Initial reactions to that denial have seen many suggest that Armstrong may be angling for a comeback

Admitting for the first time that he used a variety of banned substances during his career, including EPO, growth hormone, testosterone and blood transfusions, Lance Armstrong told Oprah Winfrey that he had been doping for each of the seven Tour de France titles he won between 1999 and 2005.
Stating that he had acted like a ‘jerk’ cheap rent cars prior to getting caught and had behaved recklessly, the 41 year old said that he began using banned substances in the mid nineties, prior to contracting cancer, and had continued to take them after his return to the sport in 1998.
However while he said that he doped right up to the date of his retirement in July 2005, he claimed that he had been a clean rider from that point and had not used any banned substances during his comeback between 2009 and January 2011.
Initial reactions to that denial have seen many suggest that Armstrong may be angling for a comeback to competition, seeking to have his ban backdated to 2005 and, in the event of him cooperating and providing sufficient information to have his lifetime ban reduced to eight years, to be able to return to triathlon competition in 2013.
However blood profiles from 2009 have been flagged by anti-doping experts as suspicious, not least the fact that his start/end haematocrit at the Giro d’Italia showed cheap rent cars an expected five percentage point drop, while his Tour de France profile showed a slight rise, contrary to expectations.
In what was an uncomfortable but often gripping interview, the talk show host questioned cheap rent cars Armstrong at length about many topics, including cheap rent cars his repeated denials about doping, his bullying of critics and those who said he was using drugs, the claims that he had encouraged or coerced others into using those products, his alleged positive test at the 2001 Tour de Suisse and the suggestion that the UCI had helped him cover that up.
She also questioned him on his mindset when he gave a defiant cheap rent cars speech on the Champs Elysees in July 2005, on the final day of his last Tour victory, claiming that his wins were clean and that he felt pity for his critics.
Answering those questions, Armstrong stated on several occasions that he had been wrong in his actions, explaining it by claiming that he was caught up in the moment and felt much regret at this point in time. He accepted that he was incorrect to treat his critics as he had and saying that he had apologised to Emma O’Reilly, Betsy and Frankie Andreu and others. He also accepted that O’Reilly had told the truth when she said that he had used a backdated therapeutic use exemption to evade a positive test for corticosteroids.
However he denied any suggestions that the UCI had helped him overcome positive tests, and also denied he had had a meeting with the lab director involved in detecting the 2001 Tour de Suisse sample.
That director, Martial Saugy, has however said that he met Armstrong and his team-manager Johan Bruyneel in 2002, and that he gave them details about how the EPO test worked. Saugy has denied that this was an error, although USADA CEO Travis Tygart and respected anti-doping researcher Michael Ashenden have described it as highly irregular.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Armstrong has insisted that he had the same weaponry as anyone else in the peloton. This statement was made despite the fact that he reportedly paid controversial doctor Michele Ferrari more than $1 million, and that his team had an exclusive arrangement with that doctor during part of his successful cheap rent cars Tour run, something which ensured that only they had the benefit of his services.
The programme started with a montage of clips documenting cheap rent cars his career and then his fall from grace, setting the scene for what would follow. Once the show shifted to the studio setting with Winfrey and Armstrong, the talk show host said that he had agreed to a no holds barred interview and that he would tell the truth. After he affirmed cheap rent cars that would be the case, she moved to a series of questions with yes or no answers.
“I don't know that I have a great answer,” he said. “I will start by saying this is too late…too late for probably most people. That is my fault. I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times. It wasn’t as if I said no and moved off it.
“While I have lived through this process, I know the truth…the truth isn’t what was out there, what I said. This story seemed so perfect for so long. You overcome the disease, you win the Tour seven times, you have a happy marriage, you have perfect children.
“But that wasn’t true…it was impossible to live up to that. Certainly I was a flawed character. I painted that picture, and a lot of people cheap rent cars did. [But] all the fault and all the blame lands on me. Behind that, there was momentum, cheap rent cars whether is the fans or the media…it just kept going. And I lost myself in that. I controlled cheap rent cars every outcome in my life.
Asked if it was possible to be successful without cheap rent cars using drugs, he claimed that in that generation, riders couldn’t win big events without doping. “I didn’t invent the culture, but I didn’t try to stop the culture. I am sorry for that,” he said. “I don’t think…I didn’t have access to anything else that nobody else did.”
