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.
Filippo Simeoni is an Italian former racing cyclist and the 2008 Italian road race champion. Simeoni won two stages in the Vuelta a España in 2001 and 2003, and the 2008 Italian National Road Race Championship.
George Anthony Hincapie is an American former racing cyclist, who competed professionally between 1994 and 2012. Hincapie was a key domestique of Lance Armstrong. Hincapie was also a domestique for Alberto Contador in 2007 and for Cadel Evans in 2011, when both men won the Tour de France. He was the owner and general manager of UCI Professional Continental team Hincapie–Leomo p/b BMC until it folded at the end of the 2020 season.
Levi Leipheimer is an American former professional road racing cyclist. He was twice US national champion, winning the time trial title in 1999 and the road race in 2007, and is an Olympic medalist. Leipheimer was born and raised in Butte, Montana and resides in Santa Rosa, California. He is the patron of the widely attended King Ridge GranFondo, a mass participation ride in Sonoma County.
Floyd Landis is an American former professional road racing cyclist. At the 2006 Tour de France, he would have been the third non-European winner in the event's history, but was disqualified after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. The competition was ultimately won by Óscar Pereiro.
Philip Alexander Liggett is an English commentator and journalist who covers professional cycling.
Michele Ferrari is an Italian physician, cycling coach and author, who is mostly known for his role in supplying bicycle racers with performance-enhancing drugs, notably EPO. His most famous client was Lance Armstrong.
The Tour of California was an annual professional road cycling stage race on the UCI World Tour and USA Cycling Professional Tour that ran from 2006 to 2019. It was the only event on the top-level World Tour in the United States. The eight-day race covered 650–700 miles (1,045–1,126 km) through the U.S. state of California.
Paul Kimmage is an Irish sports journalist and former amateur and professional road bicycle racer, who was road race champion of Ireland in 1981, and competed in the 1984 Olympic Games. He wrote for The Sunday Times newspaper and others, and published a number of books.
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.
Joseph Michael "Joe" Papp is a former professional American road racing cyclist and US National cycling team member, author, and convicted doper and drug distributor. A dual Irish–American citizen, Papp was born in Ohio and raised in Western Pennsylvania, where he attended high school and university. Early in his career, Papp was a member of the Pittsburgh Power, a professional team in the National Cycle League owned by Franco Harris. He also rode as a stagiare with Montgomery-Bell, but finished his career in 2006 riding for the Italian teams Partizan-Whistle and Team Bianchi-Cinghiale, after starting the year with Hong Kong–based Champion System.
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.
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 he used performance-enhancing drugs over his career. Armstrong is currently banned for life from all sanctioned bicycling events.
Phil Zajicek is an American ex-professional road racing cyclist who last rode professionally for the Fly V Australia Team in 2010. On June 10, 2011, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced that Zajicek had accepted a life-ban from competition.
Kayle Leogrande is an American road racing cyclist, who is currently suspended from the sport. Leogrande was the 2006 winner of the United States National Amateur Criterium Championships, and spent two years with the infamous Rock Racing team, having turned professional in 2005 with US domestic squad Jelly Belly–Pool Gel.
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".
