For top riders on the United States Postal Service squad, the powerhouse American cycling team led by Lance Armstrong, duplicity was simply a part of the game, one of Armstrong’s former teammates said.

Tyler Hamilton, a 2004 Olympic gold medalist and former Postal Service rider, described the team that way in an interview broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” saying it was a life filled with secret code words, clandestine phone lines and furtive conversations. Riders led double lives that revolved around performance-enhancing drug use, while publicly insisting that the team was clean, he said.

The best cyclists received white lunch bags filled with the blood-booster EPO, human growth hormone and testosterone from team doctors who handed them out casually, as if those bags contained sandwiches and juice boxes. The riders were also given little red pills that contained a testosterone oil they squirted beneath their tongues for a performance boost.

And if a rider needed EPO, or erythropoietin, Hamilton said, he knew exactly where to turn: to Armstrong, the undisputed team leader and the man who needed his teammates’ help to win.