McQuaid: Buck stops with me

RTÉ presenter Pat Kenny (PK) spoke with Pat McQuaid (PM) yesterday over his handling of the Lance Armstrong affair and his role as head of the governing body.

PK: How could Lance Armstrong cheat his way to seven Tour de France titles without the governing body having any idea?

PM: First of all, it’s easy in 2012, with all the tools that we have now in the fight against doping to look back at 2002, 2003 and 2004 and say ‘why didn’t we do this, why didn’t we do that’ but the fact of the matter is, at that time, the tools which we had to fight doping were very limited. There was no EPO test — we were the first to use it in 2001. All we had at that time was, the controls went to the laboratories, the laboratories reported back positive or negative. If it’s positive, we sanction, if it’s negative we didn’t. And that’s as much information as we had. Nowadays we have a lot more information because we have the biological passport, we have blood values, etc. The UCI has admitted to this because we didn’t have the resources.