A year on from the release of the USADA’s Reasoned Decision, Lance Armstrong has given a four-part interview with Cyclingnews and while he may not have dropped any bombshells on the sport, there was definitely some startling reading.
Perhaps the most shocking piece of news to be revealed, even if it was long suspected, was Lance’s admission he was doping long before his return to cycling from cancer in 1998.
While the USADA said they had evidence Lance was doping as far back as 1996, Lance was only stripped of results from August 1st 1998.
However, Lance has now admitted to having doped virtually from the start of his professional career, albeit in a dismissive fashion:
“As a young rider, I didn’t know then what other people were doing… but we [his Motorola team] were more or less a clean team.”
When pressed on what “more or less” meant, Lance laughed, before saying, “That’s what I mean, more or less.
“Again I don’t know what others did or didn’t do, and I don’t want to get into the details, but at some point cycling switched from low-octane to high-octane.
“I don’t know who had made that switch to high-octane first. In Motorola, we had not in 1993. It’s well documented that we did make that switch in 1995, but in the years before, we were low-octane.
“That worked okay in 1993 but it did not work okay in 1994. In that winter between ’93 and ’94, there was a tectonic shift.”
An editorial at this point in the interview clarified, ‘Armstrong later defined “low-octane” as meaning “Cortisone, etc”‘.
It’s classic Lance – sure he was juicing at that point in his career, but it was only cortisone, which is on the banned list but can be permitted with a doctor’s note, so it’s “low-octane”, not a big deal.
When asked when he “first crossed the line” and began doping, Lance responded “It was before 1995, put it that way.”
And when asked whether he won his only rainbow jersey clean, at the world championships in Oslo, 1993, Lance replied, “That’s the detail I can’t get into. It was still low-octane.”
That eventual five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain wore a silver medal on the podium that day in Oslo suggests even “low-octane” was making a difference.
It also makes all the more credible Lance’s Motorola teammate Frank Andreu and his wife Betsy’s claim that Lance told doctors during his battle with cancer he had used performance enhancing drugs, something Lance has consistently denied.
Yet when asked whether Betsy Andreu had lied, Lance’s response was, “I don’t remember that happening. It was 17 years ago, two days after brain surgery. I do not remember that happening. I don’t.”
Lance was emphatic that his return to cycling in 2009 was completely clean, saying, “Over time, hopefully, there’s a test for transfusions and 2009 will be put to the true test…
“The day there’s a test of a transfusion I’ll be the first guy to put that sample on the line. And I’ll bet everything on that.”
However, when Lance was asked if he’d been caught doping early in his career would he have come back and doped again, raced clean or just quit, he responded, “I don’t know. I never planned on testing positive. I was not going to test positive. Ever. No…
“… Because the plan was conservative. It’s funny because I say these things that are the truth and people don’t like it. They say they want the truth, you give them the truth and then they say, ‘fuck, we don’t like the truth.’
“It was so conservative, risk adverse and mathematical. It was not going to be a positive test.”
Lance was keen to move on to a wider range of topics than just doping, saying, “I don’t want to just talk about doping. It’s obviously an element but 99 per cent of my career isn’t about doping.”
(Which is a great title for his next book – It’s 99 per cent not about the dope.)
With new UCI President Brian Cookson coming to power only months ago, the time seems right to turn on former President Pat McQuaid and his predecessor Hein Verbruggen, two men who oversaw cycling’s descent into being regarded as one of the dirtiest sports on the planet and both of whom have been implicated in the ongoing Armstrong case.
Yet Lance was not overly keen to lay any blame on them:
“I don’t think highly of Pat or Hein today, but what were they going to do?
“Imagine you’re Hein, and again I’m not defending him, but take yourself to ’94 or maybe even ’93 or before. He should have known before because high-octane existed in the late ’80s and not just in cycling, in other endurance sports.
“You’re there, you’re the head of the governing body, you’ve got no test, no test at all – what are you going to do…
“They just did not have the tools to do anything until maybe 10 years later.”
As to his relationship with the press, it was interesting to note he specifically cited Fairfax journalist Rupert Guinness as one of two journalists he considers a friend, even though Guinness has been witheringly honest in his assessments of Lance since the Reasoned Decision was released.
