Those of us lucky enough to live in Australia just had the opportunity to watch a 4 Corners episode about Lance Armstrong and the mess that is being dragged up after the USADA report. To those who have read The Secret Race, there wasn’t a lot of news. But to Joe Public, it would have been an eye opener.
The biggest news for me was Phil Liggett basically making a soft admission that Lance doped. “…I find it hard to believe Lance didn’t do it.”
Phil Liggett on 4 Corners
Dick Pound also dropped a clanger saying Hein Verbruggen blames the fans for the doping.
If you are outside Australia, you can see a lot of the interviews on the ABC website. It is worth a look.
The extended interview with Phil Anderson makes him look bad. Really bad.
“You know for me … he’ll always be the champion that won seven tours… I can only name half of the riders that got second during those tours.” – Phil Anderson
Lance who?
Lance the Cheat!
Phil and Phil honestly do not deserve more screen time. The choice may have been made because of financial constraints at the time, but glad I never did end up going on one of his TDF tours a few years back.more
The way Phil Anderson is talking, I get the impression that this was recorded before the USADA report was actually released. His piece on the nine wwos website is more damning of Lance: http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8547102 and was written after the report came to light. The ambush journalism employed at the end to ask him about fixing the race with Armstrong made him look pretty bad but was off theme in my opinion.
Even though cheating is wrong in a perfect world, Armstrong was trying to compete in a sport already riddled with drug cheats. So, to achieve what he did (even with the help of drugs) is still an amazing thing.
It just seems unbelievable that Armstrong could have gotten away with it for so long without some help from the “inside”. Videos of him like the one at http://larmstrongdrugabuse.celebrityshocks.com/ will certainly damage the image of cycling. You can’t help wondering how many cyclists are still at it today…