After crashing out early at the Amgen Tour of California last week, Lance Armstrong now says he'll ride for Team RadioShack at the four-stage Tour of Luxembourg that begins next Tuesday Wednesday.
Meanwhile, two reporters for the New York Times write that unidentified sources told them that a federal drug probe into Armstrong and other cyclists accused by Floyd Landis might be broadened to include a fraud investigation.
Whether or not Armstrong used performance enhancing drugs, which he has vehemently denied for years, it will be interesting to see whether the distractions posed by reports of investigations will detract from his performance at Tour of Luxembourg and the Tour de France in July.
Tour of Lux
UCI ranks the bike race through Luxembourg as 2.0, that's one level below a ProTour race and the same as Tour of California.
Armstrong says he competed in and won the race in 1998, and he's looking forward to it this year. He'll be joined by Sam Bewley, Daryl Impey, Andreas Klöden, Tiago Machado, Gregory Rast, Ivan Rovny and Bjørn Selander.
Saxo Bank's Frank Schleck won the race last year. Other teams competing include Bbox, Cofidis, Katusha, Euskaltel-Euskadi, Saxo Bank and Sky.
Fraud probe
The story at the New York Times will probably grab the attention of the cyclists accused by Landis when he wrote a series of emails in the past several weeks. The story's two sources “spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to delicate information.”
Daniel C. Richman, a professor of law at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor, explained the significance of broadening the investigation into fraud:
“Federal fraud charges are fairly straightforward; they apply to any scheme to acquire money or property through deceit or misrepresentation. In this case, the authorities would have to prove that Armstrong was misrepresenting himself to sponsors by saying that he was clean but was actually using performance-enhancing drugs and profiting from it.”
The unidentified sources also told the Times that investigators also are checking to see if money from the US Postal Service was used to buy performance-enhancing drugs while it was sponsor of the team from 1996 to 2004.
The federal investigation will also reopen the book on the SCA Promotions case. SCA refused to pay a $5 million bonus to Armstrong after his 6th Tour de France victory based on allegations that he doped. Armstrong sued, and the closed door hearings included testimony from Frank Andreu and his wife, who heard Armstrong tell doctors he had used performance enhancing drugs before his cancer diagnosis. SCA paid Armstrong the $5 million, plus a $2.5 million penalty, in an out-of-court settlement.
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