ADELAIDE, Australia, Jan 16, 2010 (AFP) – Lance Armstrong Saturday said he had abandoned the rigorous personal doping tests he adopted to silence critics who suspect him of using drugs.

Armstrong said he had proved he was clean by undergoing the tests, alongside routine checks by anti-doping authorities, and posting results online.

“I did 52 controls last year and most of them included blood and urine,” Armstrong said. “There would be no way to get around that unless you’ve got some stuff or voodoo, something — but that’s not an option.”

The seven-time Tour de France winner, 38, embarked on the tests to quell doubters as he came out of a three-and-a-half year retirement to return to racing last year.

But he said cycling’s ‘biological passport’, which logs riders’ test results over time to check for variations, was sophisticated enough to make independent testing pointless.

“The biological passport has got to a point … that it controls all those things that an independent programme would do, which is good news,” he said.

“I’m not sure it’s the perfect solution, but it’s the next level when it comes to fighting doping in sport.”

Armstrong has long battled doping allegations, including French sports paper L’Equipe’s 2005 claim that urine samples from 1999 contained banned blood booster EPO.

In 2006, he sued a British newspaper over an article based on “LA Confidential — The Secrets of Lance Armstrong”, a book which contained doping allegations. The case was settled out of court.

Armstrong expressed frustration that some scientists had questioned his personal test results even though he had gone to the trouble of making them freely available on the Internet.

“You’ve got 1,000 scientists looking at it, one of them says ‘this is suspicious’. Of course you’re going to have someone say that,” he said.

“And that’s the story that gets printed. Obviously that’s frustrating for us.”

Armstrong is in Adelaide for next week’s Tour Down Under, the southern hemisphere’s biggest race and curtain-raiser for the 2010 season.