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A LEADING blood doping expert has posed fresh questions over the “triangle” involving disgraced Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, a payment by him to the UCI and a drug-testing laboratory.

The UCI, cycling’s governing body, have admitted they accepted a donation of more than $100,000 – over £62,000 – from Armstrong in 2002.

They have strongly denied it was connected to any cover-up of a positive test.

But ex-US Postal team-mate Tyler Hamilton has testified Armstrong bragged he had managed to have a positive finding covered up.

Around the same time, the head of a drug-testing lab in Switzerland admitted to having met Armstrong and, separately, was given free use of a UCI blood analysing machine.

A report last week by USADA, America’s anti-doping agency, labelled Armstrong a “serial cheat” and bully who enforced “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”.

And Dr Michael Ashenden, considered the foremost expert in blood doping and the man whose test caught Hamilton, last night told BBC Radio Five Live programme ‘Peddlers – Cycling’s Dirty Truth’ that there were clear conflicts of interest.

He said: “The UCI should never have accepted money from Armstrong under any circumstances.

“But if they took money after they were aware there were grounds to suspect Armstrong had used EPO (a chemical form of blood doping), it takes on a really sinister complexion. We know Armstrong paid the UCI more than 100,000 US dollars and around that time the UCI gave the Lausanne laboratory free use of a blood analyser worth around 70,000 US dollars.

“That’s what I mean by a triangle – the laboratory meets with Armstrong, all of this takes place about the time Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton said under oath Armstrong bragged he had a result covered up.”

Emma O’Reilly, a former aide of Armstrong’s, claimed she was used as a “drug runner”, picking up tablets from US Postal team director Johan Bruyneel in Spain and returning to France to give them to the cyclist.

She said: “I met Lance in the car park at McDonald’s and just handed them over.”