Lance was long rumoured to have a ‘blacklist’ of journalists he would avoid or simply refuse to speak to. On this, Lance used the example of current Tour champion Chris Froome to illustrate his point:
“There was never a blacklist. People think there was a list on the bus with a bunch of photos, but that’s a load of bullshit.
“Okay, we’d sit in the bus and look outside, but we did that every day and talked about other teams, people – you’re pretty much a rat in a cage. We were looking outside.
“There were certain people we didn’t want to talk to but Chris Froome, I’m sure, sits on the bus and looks outside and thinks he’s not talking to that guy. That’s totally normal.”
The biggest fish for Lance in the journalism pool was David Walsh, who led the doping charge against Lance and, as a result, Lance successfully sued.
Lance made a point of saying, “I paid Walsh back, and I tried to make that right.” However he was more expansive than just that with regard to Walsh:
“Obviously David and I have had a long history. I have mixed feelings. He was right about some things but I saw a side of him along the way that wasn’t correct.
“He knows better than anyone the times he’s been caught out, but whatever. I doubt that he will read this interview because he’s in the middle of his global victory tour.
“I’ve tried to resolve that situation as best as I could and I think that I did…
“David and I are similar. I was a win at all costs kind of guy. David is a win at all costs kind of guy. Even if it means embellishing, tweaking.
“Was he right that I was doping in those years? Absolutely and hats off to him, but there were times he would have done anything to do that story.
“But I understand that, I was the same way. That was the world I lived for a long time.”
As to his own ‘narrative’, Lance accepted partial blame but pointed out it couldn’t have been as big a story if he’d been alone in pushing it:
“I controlled the narrative but I think the wave of momentum helped to control it. I was at the front of it, but whether it’s the sport, the industry, the cancer community, there was this wave of momentum that was the narrative.
“And along the way there were people that had different opinions and that momentum rolled over them…
“It was a cancer survivor who was two years out of diagnosis winning the hardest sport in the world. As you can imagine, I know at the time I took that for granted. I can see why that became such a story and one turns to two and the story just builds and builds. Hence the reason why so much of the fallout has been so drastic.
“If you’re just a guy who wins the Tour seven times with no ‘story’, the fallout isn’t the same. A lot of that’s my fault. I accept responsibility for being so aggressive and stern when it came to the denials. It was a tremendous mistake.
“That took the fall and doubled it.”
That his narrative had a definite upside for his sponsors was made light of, and Lance was asked whether he felt he had ever been a “pawn” for the likes of Oakley and Trek:
“Well, again when I talk about this wave of momentum that’s what I’m talking about, whether it was the growth of the sport, the growth of the industry.
“You cite Trek as an example, they go through the roof and that’s Trek, but I think Specialized would tell you that they had a similar growth curve.
“So the whole sea rose with this. It wasn’t just that our boat was rising, everyone’s rose.
“So yeah, that’s a powerful thing, but again I made some major mistakes as the head, as the guy filling the pool with water…
“But for the record I don’t feel like a pawn.”
Regarding his denials to the press about his drug use, he was again conciliatory:
“I definitely denied it. In the first press conference in 1999 when the question comes up and you’re in the yellow jersey, I don’t know a person who would say ‘you’re right, that’s a great question, and I have to be honest’. Who the fuck would say that? Who?
“It’s one thing to not comment and get out of that question as soon as you can. It’s a whole different thing to be confrontational and combative, which was what I was.”
When pressed on having once said “I’ve seen death in the face and I don’t do drugs”, Lance was particularly apologetic:
“Those are the moments you’d do anything to take back or say something different, or erase it. It’s inexcusable; it’s embarrassing to hear that.
“And even in many ways, fuck the press room. A statement like that, what it would have signified or the confidence it would have given to the community that matters, the cancer community, they took stuff like that to heart. That gave them faith that the story was perfect.
“In my mind – and maybe I’m more aligned to that group – but in my mind that’s where the foul there is times one thousand.
“I’d love to change it but I can’t.”
Thus Lance regards his biggest mistake as “Any time talk of my diagnosis mixed with a doping denial.
“That makes any other affair minor. That was so far over the line, and so desperate to keep it rolling and keep controlling the narrative, that’s totally unacceptable.
“It’s unacceptable in the cycling world but the ramifications it had in the cancer community, I deserve to be where I am at today. It was unacceptable.”
(You can read the full interview in four parts – part I, part II, part III and part IV.)
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