Lance Armstrong: “I'm not coming back.”

In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Armstrong said he was fed up with controversy over six-year-old urine samples and allegations they contained blood boosting agents.

As quoted in CyclingNews:

“Sitting here in my chair right now… yeah, I opened up the possibility a couple of weeks ago; I thought 'maybe I need to go back to the Tour for another one'. It seemed like the right answer. But sitting here today, dealing with all this stuff again and obviously it would be the Tour, there is no way I could go to France and get a fair shake, either on the roadside, in the doping control, or in the lab, or in the hotel or in the food or whatever. There's no way I could go back there. We're not going back [to France]. I'm happy with way my career ended, the way it went. I'm not coming back.”

OK. Fine. He's retired again. Is it final? Of course not.

You know that this winter he'll show up at a training session with the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team or he'll be at some event and say some off-the-cuff remark about how strong he feels, and the speculation will begin again. Will he or won't he?

Meanwhile, back at the lab, Thursday's conference call was brought on by the latest salvo in the urine sample pissing match between Dick Pound (an unfortunate name considering the issue at hand), president of the World Anti-Drug Agency, and Hein Verbruggen, president of United Cycliste Internationale.

In a nutshell, UCI issued a press release last week that sounded like it was more interested in investigating how French newspaper L'Equipe got confidential records of cyclists urine samples than whether those samples were accurate or not. At the time, UCI's Verbruggen took a shot at Pound for comments he made.

Early Thursday, Pound said Verbruggen should know how L'Equipe made the match between the anonymous urine samples and Armstrong, because the UCI handed over documents that enabled L'Equipe to match serial numbers on the samples to Armstrong.

Armstrong attorney, Bill Stapleton, said in the conference call that Pound is trying to mislead. According to VeloNews:

Stapleton … accused Pound of using “false and misleading statements to misdirect attention away from himself and his organization by alleging that the UCI was the leak to L'Equipe.

Stapleton said the breakdown occurred prior to the UCI's release of seemingly unrelated documents, when Ressiot acquired the sample codes in the first place.

“The issue is that the codes were attached to anonymous samples,” he said. “That's where the system broke down.”

Somebody directed that lab to leak samples with codes,” Stapleton continued. “That's the question that needs to be answered before we start crucifying athletes without due process.”