An attorney for Lance Armstrong said the disgraced cyclist will not meet the US Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) deadline for him to answer questions under oath, and suggested his client would rather participate in international efforts to “clear the air.”
In a letter to the USADA dated on Friday, attorney Timothy Herman said that while the athlete is willing to cooperate with the agency, its request to interview him in the next two weeks “cannot be accommodated.”
Herman blamed pre-existing obligations.
The USADA set a Feb. 6 deadline for Armstrong to fully cooperate in its investigation in return for a possible lifting of his lifetime ban from cycling, the agency’s chief executive Travis Tygart said in an excerpt from an interview that was due to air on the CBS 60 Minutes program yesterday.
In his letter, Herman raised questions about the role of the USADA in ridding cycling of performance-enhancing drugs. He said that “professional cycling is and has been largely a European sport.”
Herman applauded the International Cycling Union’s announcement on Friday that it would work with the World Anti-Doping Agency in a broad probe into the use of drugs and rely on a “truth and reconciliation” process.
“As such, we would like to make sure we coordinate with the truth and reconciliation process to examine the culture of doping in cycling in the past and to clear the air so that cycling can move forward,” Herman wrote.
On Wednesday, USADA general counsel William Bock sent Herman a letter saying that Armstrong’s admissions to Winfrey “removed any possible impediment to his cooperation with USADA.”
“Your client has a great deal of information that is needed to clean up cycling; the time has clearly come for him to sit down with USADA and provide detailed information under oath, and on the record, regarding his doping and all potential anti-doping rule violations of others of which he has knowledge,” Bock wrote.
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