It could be argued that the fight against doping in all sports is futile because there’s
so many different people with interests, you’ve got the athletes that want to make money from
the sport, the governing body doesn’t want the sport to come into disrepute, the media
wants to get as easy a story as possible and that means being friends with the athletes,
you obviously don’t have that view but how is that going to be resolved?
People say well you’ve got so much doping in sport and it’s so difficult to eradicate
I mean and sport really has tried and I would say not hard enough but it has tried and it’s
failed miserably to eradicate doping.
So why not just accept it’s there it’s part of sport now just get on with it.
Well the reason why we can never do that is, is put yourself in the mindset of you being
a father to a gifted athlete and you brought him up to say that the truth is important
and to believe in the truth, you’ve brought him up not to cheat and then he calls you
up maybe you know he’s brought up in London or he’s brought up in Manchester and then
he goes to France and he rings you up and he says Dad you know I now realise that I
can’t achieve what I want to achieve in cycling unless I dope because pretty much
all my rivals, all my big rivals are doping, what do you say to him, I believe you say
to him Son I’m sorry you’ve got to come home, you can’t do this because you’ll
be building whatever success you might achieve on a lie.
See everybody that says well look doping is there, doping exists, lets not get obsessed
about it and fight a battle that we’re never going to win, those people, they tend to be
people who are looking at it from the point of view I’m a spectator, I’m sitting on
my couch, I love records I love great performances and I’m not that concerned.
Well my argument always was you’d be damn concerned if it was your son faced with that
dilemma and you’d say how horrible it is that he had to come to that crossroads in
his life where the only way to progress was to cheat, it’s just not acceptable, should
never be acceptable and we should fight in more imaginative ways than ever and we should
never give up the fight.
Well there’s a big gap in the record books now, 7 years of tour de France which haven’t
got a winner I think we can safely say that most people don’t see Lance Armstrong as
a champion anymore but in your view who is the best ever cyclist now?
I would say Merckx, for sure you know the amount of races he won the fact that he could
win the one day classics he could win the short tours he could win the Grand tours just
he could sprint he could time trial, he could do the lot.
The cannibal they called him because he just devoured the opposition and he’s definitely
the greatest cyclist.
Bradley Wiggins has done extremely well to win the tour de France win an olympic gold
medal I mean in the same year it’s a fantastic achievement he won plenty of other races this
year as well but at the kind of pantheon of great cyclists I mean Bradley doesn’t get
near really the you know if I’m thinking of the Tour de France winners that I would
regard as truly great I’m thinking of, I’m thinking of Merckx I’m thinking of Jacques
Anquetil I’m thinking of Greg Lemond, there the kind of people I’m thinking of and generally
I’d, I would be going for people who came before EPO because that was the, there was
always drugs in cycling but when EPO came it really did change the territory and it
meant that people who should never, could never win the tour de France without it would
win it.
Something that set alarm bells ringing for you is not just Lances dominance but also
that of his team US postal.
Team sky seem to be very dominant this year is that something that also worries you?
Team Sky have been so good that people almost say, Dave Brailsford himself makes this point
you know the more success we achieve the more suspicious we look and that’s true because
that’s what cycling is now.
Uhm..
I really want to believe they’re clean , I believe that what Dave Brailsford did on the
track was done without drugs, I think they’ve been sensationally kind of successful we saw
that in Beijing, we’ve seen that at London 2012.
I think Brailsford has applied a lot of the principals that he used with the track team
and he’s adapted them to road cycling with tremendous success.
I think Sky had the biggest budget, so I think it’s natural that they’ll get the best
riders Jonathan Vaughters who had Bradley Wiggins on the Garmin team, he said to me
if Bradley Wiggins had stayed with us, we would’ve won the tour de France with him,
now I believe the Garmin team are clean so a simple question to self, if you believe
Bradley Wiggins would have won the tour clean with Garmin then why can’t you believe that
Bradley Wiggins won the tour clean with Sky, well I do believe he won it clean with Sky
because I believe the race in which he finished 4th for Garmin was a tougher race than last
year’s race I think Bradley won a good race but it wasn’t an especially difficult tour
de France, I mean if Contador is back in 2013 and if we have Chris Froome a year older,
a year stronger it’s going to be a tougher race for Bradley Wiggins to win and my feeling
is to say that Sky, Team Sky are clean but that doesn’t mean we stop watching and stop
watching closely.