The 1999 Tour de France was contested before an official test for recombinant EPO existed, allowing riders who used the blood-boosting drug to pass the era's routine controls. In 2005, French researchers retrospectively examined 84 urine samples from that Tour using progressively more sophisticated laboratory methods: autoradiography, measurement of basic EPO isoforms, and statistical discriminant analysis. Twelve samples were described as definitively positive because all three methods agreed. Six of those samples—collected on July 3, 4, 13, 14, 16, and 18—were linked through leaked sample-identification records to Lance Armstrong. The same leak also allowed four riders tested during the Prologue—Manuel Beltrán, José Castelblanco, Bo Hamburger, and Armstrong—to be identified as having submitted samples positive under all three methods.
The publication of the findings by L'Équipe in August 2005 triggered a major institutional dispute. The UCI commissioned the Vrijman report, which accused WADA of engineering the leak and targeting Armstrong. WADA rejected the allegation and argued that the journalist had obtained Armstrong's doping-control forms legally from the UCI, with Armstrong's written consent. In 2013, a French Senate inquiry published additional sample information, identifying 13 of 20 positive 1999 samples as belonging to six riders: Armstrong, Kevin Livingston, Beltrán, Castelblanco, Hamburger, and Wladimir Belli. Thirty samples were inconclusive because of degradation, while 34 tested negative. Because the samples were tested retrospectively for research rather than during the race under an approved sanctioning procedure, the episode became both a landmark in anti-doping science and a bitter controversy over confidentiality, proof, and the limits of retroactive testing.
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