Originally Posted by plin
Although I never believed that Armstrong is clean, I do wonder who he really ticked off in France for them to go after him with samples dating from 1999.
If you read the CN article it says the LNDD Lab tested ALL the B samples from '99 and I would imagine blindly with 12 tests coming up positive (6 of those turing out to be from Armstrong). This was probably done as a benchmark to measure the new test vs. the old test method that had previously given all negatives.
Also, this testing was done in Dec '04. If anything someone in France has been doing Armstrong a BIG favor and had been burying it for 10 months till this years TdF was over. Might explain why Armstrong decided to announce retirement in April and not go for #8.
Anyway, this all depends on this "new" test and we'll see how it holds up to scrutiny or not.