Tour de France champ Bradley Wiggins has described watching Lance Armstrong confess to doping with a mixture of emotions including “anger and sadness”.
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, “difficult to watch, watching him cave in after lying so convincingly.
“It’s 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.”
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 – drug-fuelled – unbeaten run of seven consecutive Tour wins.
“Part of me didn’t want to watch it, to have that perception of him as an amazing athlete broken,” he said. “One 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 Flèche Wallonne and Tour DuPont.
“He 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.”
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.
He said Armstrong’s 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.
“I thought, ‘You lying bastard’. 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” – on the penultimate stage of the Tour when Armstrong put time into Wiggins – “wasn’t the same bike rider. I don’t believe anything that comes out of his mouth anymore.” – guardian
