Lance Armstrong: You can't win Tour de France title without taking drugs

Comments will infuriate Brits Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, who insist that the sport is now clean.

 

Nobody can win the Tour de France without taking performance-enhancing drugs, Lance Armstrong, the disgraced seven-times winner of the race said today.

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde on the eve of the 100th Tour, Armstrong implied that all recent winners of the race – including Britain’s Sir Bradley Wiggins last year – must have taken some form of dope.

“I didn’t invent doping. It didn’t stop with me either,” Armstrong said.

In reply to the question whether it was possible to win cycle races without dope while he was a professional rider, Armstrong said: “It depends which races you want to win. The Tour de France? Impossible to win it without dope. The Tour is a test of endurance where oxygen is the decisive factor.”

“EPO, for example, is not going to help a sprinter over 100 metres but it will make all the difference to a 10,000 metre runner. That’s obvious.”

For the rest of the story: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/cycling/lance-armstrong-you-cant-win-tour-de-france-title-without-taking-drugs-8678185.html