Emma O’Reilly, in the centre and dressed all in black holding a small black bag, gave explosive evidence to USADA and has been vindicate
Lance Armstrong’s Irish soigneur Emma O’Reilly is set to appear on The Late Late Show on RTE 1 TV tonight, Friday.
It will be her first broadcast interview about her time working for Armstrong since the American confessed on Oprah Winfrey to taking a cocktail of performance enhancing drugs throughout all of his seven Tour de France wins.
O’Reilly was one of the first to speak out publicly about the drug taking by Armstrong and his former US Postal Service team.
She first spoke to journalists a decade ago. The Dubliner, now aged 43 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 which she said she transported substances for Armstrong that she believed were performance enhancing.
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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.
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.
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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.”
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