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Comment and Health

Blood doping: Were Armstrong and Russia wasting their time?

Doping with EPO appears to offer nothing but placebo effect in amateur riders. Is this the end for the drug that Lance Armstrong abused, wonders Chris Cooper

By Chris Cooper

30 June 2017

Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times in a row, but the results have now been voided

Doug Pensinger/Getty

On Saturday, the greatest cycling race in the world, the Tour de France, starts in Düsseldorf, ending 22 days and 3540 kilometres later on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Between 1999 and 2005, the only winner of the Tour was US rider Lance Armstrong. However, in 2012 he received a lifetime ban for doping, for using among other things the blood-boosting agent erythropoietin (EPO). Stripped of his titles, a…

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