Emma O’Reilly, in the centre and dressed all in black holding a small black bag, has given explosive evidence to USADA
Emma O’Reilly, the Irish woman who worked for the US Postal Services team for five years, two of them as “head soigneur”, has revealed she carried testosterone for George Hincapie and “pills” for Lance Armstrong which she believed were performance enhancing.
The Dubliner, now aged 42 years and no longer involved in cycling, swore an affidavit for the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) investigation into Armstrong and doping in the team.
In it she says she managed to talk Irish Customs Officers out of searching team vehicles as many of the Tour de France teams were just about to disembark a ferry in Dublin for the start of the 1998 Tour in the Irish capital.
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Just hours earlier Festina team worker Willy Voet had been stopped by Customs on the French-Belgian border with a car full of drugs on his way to catch the Dublin-bound ferry.
In her affidavit, which has now been published with others by USADA, O’Reilly reveals the US Postal team vehicles were carrying drugs during that ’98 Tour.
She says after the Voet arrest and the seizure of the Festina stash of drugs, many teams became nervous when the race got back to France that the police would raid the race.
O’Reilly – who worked for the team from 1996 to 2000 and for a period worked personally with Armstrong - says a decision was taken to flush drugs valued at $25,000 down the toilet on a team bus and to dump the contents of the toilet into a field.
Of her role in talking Irish Customs Officers out of performing searches on team vehicles in Dublin, she said in her affidavit:
“The 1998 Tour de France was scheduled to begin in Dublin, Ireland, on July 11th. I am from the Dublin area and have family there so I travelled to Ireland early to visit with them and made arrangements to meet the team at the port when they arrived on the ferry from Belgium.”
“The ferry was scheduled to arrive at the port after midnight, so I was surprised when customs agents showed up to meet the ferry to carry out searches of the team vehicles. I convinced the customs agents to leave by explaining that they would have a riot on their hands if they tried to search the trucks at 2am and that any search they felt was necessary could just as easily occur in the morning.”
“Later that same morning was when word of Willy Voet’s arrest started to make its way around the Tour de France.”
O’Reilly said she knew of drug taking in the team and even carried banned substances, at least once and possibly twice, but says she was never in the inner doping circle of the team. She also told USADA she only took the post of head soigneur in 1999 on condition her position remained as having no part in the team’s doping program.
However, she said despite clearly deciding to have no role on the doping programme and to deliberately keep herself ignorant of specific details, in 1998 she had “several conversations about the doping program and on one occasion actively participated in the transport of a banned performance enhancing substance”.
Her affidavit describes in great detail that occasion when she carried drugs.
“In May or June of the 1998 season, George Hincapie learned that I was travelling to Belgium and asked me to pick up a package for him from (an unnamed person). (The unnamed person) was no longer associated with the US Postal Services team but both George and I remained on good terms with him.”
“I arranged a meeting with (the unnamed person) at a restaurant in the Hotel Nazareth in Ghent to pick up the package. When we met (the unnamed person) handed me a small package. I remember being surprised by how small the package was and telling (the unnamed person) that I would try and get the package to George in Girona but was happy to deliver it to him when I returned to the United States if I did not happen to see him before I left Spain.”
“When I mentioned travelling with the package to the United States (the unnamed person) said something like. ‘Don’t do that, Give it to George. It is testosterone and you do not want to transport it yourself’.”
She said when she asked Hincapie why he wanted to take testosterone he said it was “good for long events and gives a rider enough energy to finish a sprint”.
She also recalls another occasion when she said Armstrong asked her at a training camp in the Pyrenees in May 1999, just two months before he won his first Tour de France, if she could drive to the team’s base in Piles, Spain, to collect something for him from a team doctor.
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“Lance did not tell me what I would be picking up and I did not ask. However, I understood that he was asking me to pick up doping products for him because he asked me not to tell my boyfriend about the purpose of the trip.”
She said when she drove to Piles she met team manager Johan Bruyneel who “discreetly handed me a small pill bottle” in a property rented by the team there. The next day she set out to make the journey by car to France with her boyfriend at the time, Simon Lillistone, to deliver the pill bottle containing around 20 pills to Armstrong.
O’Reilly says she informed Lillistone she was carrying a pill bottle for Armstrong and that he made the journey to France with her. However, there is no suggestion whatsoever in O’Reilly’s affidavit that Lillistone was actively involved in the transportation of the bottle.
She says when they set out for Valras-Plage to France in their car, she put the pill bottle in her toiletry bag for safe keeping.
“As we pulled up to the (Spanish-French) border there was a queue, which was not a normal occurrence. While we waited in the queue, Simon and I had a conversation about what to do if I got caught with the pills. We decided that we would use my phone call to call Thom Weisel, if we ran into any problems, because he would probably have the best lawyers.”
She said they then passed through the border without incident and drove on to Valras-Plage, staying there that night. O’Reilly added she arranged to meet Armstrong in the car park of a McDonalds the next day around three hours drive away, just outside Nice. When she arrived there Armstrong was already waiting there in his car with this then wife Kristin.
“As I pulled up Lance stepped out of his car and walked over to where I was parked. When Lance reached my vehicle I discreetly passed him the pill bottle so that Kristin or anybody else who happened to be observing our interaction would not be able to tell that a handoff had occurred.”
She said later that season – on the Dauphiné Libéré - she discussed with Armstrong his low hematocrit level as she was massaging him.
“When I asked him what he was going to do about his low hematocrit Lance just laughed and said, ‘You know Emma. What everybody else does’. I understood Lance’s response to mean that he intended to use EPO in order to raise his hematocrit levels.”
She said three weeks later and just “a day or so” before the Tour de France, Armstrong asked her for some make-up to cover bruising on his arm. She said that according to Armstrong the bruising had been caused by a syringe
She then goes on to state that less than a week later, and with the 1999 Tour de France underway, she was informed by rider Kevin Livingston that Armstrong had tested positive for corticosteroid. She said there was no sense of panic in the team about the test – which had not yet emerged publicly – until the team got wind that French newspaper Le Monde was about to reveal it.
She said it was at that point that Armstrong and two others – who are not named in her affidavit – came up with a plan to get a backdated prescription for a corticosteroid from a doctor within the team on the pre-tense it was for saddle sores. She said she heard the conversation because she was giving Armstrong a massage at the time.
She added that Armstrong told her he had not been concerned about testing positive because he had passed a test at the Route du Sud two weeks before the Tour.
“Lance did not realise that a more sensitive test had been adopted and implemented for the Tour de France until his sample came back positive.”
She continued that after the episode Armstrong remarked that she now knew things that could harm him.
“Lance acknowledged that I had been present for a significant moment in his cycling career when he told me, ‘Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down’. The US Postal Service team provided the prescription Dr del Moral wrote for Lance to the UCI and all of the commotion surrounding the positive test quickly died down. A few days later Lance won his first Tour de France.”
O’Reilly said the 1999 season was her last as Armstrong’s personal soigneur. Her relationship with Bruyneel had broken down to the point of no return during that year and while she stayed with the team for one more year, she only worked on races where he was not present, meaning she missed the Grand Tours.
O’Reilly, who now lives in Manchester and runs a sports injury business, resigned from the team at the end of the 2000 season and has not worked in cycling since then.
She said she had decided to speak out in order to try and help bring about change in the sport and protect riders’ health. She said when she gave a newspaper interview three years after leaving cycling, Armstrong tried to sue her but that those actions were later dropped or settled. She also said the American referred to her as “a prostitute and alcoholic”, which she believed had caused lasting damage to her reputation.
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