Lance Armstrong expectedly confessed to doping in all seven of his Tour De France wins, with the American surprisingly admitting candidly to some of the details behind what USADA described as the most "sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme sport has ever seen."
Armstrong was recently stripped of his seven titles, as well as the Olympic Bronze medal he won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
In the first part of an interview aired Thursday night on Oprah Winfrey Network, Armstrong admitted to most of the claims made by his teammates regarding doping, with the second part of the interview set to air Friday.
Oprah started by asking Lance Armstrong to answer "yes" or "no" to a certain amount of questions before going into detail on the issue.
To the question, Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance? Armstrong replied: Yes.
That question was followed by whether the substance was EPO, and if he used blood transfusions, HGH, testosterone in all seven Tour de France wins, to which Armstrong replied: "Yes."
Armstrong went on to add he thought it was not humanly possible to win the coveted cycling title without doping. The American said he regretted calling other cyclists who came clean as liars, while explaining his decision to finally admit to doping after so vehemently denying it for so long.
"I will start my answer by saying that this is too late," he said. "It's too late for probably most people, and that's my fault. I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times, and as you said, it wasn't as if I just said no and I moved off it.
"While I lived through this process, especially the last two years, one year, six months, two, three months, I know the truth. The truth isn't what was out there.
"The truth isn't what I said, and now it's gone -- this story was so perfect for so long. And I mean that, as I try to take myself out of the situation and I look at it.
"You overcome the disease, you win the Tour de France seven times. You have a happy marriage, you have children. I mean, it's just this mythic perfect story, and it wasn't true. And that was not true on a lot of levels.
"Certainly I'm a flawed character, as I well know, and I couldn't do that. But what we see now and what's out there now.
"All the fault and all the blame here falls on me. But behind that picture and behind that story is momentum. Whether it's fans or whether it's the media or whether it's -- it just gets going. And I lost myself in all of that. I'm sure there would be other people that couldn't handle it, but I certainly couldn't handle it, and I was used to controlling everything in my life. I controlled every outcome in my life."
Armstrong stuck to his stand that it was not possible to win the Tour without doping, although there were several clean riders, even if the majority might have been using drugs.
"Not in that generation, and I'm not here to talk about others in that generation. It's been well-documented. I didn't invent the culture, but I didn't try to stop the culture, and that's my mistake, and that's what I have to be sorry for, and that's what something and the sport is now paying the price because of that.
"So I am sorry for that. I don't think -- I didn't have access to anything else that nobody else did."
Armstrong also strongly denied using drugs on his comeback in 2009 and 2010, saying his third place finish in '09 was legitimate and clean.
"Absolutely not," he said when asked if he doped on his comeback.
Armstrong, who founded the Livestrong cancer foundation, also confessed to being a bully, after going on the offensive against people who accused him of doping during his career.
"Yeah, yeah, I was a bully. ... I was a bully in the sense that I tried to control the narrative, and if I didn't like what somebody said, and for whatever reasons in my own head whether I viewed that as somebody being disloyal or a friend turning on you or whatever, I tried to control that. Say that's a lie, they're liars," he added.
