The United States Anti-Doping Agency on Wednesday released details of its investigation of Lance Armstrong, calling it the most sophisticated doping program in recent sports history — a program in which it said Armstrong played a key role by doping, supplying doping products and demanding that his top teammates dope so he could be successful.

A 202-page account of the agency’s case against Armstrong included sworn testimony from 26 people, including nearly a dozen former teammates on Armstrong’s United States Postal Service and Discovery Channel squads who said they saw Armstrong doping to help him win every one of his record seven Tour de France titles.

The file was the most extensive, groundbreaking layout of Armstrong’s alleged doping, bolstered by new interviews, financial statements and laboratory results.

The agency said that witnesses’ testimony was so damning that it did not need any corroborating evidence to make its case, though its report included financial payments, e-mail messages, laboratory results and scientific data that the agency said proved Armstrong cheated by using banned performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions.

“The U.S.P.S. Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices,” the agency said. “A program organized by individuals who thought they were above the rules and who still play a major and active role in sport today.”

Armstrong has repeatedly denied doping. Timothy J. Herman, one of Armstrong’s lawyers, said in an e-mail message that the 202-page report “will be a one-sided hatchet job — a taxpayer-funded tabloid piece rehashing old, disproved, unreliable allegations based largely on axe-grinders, serial perjurers, coerced testimony, sweetheart deals and threat-induced stories.”

The teammates who came forward and submitted sworn affidavits included some of the best cyclists of Armstrong’s generation: Levi Leipheimer, Tyler Hamilton and George Hincapie, one of the most respected American riders in recent history. Other teammates who came forward with information were Frankie Andreu, Michael Barry, Tom Danielson, Floyd Landis, Stephen Swart, Christian Vande Velde, Jonathan Vaughters and David Zabriskie.

Their testimony was the most widespread effort to break the code of silence in cycling that has existed for decades and perpetuated the pervasive doping in the sport.

The agency said the evidence revealed “conclusive and undeniable proof that brings to the light of day for the first time this systemic, sustained and highly professionalized team-run doping conspiracy.”

The evidence against Armstrong features financial payments, e-mails, scientific analyses and laboratory test results that show Armstrong doped and was the kingpin of the doping conspiracy, the agency said. Several years of Armstrong’s blood values showed evidence of doping, the report said.

“It’s shocking, it’s disappointing,” said Travis Tygart, chief executive of the antidoping agency. “But we did our job.”

When Armstrong decided in August not to contest Usada’s charges, he agreed to forgo an arbitration hearing at which the evidence against him would have been aired, possibly publicly.

Under the World Anti-Doping Code, the antidoping agency was required to submit its evidence against Armstrong to the International Cycling Union, which has 21 days from the receipt of the case file to appeal the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Once it makes its decision, the World Anti-Doping Agency will then have 21 days in which to appeal.

The cycling union and the World Anti-Doping Agency were expected to receive the Armstrong file Wednesday.

The antidoping agency has been gathering evidence on Armstrong for the past several years, with its efforts increasing after Landis, the 2006 Tour winner who was stripped of the title for doping, contacted Tygart in 2010. Landis told Tygart that he, Armstrong and others on the Postal Service team were involved in systematic doping supported by the team.

At the same time, Armstrong became the target of a federal investigation into his doping and doping-related crimes, including defrauding the government, drug trafficking, money laundering and conspiracy. In particular, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration, the F.B.I. and the United States Postal Service were looking into whether Armstrong and his associates had used government money to finance doping practices.

But last February, André Birotte Jr., the United States attorney in Los Angeles, announced that his office was dropping the investigation into Armstrong. He gave no reason for abandoning the inquiry, which lasted nearly two years and involved extensive travel, including to Europe, where antidoping agency and law enforcement officials met with their counterparts from Italy and France.

While the criminal investigation is no more, an inquiry by the Department of Justice is continuing, sparked by Landis’s filing a federal whistle-blower lawsuit charging that Armstrong and the team management defrauded the government by using taxpayer dollars to finance the squad’s doping program.

