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Related: About this forumArmstrong Aide Talks of Doping and Price Paid
The job title is soigneur, an elegant sounding name for the person on a professional cycling team who is assigned some unglamorous work: massaging the muscles of the cyclists, laundering their clothes, booking their hotel rooms and preparing their food. Discretion and loyalty are also part of the job.
For Emma OReilly, a young, onetime electrician from Dublin, the chance in 1996 to be a soigneur for the United States Postal Service cycling team was an extraordinary opportunity. She had raced some as a teenager in Ireland, and served as an assistant on that countrys national cycling team. But the Postal Service team was a rising power, with its sights set on the Tour de France.
In short order, however, it became clear to Ms. OReilly that her tasks with the team would hardly be limited to kneading leg muscles and doing laundry. In an interview this week, Ms. OReilly said she became a regular player in the teams doping program, one that investigators have charged took on its most sinister and far-reaching dimensions with the arrival of Lance Armstrong in 1998. Ms. OReilly, then not yet 30, said she wound up transporting doping material across borders, disposing of drugs and syringes when the authorities were lurking, and distributing performance-enhancing substances to the teams riders whenever they needed them.
Discretion and loyalty, she said she came to understand, were not just valued qualities. They were paramount.
It was prevalent, but discreet, Ms. OReilly said of the teams doping. The drugs were just part and parcel of things. You didnt analyze it at the time. It was just part of things.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/sports/cycling/lance-armstrong-aide-talks-of-doping-and-price-paid.html?pagewanted=all
If USADA is really relying on witnesses like O'Reilly with potentially biased motivations I would say it is a pathetic case against Lance.
trumad
(41,692 posts)joeybee12
(56,177 posts)there yet...yet scum taggart says he was the ringleader...hard to believe him or any of the witnesses...all of him are liars and cheats and probably say a way to make themselves appear less culpable.