Lance Armstrong claims he would never dope today. But if he had to go back in time, the 43-year-old cyclist who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles would probably do it all over again.
In an interview with BBC Sport to promote the documentary, Lance Armstrong: The Road Ahead, Armstrong explains that attitudes were different in the ’90s – thus his decision to use performance-enhancing drugs.
“If I was racing in 2015, I wouldn’t do it again,” he told BBC Sport. “Take me back to 1995 when it was completely and totally pervasive, I’d probably do it again. People don’t like to hear that. That’s the honest answer.”
“It’s an answer that needs some explanation,” Armstrong continued. “I look at everything when I made that decision, when my teammates made that decision. It was a bad decision in an imperfect time, but it happened.”
If there was one thing that Armstrong wishes he could change, it is “the man who did those things.” Armstrong lied in interviews for more than a decade until he came clean during an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2013.
“For 15 years I was a complete asshole to a dozen people … that’s the man that really needed to change and never come back,” Armstrong said. “If I go back to 1995, I think we’re all sorry. You know what we are sorry for? We’re sorry we were put in that place. None of us wanted to be in that place. We all would have loved to compete man on man .. naturally, clean. Yeah, we’re sorry. We all looked around as desperate kids.”
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