Perhaps there was something lost in translation, or maybe he just really still doesn’t get the impact his words has or for that matter his actions had on his sport, but in a recent interview Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying the following:
“If I was racing in 2015, no I wouldn’t do it again because I don’t think you have to do it again,” he said in an interview with BBC. “If you take me back to 1995, when it was completely and totally pervasive, I would probably do it again. People don’t like to hear that.”
There was another person, Tyler Hamilton that was more sympathetic to Armstrong’s statement by shedding light on the culture that was cycling:
In his book “The Secret Race,” Tyler Hamilton, Armstrong’s former teammate, writes of his decision to start doping.
Hamilton explained that for most professional cyclists the decision is made in your third year of competition, or after about 1,000 days. The first year, he wrote, is all about just being happy to be there. The second, you realize your best isn’t good enough. The third you approach a fork in the road: you either dope and continue or don’t and quit, because without doping you won’t be competitive.
Hamilton wrote:
“… In my opinion this decision isn’t really about honor or character. I know wonderful people who doped; I know questionable people who decided not to. For me, the only fact that mattered was that for a thousand days I had been cheated out of my livelihood, and there was no sign that things were going to get better. So I did what many others had done before me. I joined the brotherhood.”
Armstrong said in the BBC interview that his life has been “brutal” since he told Oprah Winfrey that he cheated.
“The fallout has been heavy, maybe heavier than I thought. It was, you know, pretty brutal afterwards. It’s been tough.”
“I would want to change the man that did those things, maybe not the decision, but the way he acted,” he said. “The way he treated people, the way he couldn’t stop fighting. It was unacceptable, inexcusable.”
Armstrong’s life being brutal can be looked at from this point of the lives he went to great length to ruin to keep his lies and legacy in tact, some would say it is justice for the way he conducted himself with others more than with the actual cheating.
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