Australian Cyclist Stuart O’Grady Retires, Admits To Tour de France Blood Doping

How long after telling a lie should you wait before admitting the truth? An hour? A lifetime; just let them try to pry the truth out of your cold, dead hands? Decorated Australian cycling legend Stuart O’Grady today decided that fifteen years was a good enough time period in which to live a lifetime of lies and has admitted to using banned blood-doping substance EPO during the 1998 Tour de France only days after retiring from cycling.
O’Grady, 39, a seventeen-time Tour rider and six-time Olympian, made the confession off the back of a successful tour, telling News Limited, “Leading into the Tour I made a decision, I sourced it [the EPO] myself, there was no one else involved, it didn’t involve the team in any way.” 
“I just had to drive over the border and buy it at any pharmacy.”
The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) has since called for O’Grady to step down from its Athletes’ Commission due to his lacking “qualities of integrity and leadership”. O’Grady’s Orica GreenEdge team have maintained their support of O’Grady as both “an advocate for a clean sport” and as one person among many who were “on the juice back then.”
O’Grady’s one-time dalliance with doping took place during the tumultuous 1998 Tour, whose legacy has been marred by a recent French Senate inquiry into the Tour’s top three cyclists, all of whom were found to have been doping. O’Grady confession was prompted after he returned ‘suspicious’ re-tested blood samples alongside eighty-three other athletes. 
“When the Festina Affair happened, I smashed it, got rid of it and that was the last I ever touched it. That’s the hardest thing to swallow out of all this – it was such a long time ago and one very bad judgement is going to taint a lot of things and people will have a lot of questions.  
“You win Olympics, Paris-Roubaix and now all of that is going to be tainted by this action and I wish it could be changed but it can’t.”

Photo: Suhaimi Abdullah via Getty

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