Lance Armstrong on doping: what the evidence says · JRE #737
“So then they started testing the viscosity or the thickness of people's bloods, otherwise known as hematocrit, right? And so they would use that as a screen. Anybody above 50% hematocrit couldn't race.”
What the evidence says
The UCI's 50% hematocrit "no-start" rule, introduced in 1997, was officially framed as a health-safety check because no direct test for synthetic EPO existed until 2000. But it functioned in practice as an indirect proxy test for EPO doping: since EPO artificially raises hematocrit and some dopers were arriving at races with levels above 60%, the threshold was specifically adopted to curb that abuse. Riders, including members of Armstrong's US Postal team, responded by diluting EPO-boosted blood with saline infusions to stay just under 50% rather than by avoiding EPO. The 2012 USADA investigation documented this systematic hematocrit management and evasion within Armstrong's team, and he was later stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and admitted to using EPO and blood transfusions throughout his career. His description of the rule as a neutral health screen omits its well-documented anti-doping function and the fact that his own team actively manipulated it.