He claimed that Armstrong and the team management were aware of the widespread doping on the team when the squad’s contract with the Postal Service clearly stated that any doping would constitute default of their agreement, said two people with knowledge of the case. Those people did not want their names published because the case is still under seal.

Landis filed the lawsuit under the False Claims Act, the people with knowledge of the matter said, and those suits give citizens the right and financial incentive to bring lawsuits on the government’s behalf.

If the government decides to join the lawsuit and recovers any money because of it, Landis will be eligible to receive a percentage of the money.

Armstrong, who retired from cycling last year, has said Landis made up the story of doping on the team because he had not been hired by Armstrong after Landis ended his two-year suspension from the sport for doping.

When the antidoping agency announced this summer that it would file charges against Armstrong, he immediately denounced the agency’s claims and called its process of sanctioning athletes “a kangaroo court.” He filed a federal lawsuit in August, saying the antidoping agency was depriving him of his constitutional right for due process and asking the court to stop the antidoping agency from moving forward with its case. A judge dismissed the lawsuit.

In a statement by his lawyer on Wednesday, Hincapie, the only rider who was at Armstrong’s side for his seven Tour victories, acknowledged doping and apologized to his family, teammates and fans for his dishonesty.

“Early in my professional career, it became clear to me that, given the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by cyclists at the top of the profession, it was not possible to compete at the highest level without them,” said Hincapie, who retired from cycling this year after riding in a record 17th Tour. “I deeply regret that choice.”

Hincapie, the five-time Olympian and three-time national road race champion, said that he had been approached by federal investigators in the spring of 2010 and they asked him to divulge his experience with doping. That summer, he sat down with them and admitted he had cheated with drugs — but also reluctantly spoke about the other cyclists involved in doping because he felt “obligated to tell the truth about everything he knew,” he said.

He told investigators that he had not used performance-enhancing drugs or processes since 2006, a point when he was accomplished enough to ride clean and respected enough to start persuading other riders, particularly young ones, to avoid doping.

Since stopping his drug use, Hincapie said he has been “working hard within the sport of cycling to rid it of banned substances.”

“Thankfully, the use of performance-enhancing drugs is no longer embedded in the culture of our sport, and younger riders are not faced with the same choice we had,” he said.

He said the antidoping agency had reached out to him more recently to ask him about his doping past.

The evidence against Armstrong features financial payments, e-mails, scientific analyses and laboratory test results that show Armstrong doped and was the kingpin of the doping conspiracy, the agency said. Several years of Armstrong’s blood values showed evidence of doping, the report said.

Throughout his career, Lance Armstrong always responded to doping accusations by saying he had been tested for banned substances hundreds of times and never produced a positive result. How could the world’s greatest cyclist, always in the cross hairs of doping officials, never fail a drug test if he was doping, Armstrong reasoned.

An explanation emerged Wednesday, when the United States Anti-Doping Agency released its dossier on Armstrong, citing witness testimony, financial records and laboratory results. Armstrong was centrally involved in a sprawling, sophisticated doping program, the agency said, yet he employed both cunning and farcical methods to beat the sport’s drug-testing system.

The report also introduced new scientific evidence that the agency said suggested Armstrong was doping the last two times he competed in the Tour de France.

“It has been a frequent refrain of Armstrong and his representatives over the years that Lance Armstrong has never had a positive drug test,” the report said. “That does not mean, however, he did not dope. Nor has Armstrong apparently had nearly as many doping tests as his representatives have claimed.”

As part of its investigation, Usada asked Christopher J. Gore, the head of physiology at the Australian Institute of Sport, to analyze test results from 38 blood samples taken from Armstrong between February 2009 and the end of last April. Those taken during the 2009 and 2010 Tours, the report said, showed blood values whose likelihood “of occurring naturally was less than one in a million,” and other indications of blood doping.

While Gore’s analysis was not a conventional antidoping test, Usada concluded that the findings “build a compelling argument consistent with blood doping.”

The techniques Usada says were used by Armstrong and his teammates to elude positive tests were used by many cyclists, and many believe those tactics are still in use today. They often exploited weaknesses in the antidoping system, many of which still persist.

The most basic technique outlined in the report, based on affidavits from some of Armstrong’s former teammates, was simply running away or hiding.

