Lance Armstrong, who is the focus of a federal grand jury probe, encouraged members of his former Team Motorola to use the banned boosting agent EPO, Sports Illustrated reported. New Zealand rider Stephen Swart, a teammate in 1995, told the magazine the American cyclist urged fellow members of the team to take performance-enhancing drugs, convincing them it was the way to go if they were to become successful, AFP reported. "He was the instigator. It was his words that pushed us toward doing it," Sports Illustrated quoted Swart as saying on its website, publishing the results of a long investigation by two of its reporters. Swart was one of dozens of people interviewed in different countries by the pair of Sports Illustrated reporters who reviewed hundreds of pages of official documents over the past few months, AFP reported. Sports Illustrated posted some of its findings on its website today and said it expects to include a longer version of the story in the January 24 issue of the magazine. Seven-time Tour de France winner Armstrong has vehemently denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Swart is not the only former Armstrong teammate to admit using performance-enhancing drugs and made similar accusations against Armstrong in a 2004 book L.A. Confidentiel - Les secrets de Lance Armstrong. He described to Sports Illustrated a regular hotel-room scene where riders pricked their fingers to draw blood and then tested it for hematocrit levels. Riders were given a 15-day ban if their hematocrit level surpassed a reading of 50. On one occasion his reading came back at 48 and Armstrong's was "54 or 56", he said. Armstrong is the focus of a criminal probe headed by Jeff Novitzky of the US government's The Food and Drug Administration which is looking into whether Armstrong was involved in an organised effort to illegally use performance-enhancing drugs. Among the others issues raised by Sports Illustrated on Tuesday is the credibility of a drug-testing lab at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) run by anti-doping guru Don Catlin. In 1999, USA Cycling asked Catlin to retest some of Armstrong's alleged samples. The samples were stored, not by name, but with a drug-testing code number on them. Sports Illustrated says one of its sources told them the samples belonged to Armstrong. The lab could not find five of the testosterone-epitestosterone test results USA Cycling had asked for but three others did "stand out", Sports Illustrated reported. One of the results had a ratio of 9.0-to-1 and another was 7.6-to-1. Anything above 6.0-to-1 was considered abnormal at the time. A normal person has a ratio of 1-to-1. Sports Illustrated reported that after retesting the samples, Catlin wrote back "the confirmation was unsuccessful and the samples were reported negative." Sports Illustrated did not say whether it contacted Catlin for a reaction. Another former teammate and Armstrong critic, Floyd Landis, also claims in the article that they were once stopped in 2003 at an airport in Saint Moritz, Switzerland where customs officials searched one of Armstrong's bags and discovered syringes and drugs used for doping. Landis, who has also admitted using performance-enhancing drugs, said Armstrong was let go after a teammate convinced officers the items in the bag were vitamins and the syringes were used to inject the vitamins. Frankie Andreu, who rode on the United States Postal Service team with Armstrong, has also admitted using performance-enhancing drugs.
