Earlier Thursday, Pound said he received a letter from Verbruggen acknowledging the cycling union, known as UCI, had provided L’Equipe’s reporter with forms indicating Armstrong had doped during his first Tour victory.

“Mr. Verbruggen told us that he showed all the forms of Mr. Armstrong to L’Equipe and that he even gave the journalist a copy of one of the documents,” Pound said during a conference call from Montreal.

“I don’t understand why they’re not stepping up to that and saying, ‘Well, I guess we do know how the name got public, we made it possible,”’ he said.

But Armstrong said that he himself had authorized releasing the forms to L’Equipe. He said the request from the newspaper was to check whether the UCI had granted him any medical exemptions during competition, not to find out if the numerical code used by race official to identify Armstrong matched the one attached to the urine samples.

Last Friday, the UCI said it had not received enough information to make a judgment on the doping accusations.

Interactive Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong is no mere mortal

It also criticized L’Equipe for targeting Armstrong and Pound for making public statements on the “likely guilt of the athlete” without knowing all the facts.

Pound countered by saying, “It’s ... quite clear the only way there could have been a match between the code numbers and a particular athlete was on the basis of information supplied by the UCI.”

He then questioned the UCI’s willingness to fully investigate L’Equipe’s accusations and wondered whether the cycling body was merely looking for a “scapegoat.”

If so, Armstrong suggested Pound should look in a mirror.

“Is Dick Pound a vindictive person and somebody who holds grudges?” he said. “Perhaps.”

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