“The most conventional way that the U.S. Postal riders beat what little out-of-competition testing there was, was to simply use their wits to avoid the testers,” the report concluded.

To facilitate out-of-competition testing, professional cyclists are required to inform their national antidoping agencies of their locations at all times. Riders who receive three warnings in an 18-month period for either not providing their whereabouts accurately or not filing the information at all can be punished as if they had had a positive drug test.

Saying that “the adequacy of unannounced, no-notice testing taking place in the sport of cycling remains a concern,” Usada outlined several methods used by Armstrong and his teammates to circumvent the system.

The simplest was pretending not to be home when the testers arrived. As long as they were in the city they had reported as their locations, the riders found they would not receive a warning for not answering the door.

The agency compared the whereabouts information it received from Armstrong over the years with messages between Armstrong and Michele Ferrari, a sports medicine doctor who is also a target of the doping investigation. There were revealing discrepancies, the report said.

Travel plans that Armstrong conveyed months in advance to Ferrari through training and racing diaries were submitted to Usada weeks later, sometimes the day he made the trip. While those last-minute changes did not break any rules, they frustrated the agency’s testing plans. The doping agency also found that Armstrong often stayed at a remote hotel in Spain where he “was virtually certain not to be tested.”

According to the report, Armstrong abruptly dropped out of one race after his teammate George Hincapie warned him through a text message that drug testers were at the team’s hotel. Armstrong had, Hincapie said in an affidavit, just taken a solution containing olive oil and testosterone.

Riders on Armstrong’s team, the agency said, also kept a constant lookout for testers and relayed information about them to one another. Team officials often seemed to know when a supposedly unannounced drug test would occur.

When the testers could not be avoided, Armstrong and his teammates turned to drug masking, the report said. It indicated that during the 1998 world championships, testers were diverted to other riders on the United States team while one of Armstrong’s doctors “smuggled a bag of saline under his raincoat, getting it past the tester and administering saline to Armstrong before Armstrong was required to provide a blood sample.”

The saline infusion restored Armstrong’s blood values to a level that would not attract attention.

The report also described how Armstrong, often in conjunction with Ferrari and the team director Johan Bruyneel, was careful to use techniques and drugs that were untraceable through tests.

During his first Tour de France victory, in 1999, Armstrong’s drug of choice, according to the sworn affidavits, was the blood-boosting hormone known as EPO. At that time, there was no test for EPO, which is a cloned form of human hormone rather than a synthetic product.

But when rumors began circulating about the arrival of a test for EPO, Armstrong and some of his teammates switched to withdrawing and then reinfusing their own blood. Again, it was a technique initially without a test.

Ferrari discovered that when regular, if small, doses of EPO were injected directly into veins rather than under the skin, Armstrong and others could continue using the hormone without fear of a positive test result, the report said.

Armstrong and his teammates also learned from Ferrari that the test for testosterone was not highly sensitive and caught only those who consumed large amounts of it or carelessly used it at times of the day when testing was likely. A test for human growth hormone, another banned substance with a following among members of the United States Postal Service team, was introduced only this year, at the London Olympics.

According to the report, the drugs used by Armstrong and his teammates were generally supplied by José Martí, often at clandestine meetings. Better known as Pepe, Martí ostensibly worked as a trainer for Armstrong’s United States Postal Service and Discovery Channel teams. But several riders told Usada that Martí’s training largely involved relaying information from Ferrari, who was apparently careful to give only advice rather than administer or supply drugs. Martí, who also helped with the team’s blood transfusions, according to the report, sometimes sold drugs to riders on other teams.

Contrary to Armstrong’s repeated claim that he never tested positive, it was widely reported at the time that he tested positive for a corticosteroid during the 1999 Tour. But he was not sanctioned because the team produced a prescription from one of its doctors indicating that Armstrong had received it in a cream used to treat a saddle sore.

Usada contends in the report that the prescription and its explanation were both shams. In his affidavit to Usada, Tyler Hamilton, the disgraced former Olympic champion and Armstrong teammate, said the positive test prompted “a great deal of swearing from Lance and Johan.” A backdated prescription, a former team employee told Usada, was created to resolve the problem.

