Lance Armstrong recently did an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde. Following are some of the questions and answers from the interview with Stephane Mandard
- Tour de France : The Tour de France can’t be won without doping because the Tour is an endurance test where oxygen is the determinant.
“It’s okay to erase my name from the palmares, but the Tour took place from 1999 – 2005, did it not? There has to be a winner. Who is it? No one has reclaimed my jerseys.”
- Rapport with USADA
“All this is just bullshit. It was seen that Operaton Puerto was a hundred times more sophisticated. Our system was very simple, very conservative and not evil. History will show that all of this is simply a posture by USADA to make a buzz.”
“The ‘reasoned decision’ of USADA has succeeded perfectly in destroying a man’s life but has not benefited cycling.”
“The UCI rejected the establishment of the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commission because the world would hear the evidence and it would plunge McQuaid, Verbruggen and the entire institution.”
- Laurent Jalabert
“Ah, Jaja, with all due respect, he is lying. He would ahve done better to avoid talking about Ferrari and Citroen because he very well knows that Ferrari was the doctor for ONCE in the mid-1990s.”
- The Culture of Doping in Cycling
“I did not invent doping. Sorry Travis (Tygart). And it did not stop with me. I just participated in the system.”
- Remorse
“I shall never succeed at fixing everything but I will spend my life trying. I was too hard on people. Fighting on the bike is perfect. Fighting off the bike, is not. I could not, I did not know how to separate the two.”
