Armstrong said to be weighing admission of doping

Lance Armstrong, who this fall was
stripped of his seven Tour de France titles
for doping and barred for life from
competing in all Olympic sports, has told
associates and anti-doping officials that he
is considering publicly admitting that he
used banned performance-enhancing
drugs and blood transfusions during his
cycling career, according to several people
with direct knowledge of the situation.
He would do this, the people said,
because he wants to persuade anti-
doping officials to restore his eligibility so
he can resume his athletic career.
For more than a decade, Armstrong has
vehemently denied doping, even after
anti-doping officials laid out their case
against him in October in hundreds of
pages of eyewitness testimony from
teammates, email correspondence,
financial records and laboratory analyses.
When asked if Armstrong might admit to
doping, Tim Herman, Armstrong's
longtime lawyer, said: "I do not know
about that. I suppose anything is
possible, for sure. Right now, that's really
not on the table."
Several legal cases stand in the way of a
confession, the people familiar with the
situation said. Among the obstacles is a
federal whistle-blower case in which he
and several officials from Armstrong's
U.S. Postal Service cycling team are
accused of defrauding the government by
allowing doping on the squad when the
team's contract with the Postal Service
explicitly forbade it.
Armstrong, 41, has been in discussions
with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and has
met with Travis Tygart, the agency's chief
executive, in an effort to mitigate the
lifetime ban he received for playing a lead
role in doping on his Tour-winning teams,
according to one person briefed on the
situation.
Armstrong is also seeking to meet with
David Howman, director general of the
World Anti-Doping Agency, that person
said.
Herman denied that Armstrong was
talking to Tygart.
Those with knowledge of Armstrong's
situation did not want their names
published because it would jeopardize
their access to information on the matter.
Tygart declined to comment. Howman,
who is on vacation in New Zealand, did
not immediately respond to a phone call
and an email.
Armstrong has been under pressure from
various fronts to come clean.
Wealthy supporters of Livestrong, the
charity he founded after surviving
testicular cancer, have been trying to
persuade him to come forward so he
could clear his conscience and save the
organization from further damage, one
person with knowledge of the situation
said.
Armstrong also hopes to compete in
triathlons and running events, but those
competitions are often sanctioned by
organizations that adhere to the World
Anti-Doping Code under which Armstrong
received his lifetime ban.
According to the World Anti-Doping Code,
an athlete might be eligible for a reduced
punishment if he fully confesses and says
how he doped, who helped him dope and
how he got away with it.
Marion Jones, who won five medals at the
2000 Olympics, denied doping for years
until giving a teary-eyed confession in
2007. She spent six months in prison for
lying to federal investigators about her
doping and for her involvement in a
check-fraud scheme.
The timeline for Armstrong's deciding
whether to confess is unclear, but it is
partly based on whether the U.S. Justice
Department will join the whistle-blower
lawsuit, which was filed under the False
Claims Act. The sole plaintiff of that
lawsuit is Floyd Landis, Armstrong's
former Postal Service teammate who was
stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title
for doping.
If the Justice Department also becomes a
plaintiff, the case would be more
formidable than if Landis pursued the
case alone. Landis stands to collect up to
30 percent of any money won in the case,
which could be in the millions. The
team's contract with the Postal Service
from 2000 to 2004 was more than $30
million.