Lance armstrong what was he taking

Sprinters like Ben Johnson would use steroids during training, administered by doctors and coaches who would rigorously work out the timing to stop using banned substances well before an official event.

In , Johnson was recovering from a hamstring injury shortly before the Olympics and appears to have botched his window, resulting in his famous disqualification after a world-record race. That long pre-race window doesn't work for doping cyclists; they typically have to take PEDs or perform blood transfusions during events, so everything about their doping regimen must be much more precise.

Besides mid-tech methods like precise timing of injections the night before a race, low-tech methods like infusing testosterone in olive oil, and beyond-low-tech practices like literally running and hiding from official testers, Armstrong and his teammates used a range of masking agents. The most common way the cyclists confounded blood tests was through saline injections, a banned but undetectable practice.

The extra hemoglobin and hematocrit cells that help a racer retain oxygen and avoid fatigue can be watered down below official thresholds by adding a saline solution to the blood within just 20 minutes' notice of an imminent test. Ultimately, just as firewalls can be hacked, tests can be fooled, whether through fancy chemistry or brute force.

The problem with doping is the problem with any conspiracy: too many people know. Someone has to prescribe the drugs or obtain them on the black market. Someone has to administer infusions of blood or saline. Someone has to alert the other athletes that testers are on the way. You need doctors and athletes who are willing to compromise themselves, and compromised people often end up in situations where they're compelled to talk.

Armstrong, by all accounts, wasn't just the USPS's star athlete and public face, but also its disciplinarian. If a team doctor was caught red-handed with PEDs, or convicted of doping-related charges, as Armstrong's doctor Michele Ferrari was in , Armstrong would publicly shun and denounce him; if reporters wrote that Armstrong was using PEDs, Armstrong would sue them; if a teammate seemed reluctant to use PEDs, Armstrong encouraged him or removed him.

The best means of enforcement was shared complicity: if Armstrong went down, everyone would go down. In many ways, figures like Dr. Ferrari are more fascinating than athletes like Armstrong. Competitive athletes obsessively tracking blood cell counts like interval times or routing around the rules to beat opponents is pretty much par for the course.

The physicians' and consultants' motives and backgrounds are impossibly wide-ranging, but almost always include great technical skill and an element of hero worship. Many of them are obsessed with the sport, and with bringing a scientific attitude toward it. Long after he had supposedly been jettisoned from Armstrong's team, Dr. Ferrari who Armstrong nicknamed "Schumi," after Formula One racecar driver Michael Schumacher would regularly communicate with Armstrong not just about drugs and recovery times, but with advice to raise his bicycle saddle by 2 millimeters.

Armstrong also paid Ferrari over a million dollars, which is a pretty healthy incentive too. Conte's dream beginning in the early s, was to use biometric data, nutritional supplements, and eventually, designer steroids to revolutionize human fitness :.

Conte's primary innovation in doping was the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, which was undetectable at a molecular level until the earlys. Meanwhile, just down the road in Santa Clara, Hewlett-Packard spinoff Agilent had developed the chemical analysis and computing technology to detect THG. HP performed chromatography and spectrometry tests for the Olympics, beginning when mandatory drug testing was introduced in ; now Agilent supplies equipment and technical expertise for the Tour de France.

Much like athletes and their bodies, the basic procedure of testing for PEDs, their masking agents, or the signature chemical signs of blood doping or hormone therapy hasn't changed much. The equipment is better, but it's still about heating substances mixed with a gas or liquid chromatography or ionizing compounds to detect the "fingerprint" of their molecular weight mass spectrometry. Eighty percent of the Tour de France medalists between and have been "similarly tainted by doping," according to the USADA report on Armstrong.

More Videos Lance Armstrong admits doping McKinnon: Armstrong doping 'devastating' Armstrong could face more legal trouble Lance Armstrong plays Oprah card EPO, or erythropoietin, is a hormone naturally produced by human kidneys to stimulate red blood cell production, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Cyclists and other athletes use EPO to raise their red blood cell counts, which increases the amount of oxygen that can be delivered to muscles, improving recovery and endurance. Blood transfusions have a similar effect on the body's red blood cell count. Usually an athlete will store some of his blood when his hemoglobin levels are high, then reinfuse it right before an event. Both methods can have dangerous side effects. Increased levels of hemoglobin, which literally thickens the blood, can lead to complications with circulation, putting athletes at risk for cardiovascular problems.

Corticosteroids are man-made drugs that resemble the natural hormone cortisol, according to the Cleveland Clinic. These are different from anabolic steroids, which athletes take to increase strength. The most common types are cortisone, prednisone and methylprednisolone.

Cortisol is most commonly known as a stress hormone. Corticosteroids work to decrease inflammation that can cause swelling and pain, according to the Cleveland Clinic. They can be administered locally -- to the specific area that hurts -- or systemically through a pill or intravenously. The list of possible side effects for corticosteroids is long, including weight gain, sudden mood swings, blurred vision, osteoporosis and high blood pressure.

Testosterone is a naturally occurring hormone that helps regulate bone density, fat distribution, muscle strength, red blood cell production and sex drive, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is found in both men and women; in men, it also helps to regulate sperm production. At one stage, makeup was applied to Armstrong's upper arm to hide bruising from an injection, the report says.

After the EPO test came in, blood transfusions became more popular. Half-litres of blood were extracted, stored in fridges, then rigged up as drips on coat hangers and reinfused into riders, so replicating the effect of EPO. Tyler Hamilton describes how he saw Armstrong using a mixture of Andriol, commonly referred to as liquid testosterone, and olive oil developed by Dr Ferrari, which was to be taken orally. On at least one occasion during the Tour Armstrong squirted the "oil" into Hamilton's mouth after a stage.

The testosterone, which boosts power, could also be dispensed through patches, which were to be worn overnight. In , he was found guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs after aggressively denying taking them for years, losing his reputation as an American hero—and millions of dollars in lawsuits.

Although an EPO urine test was introduced in , the drug is notoriously hard to detect. LANCE describes a sport ravaged by doping—where, similar to the steroids era in baseball, not doing it was career sabotage. As for Armstrong, he says in the documentary that he always knew what he was putting in his body—risks and all, even speculating the possibility his use of growth hormone during the season may have caused his cancer to grow. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Come on," Armstrong says.