour de France since the race began in 1903. Early Tour riders consumed alcohol and used ether, among other substances, as a means of dulling the pain of competing in endurance cycling. Riders began using substances as a means of increasing performance rather than dulling the senses, and organizing bodies such as the Tour and the International Cycling Union (UCI), as well as government bodies, enacted policies to combat the practice.
Erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESA) are medications which stimulate the bone marrow to make red blood cells. They are used to treat anemia due to end stage kidney disease, chemotherapy, major surgery, or certain treatments in HIV/AIDS. In these situations they decrease the need for blood transfusions. The different agents are more or less equivalent. They are given by injection.
The 2009 Tour de France was the 96th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's Grand Tours. It started on 4 July in the principality of Monaco with a 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) individual time trial which included a section of the Circuit de Monaco. The race visited six countries: Monaco, France, Spain, Andorra, Switzerland and Italy, and finished on 26 July on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Edward Borysewicz, sometimes known as "Eddie B", was a cycling coach who brought the United States to world prominence, even though at first he barely spoke English. The US team, under his direction, won nine medals at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984. It was the first time Americans had won medals since 1912. Audrey McElmury won the World Road Cycling Championships in 1969, followed by Beth Heiden, in 1980.
Lance Edward Armstrong is an American former professional road racing cyclist. He achieved international fame for winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005, but was stripped of his titles after an investigation into doping allegations, called the Lance Armstrong doping case, found that Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs over his career. As a result, Armstrong is currently banned for life from all sanctioned bicycling events.
For much of the second phase of his career, American cyclist Lance Armstrong faced constant allegations of doping, including doping at the Tour de France and in the Lance Armstrong doping case. Armstrong vehemently denied allegations of using performance enhancing drugs for 13 years, until a confession during a broadcast interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013, when he finally admitted to all his cheating in sports, stating, “I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times”.
United States Anti-Doping Agency v. Lance Armstrong, the Lance Armstrong doping case, was a major doping investigation that led to retired American road racing cyclist Lance Armstrong being stripped of his seven consecutive Tour de France titles, along with one Olympic medal, and his eventual admission to using performance-enhancing drugs. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) portrayed Armstrong as the ringleader of what it called "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."
At the time of the 1999 Tour de France there was no official test for EPO. In August 2005, 60 remaining antidoping samples from the 1998 Tour and 84 remaining antidoping samples given by riders during the 1999 Tour, were tested retrospectively for recombinant EPO by using three recently developed detection methods. More precisely the laboratory compared the result of test method A: "Autoradiography — visual inspection of light emitted from a strip displaying the isoelectric profile for EPO", with the result of test method B: "Percentage of basic isoforms — using an ultra-sensitive camera that by percentage quantify the light intensity emitted from each of the isoelectric bands". For those samples with enough urine left, these results of test method A+B were finally also compared with the best and latest test method C: "Statistical discriminant analysis — taking account all the band profiles by statistical distinguish calculations for each band".
The year in which the 1998 Tour de France took place marked the moment when cycling was fundamentally shattered by doping revelations. Paradoxically no riders were caught failing drug tests by any of the ordinary doping controls in place at the time. Nevertheless, several police searches and interrogations managed to prove existence of organized doping at the two teams Festina and TVM, who consequently had to withdraw from the race. After stage 16, the police also forced the virtual mountain jersey holder Rodolfo Massi to leave the race, due to having found illegal corticosteroids in his hotel room. The intensive police work then led to a peloton strike at stage 17, with a fallout of four Spanish teams and one Italian team deciding to leave the race in protest.
