The job title is soigneur, an elegant sounding name for the person on a professional cycling team who is assigned some unglamorous work: massaging the muscles of the cyclists, laundering their clothes, booking their hotel rooms and preparing their food. Discretion and loyalty are also part of the job.
For Emma O'Reilly, a young, onetime electrician from Dublin, the chance in 1996 to be a soigneur for the United States Postal Service cycling team was an extraordinary opportunity. She had raced some as a teenager in Ireland, and served as an assistant on that country's national cycling team. But the Postal Service team was a rising power, with its sights set on the Tour de France.
In short order, however, it became clear to Ms. O'Reilly that her tasks with the team would hardly be limited to kneading leg muscles and doing laundry. In an interview this week, Ms. O'Reilly said she became a regular player in the team's doping program, one that investigators have charged took on its most sinister and far-reaching dimensions with the arrival of Lance Armstrong in 1998. Ms. O'Reilly, then not yet 30, said she wound up transporting doping material across borders, disposing of drugs and syringes when the authorities were lurking, and distributing performance-enhancing substances to the team's riders whenever they needed them.
Discretion and loyalty, she said she came to understand, were not just valued qualities. They were paramount.
"It was prevalent, but discreet," Ms. O'Reilly said of the team's doping. "The drugs were just part and parcel of things. You didn't analyze it at the time. It was just part of things."
And so, she said, she once traveled from France to Spain and back to pick up illegal pills for Mr. Armstrong and delivered them to him in a McDonald's parking lot outside Nice. Another time, she said, she took a package of testosterone and got it in the hands of another rider.
Ms. O'Reilly said she provided ice to the riders who had containers full of doping materials they needed to keep from spoiling. She spoke of using her talents with makeup to disguise bruising on the arms of the riders from needles.
Some of it made her ashamed, she said, and all of it made her anxious. But the truly hard part was to come: talking about it publicly.
"The traumatizing part," she said in the telephone interview from Manchester, England, "was dealing with telling the truth."
Ms. O'Reilly first went public in 2003, when she was paid to cooperate on a book, "L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong," that sought to expose Mr. Armstrong as a drug cheat. Mr. Armstrong sued her for libel.
Ms. O'Reilly said Mr. Armstrong demonized her as a prostitute with a drinking problem, and had her hauled into court in England. Ultimately, a legal settlement was reached, and Ms. O'Reilly tried to pick up her life, sometimes talking about Mr. Armstrong and drugs, but to little notice.
Until now. This year Ms. O'Reilly, 42, gave a sworn account of her years with the Postal Service team to American doping investigators. Her testimony, along with that of more than two dozen others, including many of the cyclists Ms. O'Reilly worked with on the team, is at the heart of the United States Anti-Doping Agency's formal case against Mr. Armstrong, one that seeks to bar him from the sport forever.
"Talking about it made me feel like I was being disloyal in a sense, like I was breaking the code," Ms. O'Reilly said of her early efforts to blow the whistle on Mr. Armstrong. "Lance tried to make my life a living hell."
Mr. Armstrong, over many years now, has steadfastly denied doping. Citing what he called a witch hunt by American doping authorities, he declined to defend himself against the formal charges that were made public this week. He has refused to comment on Usada's case against him — a brief that includes hundreds of pages of accusations, sworn affidavits, medical records, test results and e-mail correspondence.
"I have to admit," Ms. O'Reilly said, "I didn't think it would come out with so much detail like this."
It was Ms. O'Reilly's brother who introduced her to cycling. In her spare time she began taking massage courses.
"It was just a hobby, really," Ms. O'Reilly said. "Then it just escalated and escalated."
Ms. O'Reilly worked with the Irish national team and later with an American-based cycling team. Then, the Postal Service team came knocking. She was initially hired on a contract basis, as one of the junior soigneurs.
From the start, Ms. O'Reilly told investigators, it was apparent that the team was involved with doping. She said riders even complained that the team was not aggressive enough in its use of banned substances.
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