Lance Armstrong Investigation: What the SI Article Tells Us

Now that the full version of the SI article is out, it looks like we had the most significant news in yesterday's synopsis. Although much of what SI wrote about is old news, they did give a lot of new details that we didn't have before. In addition, at least one new item from the article is a potential bomb shell for Lance in terms of the Novitzky investigation: the HemAssist issue. Here is why...

I've done some reading about HemAssist and found a very interesting commentary on it in reading Bicycling.com's "Boulder Report." The commentary explains that HemAssist was thought to be a super drug for an endurance athlete--even better than EPO or blood doping. HemAssist was designed and claimed to add hemoglobin to a person's blood supply in a way that increased both the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood and make the oxygen more quickly accessible relative to human blood. Basically, more oxygen delivered to the muscles means less fatigue at higher power outputs. 

HemAssist was being tested as an aid for trauma patients who lost blood but it was believed to have these properties for athletes as well. Bottom line: if using EPO is like adding a turbo charger then HemAssist would be like adding a dual turbo or even more as is in the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport which uses four turbos! Importantly, there were (are) no drug tests for HemAssist; it's a greedy Tour de France contender's dream!!

In the Boulder Report, Joe Lindsay also explains why Lance's alleged acquisition and use of HemAssist is of interest to Jeffrey Novitzky. Lance and his attorney, Mark Fabiani, claim that the FDA is wasting taxpayer money looking into some old bike races held on foreign soil. Conventional wisdom was that the FDA was interested because Lance had federal funding from US Postal and doping would constitute fraud. Then we learned that Novitzky may have been looking at the drug chain where legalized drugs such as EPO were being distributed illegally. However, Joe Lindsay has another and, in my view, very compelling response to someone who asks: Why should the FDA care about Lance's Tour de France wins? Here is his response:

(B)ecause one of the most famous sportsmen of the last half-century stands accused of buying stocks of a tightly controlled investigational drug – manufactured by an American pharmaceutical company and intended for use only in clinical trial settings under the regulation of the FDA or its European counterparts and which is illegal to use for any other purpose, or even for a private citizen to possess, much less transport internationally – to pull off a monumental sporting fraud. I think that subject is well within the FDA’s investigatory wheelhouse. And I eagerly await Fabiani and Armstrong’s explanation for why it’s not.

Again, why would Lance have wanted HemAssist? To quote a friend who emailed me, it turns out that the drug was intended to

"...help severe blood-loss trauma patients survive, but it had incredible oxygen vector characteristics.  A "Super-booster" for an athlete.  Baxter (the manufacturer) never angled it that way, as it had no legitimate medical application for that use.  Armstrong found out about it from a friend at Baxter and arranged to secure a large portion of the supply after it failed its clinical trials and was rejected.  Armstrong needed medical help to figure out how to best apply it, and he brought in Ferarri. Apparently this drug was responsible for many of his 'superhuman' efforts."

It's not clear to me from what I've read in the Boulder Report whether HemAssist was actually responsible for Lance's superhuman efforts but I do believe that an athlete like Lance (and others mentioned in the Boulder Report who appear to have attempted to use similar products including Michael Rasmussen) would want to get their hands on it if they believed it could boost their performance beyond the ability of blood doping or EPO.

Even after we discover all that Novitzky has been up to during the past year, Lance may be the only one who ever knows whether it was HemAssist that allowed him to drop his rivals on climbs such as L'Alpe d'Huez and beat the best dopers in the individual time trials or not...In any case, we now know more about why Novitzky and his team is not going to give up easily and will be a very difficult adversary for Lance and his gold plated PR and legal team...