Lance Armstrong, the disgraced former cyclist, has been cited for a car accident in Colorado after initially allowing his girlfriend to take the blame.

Lance Armstrong Accident

Armstrong and his longtime girlfriend Anna Hansen were leaving an Aspen Art Museum party when when they crashed into two parked cars due to the icy conditions. After the accident, Hansen ran up to the house of the person renting one of the damaged cars and allegedly said, “I’m Anna, we’re the Armstrongs, my husband’s Lance, he was just driving maybe too fast around the corner or something,'” according to the man.

However, when police called Armstrong and Hansen, who had left the scene before they had arrived, Hansen was telling a different story. “Lance had a little bit to drink,” she’d told police, explaining that that was the reason that she was driving his GMC Yukon that night.

When police got wind that it had been Armstrong behind the wheel and not Hansen, they once again got in touch with the couple. This time, Hansen came clean that Armstrong had been driving and that fear that the accident would make national headlines led them to jointly decide to lie about who had been responsible.

“We’ve had our family name smeared over every paper in the world in the last couple of years, and honestly, I’ve got teenagers,” Hansen told police, according to the report obtained by NBC News. “I just wanted to protect my family because I thought ‘Gosh, Anna Hansen hit some cars,’ it’s not going to show up in the papers, but ‘Lance Armstrong hit some cars,’ it’s going to be a national story.”

Armstrong has been cited for failure to report an accident and driving too fast for conditions. Hansen is not facing any charges.

Armstrong, who was stripped of his six Tour de France after it came out that he’d been doping, is scheduled to appear in court March 17.