Jun 30, 2006, 17:30 GMT
London - Seven-times Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong Friday won an important ruling in his ongoing libel action against Britain's Sunday Times newspaper at the High Court in London.
The cyclist had sued over a June 2004 article which referred to a book, LA Confidential - The Secrets of Lance Armstrong, which was about to be published.
No date has yet been set for the full trial of the action against Times Newspapers, the journalist David Walsh and deputy sports editor Alan English.
But it was agreed that the issue of what defamatory meaning the article bore should be decided as a preliminary issue.
At the High Court in London Friday, judge Justice Gray upheld the meaning contended for on behalf of Armstrong.
He said that the hypothetical ordinary reasonable reader would have understood the article as a whole, read once in conjunction with its headline, photographs and their captions, to mean that Armstrong had taken drugs to enhance his performance in cycling competitions.
If that was the meaning, he added, it appeared to him inevitably to follow that Armstrong's conduct in so doing was fraudulent and amounted to cheating and that his denials that he had done so were lies.
The judge rejected argument for the newspaper, which denies libel, that the words conveyed no more than the existence of reasonable grounds to suspect.
Armstrong said in a statement that he was 'extremely happy' with the ruling.
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