"With the other stuff, you swallow a pill or put on a patch or get a tiny injection," Hamilton writes. "But here you're watching a big clear plastic bag slowly fill up with your warm dark red blood. You never forget it."
Thanks to hard work and banned drugs, Hamilton was exceptionally fit at the time, but he recalls how shocked and disturbed he was by the weakness he felt on his bike for the next week, while a pint of his blood sits hundreds of miles away in a dark refrigerator.
"It shook me deeply," Hamilton writes. "My strength wasn't really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags."
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Three important things for sports fans to know about blood transfusions are that they are banned in Olympic sports, that they are complicated enough to require a small conspiracy (which only creates more witnesses than other doping schemes), and that blood transfusions were more or less undetectable throughout Armstrong's career.
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