As part of its investigation, Usada said it recently obtained additional data from French officials who had retested Armstrong’s samples from the 1999 Tour. For procedural reasons, those samples cannot be used to sanction Armstrong. But the Usada report indicated that advances in EPO testing since then conclusively showed that he used the hormone. The report said the retesting produced “resoundingly positive values” from six samples.

Armstrong’s account of how often he has been tested has varied. His lawyers, according to the report, have indicated that he provided samples 500 to 600 times over 14 years.

Usada said it tested Armstrong only 60 times, and it cited reports indicating that the International Cycling Union had tested him about 200 times, although Usada said many of the cycling union’s tests were for a health program rather than for prohibited substances.

“The number of actual controls on Mr. Armstrong over the years appears to have been considerably fewer than the number claimed by Armstrong and his lawyers,” Usada said.

The Associated Press on Wednesday reported that Lance Armstrong would step down as chairman of the Livestrong Foundation, the cancer advocacy charity he started 15 years ago.

Armstrong did not receive a salary as the chairman and will remain on the 15-person board of directors. Vice chairman Jeff Garvey, who served as the founding chairman in 1997, will assume the vacant position.

“This organization, its mission and its supporters are incredibly dear to my heart,” Armstrong said in a statement. “Today therefore, to spare the foundation any negative effects as a result of controversy surrounding my cycling career, I will conclude my chairmanship.”

Nike has terminated its contract with Lance Armstrong, one of the company’s most iconic athletes over the last quarter century, citing “seemingly insurmountable evidence” that the Texan doped his way to seven Tour de France wins.

“Due to the seemingly insurmountable evidence that Lance Armstrong participated in doping and misled Nike for more than a decade, it is with great sadness that we have terminated our contract with him,” the Oregon-based footwear maker said in a statement Wednesday. “Nike does not condone the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs in any manner.”

Nike will continue working with the Livestrong Foundation. The foundation’s yellow and black-themed product range is a top seller for Nike.

“Nike plans to continue support of the Livestrong initiatives created to unite, inspire and empower people affected by cancer,” read the statement.

Armstrong on Wednesday announced that he would step down as chairman of the Livestrong Foundation.

Nike, Trek Bicycles, RadioShack and Giro have terminated their contracts with Lance Armstrong as the fall-out continues from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s case against the Texan. Anheuser-Busch also announced that it would not renew its contract with the embattled former world champion at the end of 2012.

GENEVA (AFP) — The UCI confirmed the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s sanction of Lance Armstrong on Monday, banning the former world champion for life and stripping him of his seven Tour de France titles.

“We will not appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and we will recognize the sanction that USADA has imposed,” McQuaid told a news conference in Geneva, saying he had been “sickened” by the revelations. “The UCI will strip him of his seven Tour de France wins. Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling… He deserves to be forgotten in cycling.”

McQuaid said that he had called a special management committee meeting for Friday November 2, at which time the committee will discuss how to treat Armstrong’s other results, whether to form a truth and reconciliation panel and other topics.

“We certainly have agreed that we take those seven titles from Lance Armstrong,” said McQuaid. “After that, we have to look at the rules and we’ll do that at the management meeting on Friday. It’s the UCI that decides that, not ASO.”

McQuaid was defiant over questions regarding assertions by Floyd Landis and others that the UCI had accepted a $100,000 donation from Armstrong in 2002 in exchange for concealing a positive drugs test at the 2001 Tour de Suisse.

“There is no connection between the donation to the UCI and a test covered up, because there was no test to cover up,” said McQuaid, who added that the federation would accept donations from athletes in the future. “We would accept it differently and announce it differently than we did before.”

The media assembled in Geneva pressed the UCI president on this topic and he pointed to the federation’s limited funds compared with an organization like FIFA, the world governing body for soccer.

“We spend all of our money on the development of the sport,” said McQuaid. “Where we can get funds for the development of the sport we’ll do that.

“We didn’t know he had a suspicious test for EPO. Don’t try to make a connection between the donation
We accepted it because we used the money to improve the system to fight against doping.”

Agence France Presse contributed to this report.