Officially, Jose "Pepe" Marti was listed as trainer for the Postal Service cycling team. But those on the team knew him as "The Courier."

One day while chatting with Tyler Hamilton, Pepe told the Postal Service surrogate that he had to drive to Nice, France, to make a delivery. That night, at the Villa d'Este Restaurant in Nice, Pepe arrived to a late dinner that included Lance Armstrong and his then-wife, Kristin, as well as Betsy Andreu, wife of Postal rider Frankie Andreu. According to Betsy, the reason given for the late dinner was because Pepe was there to deliver EPO (erythropoietin, a banned hormone that controls red blood cell production) to Lance and it was safer for him to cross the border with illegal drugs at night.

After dinner was over, the Armstrongs drove Betsy home. At some point, she saw Pepe hand Lance a brown paper bag. As Armstrong opened the car door for Andreu, he smiled, held up the bag and said, "Liquid gold."

On another occasion, as the Armstrongs and Andreus drove to a bike race in Milan, Italy, Armstrong stopped at a hotel/gas station outside Milan to meet Dr. Michele Ferrari, now infamous for supplying cyclists with performance-enhancing drugs. When asked why they were meeting him in such an odd place, Armstrong replied, "So the [expletive] press doesn't hound him." Leaving the other three in the car, Armstrong disappeared into Ferrari's camper for about an hour. When he returned, Armstrong exclaimed, "My numbers are great!" – the insinuation being he wouldn't test positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

The next day, Betsy Andreu asked Kristin Armstrong about her feelings on EPO. Her answer: It's a necessary evil.

Just three months later, Lance Armstrong won the 1999 Tour de France.

All of this is according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency in a 202-page report which rips the sheen off Armstrong and exposes him as the greatest fraud in the history of American sports.

No one with an objective mind can deny the damning facts uncovered in what amounts to a Mount Everest of testimony from witness after witness, all of whom point to Armstrong as the godfather of a sophisticated doping scheme aimed to accomplish one thing: win the biggest bike race in the world.

Armstrong, through his attorney Timothy Herman, continues to maintain his innocence, claiming in a letter sent to USADA that the agency is biased against him and that some of the witnesses are "serial perjurers."

For that to be true, however, the conspiracy would have to be as sophisticated and calculated as the "alleged" doping program itself.

[Related: USADA's entire 202-page report]

From Armstrrong's comeback from cancer in 1998 through his seventh and final Tour de France victory in 2005, his former teammates claim he used EPO, testosterone, human growth hormone, cortisone and blood transfusions. Among those making the claims are Hamilton, Andreu, George Hincapie, Floyd Landis and Jonathan Vaughters.

While some of the information released in Tuesday's report isn't new, the scope of it is mind-boggling.

There's the story from the 1998 World Championships in which a drug tester randomly showed up at Armstrong's hotel. Fearing Armstrong's hematocrit – a measurement of red blood cell count that cyclists consider the number between winning and losing – would test too high and thus prompt a positive drug test, Dr. Pedro Celeya, Postal's principal team doctor, ran to his car, grabbed a liter of saline, hid it under his raincoat, snuck by the drug tester and into Armstrong's room, where he administered the saline to Armstrong.

Story continues