THE SUNDAY TIMES settled with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong after it was forced to pay damages over a report which suggested that he used banned substances. The paper sued Armstrong for £1 million last October when the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced it had “overwhelming” evidence of his drug use. Armstrong, 41, had been paid £300,000 to settle a libel case in 2006 after he sued the paper and journalists Alan English and David Walsh, the latter of whom almost single-handedly uncovered Armstrong's cheating. After US officials last year found Armstrong had led a “sophisticated” doping programme, the paper demanded the money back plus interest and costs. The Sunday Times said it had reached a “mutually acceptable final resolution”. The chief sports writer of the Sunday Times, Walsh first raised questions about Armstrong in 1999 when he won the Tour de France for the first time. In 2004, the newspaper published an article saying it was right for questions about Armstrong's performance to be both “posed and answered”. The American cyclist's lawyers issued a writ and sought damages from the paper, Walsh and then-deputy sports editor English. It was later ruled that the meaning of the article was that Armstrong was “a fraud, a cheat and a liar”. The Sunday Times settled that claim in June 2006. Last year, the United States Anti-Doping Agency called Armstrong a “serial” cheat who had led “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”. He was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. The cyclist had always denied doping during his career, but finally confessed in an interview with chat show host Oprah Winfrey in January. In December last year, the Sunday Times wrote to Armstrong's lawyers saying it was now clear that the earlier proceedings brought by the athlete had been “baseless and fraudulent”. In the latest edition of the Sunday Times, the newspaper announced that it, Walsh and English had “reached a mutually acceptable final resolution to all claims against Lance Armstrong related to the 2012 High Court proceedings”.