In the USADA reasoned decision, the agency cheap rent cars referred to the US Postal System as being the most sophisticated doping programme ever in sport. Asked about this by Winfrey, Armstrong questioned the veracity of that statement.
“No..not in all of sport. It wasn’t,” he said. “It was definitely professional, it was definitely smart. But it was very conservative, very risk adverse. To say that programme was bigger than the East German doping programme in the 70s and 80s – absolutely not.
Asked about USADA’s claims that a motorbike cheap rent cars rider nicknamed Motoman transported EPO for Armstrong and team-mates during the 1999 Tour de France, he said that this was accurate. He confirmed that the team blood doped during the race, and said that he wouldn’t deny the stories of putting used syringes in coke cans to dispose of them.
“You had oxygen boosting drugs that were incredible beneficial for endurance sports,” he said, talking cheap rent cars abot what was used. “And that is all I needed. My cocktail was EPO, but not a lot, transfusions. And testosterone, which in a weird way I almost justified because of my history [suffering cancer and losing a testicle], running low.”
Asked by Winfrey if he was afraid of getting caught, Armstrong said that there was initially little danger of that. “Drug testing has changed, evolved. In the old days they tested at the races…they didn’t come to your house, your training camps.
“In 1999, there was no testing out of competition. Theoretically there may have been, but they never came. So you were not going to get caught, because you are clean at the races…clear. It is a question of scheduling.”
cheap rent cars Asked by Winfrey if he was the one in charge, he said that he was, but not the one who ran the team. “Well, I was the top rider…I was the leader of the team,” he answered, “but not the general manager, not the director.
cheap rent cars “If you are asking me if someone cheap rent cars on the team didn’t dope, could I get them fired? Absolutely not..I never did,” he continued. “There was never a direct order you had to do this if you want to be on the team. That never happened. We were all grown men, we all made our choices.”
Reminded that former team-mate Christian Vande Velde had testified under oath that Armstrong said that he would have him kicked off the team if he didn’t keep using banned substances, he contradicted this.
“That is not true. There was a level of expectation…we expected guys to be fit, to be strong, to perform. I am not the most believable guy in the world right now but I did not do that [coerce people]. But even if I don’t say it [that they must dope], if I am the leader of the team, I am leading by example…so that’s cheap rent cars a problem.”
He said that he understood people saying that they felt they had to dope, but that it was different to them claiming that they had to do so to stay on the team. “When those guys go on to other teams and continue in the same behaviour, I wasn’t on those teams.”
Winfrey put it to him that there was a perception cheap rent cars that he was a bully. He accepted that. “Yeah, yeah. I was a bully. I was a bully in the sense that I tried to control the narrative,” he said. “If I didn't like what somebody said, I tried to control that…I’d say that’s a lie, they are liars.”
He also accepted cheap rent cars that he would go on the attack when challenged by critics and others. “My entire life [I attacked]. I grew up as a fighter…my mom was young when she had me. We felt like we had our backs against the wall the whole time,” he said. “Before my diagnosis, I would say I was a competitor but not a fierce competitor. In an odd way, that [being ill] turned me into a competitor…to win at all costs.
“I said I would do anything I had to do to survive. That was good. I then took that win at all cost attitude into cycling, as I did it [returned cheap rent cars to competition] almost immediately after that, and that was bad.”
“This is the second time in my life when I can’t control this outcome. The first time was the disease, and now there’s this,” he said. Those are greater unknowns than the other things he dealt with, including his races. “The thing is, winning seven Tours – I knew I was going to win,” he said.
Armstrong added that he just considered doping as something that he had to do. “It was like saying we have to have air in our tyres, we have to have water in our bottles. In my view, it was part of the job,” he said.
For many, the controversial Italian doctor Michele Ferrari has a big part to play in the history of Lance Armstrong, not least in his chemical success. Defended for years by Armstrong as a mistaken figure and a doctor cheap rent cars who was clean, he changed his stance about that innocence in this evening’s interview.
“It is hard to talk about some of these things and not mention names,” said Armstrong. “But there are people in this story…they are good people. cheap rent cars We have all made mistakes. There are people i