There's a new addition to the ongoing Lance Armstrong fall from grace; an Italian cyclist claims Armstrong paid him $100,000 to throw a critical race in 1993, Yahoo Sports reported.
Prior to the 1993 Philadelphia International Championship, a single-day cycling event held since 1985, Roberto Gaggioli told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra that Armstrong handed him a cake box that had something a little more exciting than a cake inside.
"It was a young American colleague," Gaggioli said, according to the New York Post. "He offered me a panettone [Italian cake] as a present and wished me a merry Christmas. In the box there were $100,000 in small bills. That colleague was Lance Armstrong. Lance said that my team, Coors Light, had agreed to it. I understood that it had all been decided."
The race in Philadelphia was the third leg of the Thrift Drug Triple Crown, and paid anyone who won all three races $1 million, according to Yahoo Sports.
Armstrong was in a position to win the third after having won the first two races in Pittsburgh and West Virginia.
"Two laps from the end, I was in a breakaway with Lance, Bobby Julich and some Italian riders from the Mercatone team," said Gaggioli. "When Lance made a sign, I turned away as if not to see that he had escaped. He broke away to win on his own."
Armstrong has been alleged by another rider to have bought off multiple cyclists, Yahoo Sports reported.
According to Yahoo Sports, these are merely uncorroborated allegations, but given the lengths that Armstrong would go to later in his career, they cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Multiple Tours de France were won by Armstrong, only to see those and his many other honors stripped in the wake of a wide-ranging drug investigation and his confession of performance-enhancing drug use.
At about the 15:30 mark of the race video, you can spot Gaggioli running with a then 22-year-old Armstrong only to fade back in the stretch.
