Lance Armstrong, branded a drug cheat and banned from cycling by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), narrowly escaped a police raid on his hotel during the 2005 Tour de France because he was being “protected in France”, French lawyer Thibault de Montbrial has claimed. According to De Montbrial, a hotel at which Armstrong and his team were staying during the race’s second rest day in Pau in 2005 was set to be raided by police looking for evidence of elaborate doping substances and methods, only for the operation to be aborted at the last minute.