Lance Armstrong has guaranteed the drug-testing program he arranged with America's top anti-doping expert will be in place by the time he rides in his first official race in January.
The seven-time Tour de France winner starts his training with his new team today without having subjected himself to drug tests by Don Catlin, the expert he teamed with, and with no deal in place to post results of those tests online.
But in an interview with The Associated Press yesterday, Armstrong said the goal was not to have the program in place by this week, but by the time he rides in Australia in January-- the first race of his comeback.
"It's a tough thing to organize, but we will make it happen," Armstrong said. "All the stuff we said we were going to do will happen."
When Armstrong announced his comeback earlier this year, he partnered with Catlin to set up a testing program. Catlin said he thought it was important to make those results available to the public.
Catlin told The AP this weekend that while Armstrong has been placed back in the testing pools at both the US Anti-Doping Agency and UCI, cycling's international body, that he has yet to test him and that an agreement to document Armstrong's results online is not in place.
"We're interested in getting it going," Catlin said. "We have been chatting and are in negotiations."
Armstrong acknowledged he hadn't been tested by Catlin, but said he had been tested seven times since re-entering the anti-doping testing programs run by federations such as USADA and UCI.
Armstrong came out of retirement to ride for Astana, which was scheduled to begin its preseason camp this week at Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Astana was supposed to pay for Armstrong's testing regimen, on top of a program run by its own team.
Armstrong said his team received Catlin's testing proposal only two weeks ago and coordinating everything is difficult. There's Armstrong's busy travel schedule, plus the testing regimens instituted by USADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, UCI, Astana and other national federations.
"We're working as quickly as we can to get everyone coordinated, but it's not that simple," Armstrong said.
The goal is to make the programs mesh without too much overlap, though Armstrong reiterated his desire to do whatever he must to prove he is clean. He said the best defense against doping are requirements that cyclists give authorities their whereabouts at all times.
"I'm religious about that," he said. "Whether I'm in France or in LA, no one's trying to pull a fast one here. At the end of the day, I stand ready every day to be tested."
Though Armstrong never tested positive during his record-setting career, suspicions were always out there, which was one reason the 37-year-old cyclist asked Catlin to design a testing program that would prove he was clean.
He teamed with Catlin to attach a recognizable name to his drug-testing program. Catlin ran America's first anti-doping lab in UCLA for 25 years and recently left there to set up the nonprofit Anti-Doping Research to develop new ways of catching drug cheats.
Catlin has long been a proponent of performing baseline tests of athletes for a number of illegal substances, then comparing subsequent tests against the original results. It is widely considered a more accurate way of testing than the method most commonly used, but is also more expensive and time-intensive.
UCI has begun performing baseline tests, and under Catlin's program, Armstrong would presumably be tested the same way. Catlin also wants to freeze samples of Armstrong's blood for tests in the future.
None of this, however, has been simple since Armstrong and Catlin agreed to work together in September.
"The program we want to do is going to be intensive," Catlin said. "And he's a moving target. He's very busy. Keeping up with him, testing him, takes a lot of planning and it hasn't all come together yet."
But Catlin said he had confidence that the seven tests Armstrong has been subjected to in the USADA and UCI programs were enough to start.
"I'm not looking at that data yet and my data isn't dovetailed with his yet, but eventually, that's the plan," Catlin said.
Armstrong said his plan still is to debut at the Tour Down Under in Australia on January 20-25.
As he gets ready to work out with his new teammates and start a "second" career, Armstrong said he was feeling a little anxious.
"There are a lot of new riders I don't know," he said. "The organization is very similar to what we had at Discovery and Postal. But it's a new dynamic. There's some anxiety with that. But my training, technically speaking, is going very well."
(Agencies via Shanghai Daily December 1, 2008)
