Tour de France champ Bradley Wiggins has described watching Lance Armstrong confess to doping with a mixture of emotions including \u201canger and sadness\u201d.<\/p>\n
Wiggins said he had found the opening section of the interview Armstrong gave to Oprah Winfrey in which the American admitted using EPO and blood doping, \u201cdifficult to watch, watching him cave in after lying so convincingly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s heartbreaking for the sport, but then the anger kicks in . . . all the natural things most people had when they were watching it. In the end I felt he deserved everything he gets. I felt no sympathy for him whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wiggins has always said he was an Armstrong fan, having grown up watching the Texan make his breakthrough, then raced as a young professional when Armstrong was going through his \u2013 drug-fuelled \u2013 unbeaten run of seven consecutive Tour wins.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of me didn\u2019t want to watch it, to have that perception of him as an amazing athlete broken,\u201d he said. \u201cOne of my favourite races was the world championship he won in 1993, when I was 13, and I watched him win all those races between 1993 and 1996, the Fl\u00e8che Wallonne and Tour DuPont.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe won the Tour (for the first time) when I was 19, on the Great Britain track squad, and it was so inspirational seeing what he had come from, all the pictures of him with cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Olympic time-trial champion has stated that he would be particularly angry if Armstrong was shown to have used banned drugs or doping methods in the 2009 Tour, where the Briton finished fourth, one place behind the American.<\/p>\n
He said Armstrong\u2019s contention to Winfrey that he had raced clean in 2009 and 2010, when he made a comeback to ride the Tour, had upset him the most.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, \u2018You lying bastard\u2019. The man I saw (in the 2009 Tour, struggling) on top of (the summit finish at) Verbier and the man I saw a week later on the Ventoux\u201d \u2013 on the penultimate stage of the Tour when Armstrong put time into Wiggins \u2013 \u201cwasn\u2019t the same bike rider. I don\u2019t believe anything that comes out of his mouth anymore.\u201d \u2013 guardian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tour de France champ Bradley Wiggins has described watching Lance Armstrong confess to doping with a mixture of emotions including \u201canger and sadness\u201d. Wiggins said he had found the opening section of the interview Armstrong gave to Oprah Winfrey in which the American admitted using EPO and blood doping, \u201cdifficult to watch, watching him cave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[3258,830,885],"class_list":{"0":"post-17557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-south-africa","7":"tag-mysport","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-sport","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17557\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}