George Frey/European Pressphoto Agency
People at the Wasatch Brew Pub listened to Lance Armstrong being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about his drug use, in Park City, Utah, on Thursday.
The formerly defiant Lance Armstrong once said, "As long as I live, I will deny ever doping," but sitting face to face with Oprah Winfrey in an interview that was broadcast Thursday, he reversed course.
With Winfrey, he lost his icy stare and buried his cutting words. Looking nervous and swallowing hard several times, he admitted to using through most his cycling career a cocktail of drugs, including testosterone, cortisone, human growth hormone and the blood booster EPO.
Yet, like always, Armstrong couldn't help fighting.
He called his doping regimen very simple and conservative, rejecting volumes of evidence by the United States Anti-Doping Agency that the drug program on his Tour de France winning teams was "the most sophisticated, organized and professionalized" doping scheme in the history of cycling.
He said he wasn't the kingpin of the doping program on his teams, as the antidoping agency claimed, and that he was just doping like the rest of his teammates were at the time.
He said he had doped beginning in the mid-1990s through 2005, the year he won his record seventh Tour. He said he took EPO, but "not a lot," and said he had rationalized his use of testosterone because one of his testicles had been removed during his battle against cancer. "I thought, surely I'm running low," he said of the banned testosterone he took to gain an edge in his performance.
At times during the interview, which will resume Friday night, Armstrong seemed genuinely humble, admitting that he is "a flawed character" and that he will spend the rest of his life trying to apologize to people and regain their trust. "There will be people who hear this and never forgive me," he said. "I understand that."
But when asked about the people he had tried to crush while he tried to keep his doping secret, people like the former masseuse Emma O'Reilly or his former teammate Frankie Andreu and his wife, Betsy, he showed little contrition. Those are some of the people who claimed he had doped and who he subsequently publicly claimed were liars. He had called O'Reilly a prostitute and an alcoholic.
In the interview, he acknowledged calling Betsy Andreu crazy. But, with a suggestion of a smirk, said he never claimed she was fat.
He said he had been a bully his whole life, before contradicting himself a minute later, saying he became a bully after he survived cancer and resumed his cycling career.
And when he said he never failed a drug test, he contradicted himself again. When Winfrey asked if his urine samples from the 1999 Tour retroactively tested positive for EPO, he said yes. When she pressed him, he admitted that he received a backdated prescription from a team doctor after he tested positive for cortisone at the 1999 Tour.
Armstrong did not delve into the details of his doping, and Winfrey never asked. He did not explain how it was done, who helped him do it or how, exactly, he perpetuated his myth for so long. He said he wasn't comfortable talking about other people when asked about the infamous Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari, his former trainer who is now serving a lifetime ban for doping his athletes.
When Winfrey asked if he would cooperate with the United States Anti-Doping Agency in building doping cases against others in the sport, he masterfully skirted the question.
Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the antidoping agency, called Armstrong's admission "a step in the right direction."
But it did not really matter what Armstrong said in the interview, at least according to Tygart and other antidoping agency officials who hold the key to Armstrong's future as a professional athlete.
Armstrong's reason for coming clean was not to unburden himself of the deception he fought to keep secret for so long. It was to take the first step toward mitigating the lifetime ban from Olympic sports that he received from the United States Anti-Doping Agency last fall, according to people close to him who did not want their names published because they wanted to stay in Armstrong's good graces.
Antidoping officials need to hear more from Armstrong than an apology and a rough outline of his doping. They need details. Lots of them.
"Anything he says on TV would have no impact whatsoever under the rules on his lifetime suspension," Tygart said.
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