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Lance Armstrong (pic courtesy Photosport International)Lance Armstrong should get his titles back, says former team-mate
A former team-mate of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong says the rider who cheated his way to seven Tour de France victories should get those titles back.
Scott Mercier and Armstrong were on the US team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.
After a solid career on the North American circuit, Mercier joined the US Postal team, but left in 1997 after realising that the only way he could compete in Europe was to take performance-enhancing drugs.
He went on to run a restaurant with his father in Hawaii and then took a job as a financial advisor in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Armstrong joined US Postal the following year after recovering from cancer, and won his first Tour de France in 1999.
After a lengthy investigation by the US Anti-Doping Agency, Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles in 2012.
But Mercier says Armstrong should be given a second chance.
"It's time to consider letting Lance out of 'time-out'," he told BBC Sport's Matt Slater.
"He is a polarising figure and always will be, but I believe he can be a catalyst for good; not just for cycling, but especially for those who suffer from cancer," he said.
In recent years Mercier and Armstrong have forged an unlikely friendship.
In a BBC interview last week Armstrong told Dan Roan that Mercier was a "great example" of someone who had left cycling with his integrity undamaged.
Armstrong said: "He's somebody I raced with before, during, and after. And he's one of my closest friends now, so Scott and I have these conversations all the time."
Mercier thinks American cyclists such as Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton have shouldered a disproportionate amount of the blame for the doping of a generation of cyclists.
Hamilton, he points out, was stripped of his 2004 Olympic gold medal after confessing to doping, but that medal went to Viatcheslav Ekimov, the Russian who had been one of Armstrong's right-hand-men at US Postal.
"This drug usage did not start with the Americans - it was part of the culture long before the Yankees invaded," Mercier said.
"The Europeans have gotten a far easier ride than our riders.
"It's time to be honest, it may be painful, but I believe honesty and transparency are the best path forward.
"In my mind, Tyler is the gold medallist from 2004 and Lance Armstrong the winner of seven Tours of France."
And he doesn't think Armstrong deserves to be more harshly punished for forcing his team-mates to use performance-enhancing drugs.
"No-one forced me to leave, I left of my own free will," he said, adding that Armstrong's sponsors cannot claim to be "victims" either because "they got their money's worth" in publicity.
Mercier seems to believe Armstrong has genuinely changed.
"I was never much of a Team Lance fan," he said.
"I knew he was lying and his arrogance and boorish behaviour made me cringe.
"However, my issue with him was never about his performance. He was, quite simply, the best of his generation and is one of the fiercest competitors the world has ever seen.
"He says if there was anything he could change, it would be the way he treated people. I believe him. I've seen the way he treats people today and it's with humility and grace."
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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58 comments
Lance's main problem is that people did not like him. Sure the Russians were doping, the Russians are still doping.
Lance was playing on a level playing field, taking drugs was part of the game. Since then the rules have changed. But performance gains now depend on sophisticated teams, specialized training, and high tech product development.
Compared to now the doping in the 90s was an amateurish attempt to improve training performance.
As I said previously not a fan and never was but I agree with previous post. We can pretend he never won the 7 titles but he did. He cheated against some other cheats. And the clean riders were just canon fodder. Imagine battering yourself around France for 21 days - CLEAN - knowing the doped riders are getting the glory. I'd say that was character building par excellence.
Exactly what Boardman seems to have done. He could compete for one or two days, but over 21 days he was stuffed.
The fact that there were clean riders in there means that Lance shouldn't ever get those titles back, and we should press for other riders to lose their titles, too. Even Pantani, though that might be too controversial.
Like him or loathe him, Armstrong was arguably one of the greatest cyclists ever, he won his titles on a flat playing field against like minded individuals who were told , if you want to be competitive you need to dope, bread and water won't cut the mustard. Drugs and doping has been around the TDF since its inception 110 years ago or so,so why shouldn't he get his titles back, anyone half interested in cycling will know the years he won, and look at the record books and say Armstrong won this year and that year even know his name is not listed. Yes he was an arse and a bully , but he was a man in control of his own destiny, and needed to control everything and everyone in his life to make himself the best in the world, which he did , regardless of who he hurt or trampled on in the process ( of which i think he regrets, if his latest BBC interview is anything to go by?), it still doesn't detract from the fact he was the 7 time winner of the hardest physical competition in the world. The L.A story will go on !!!
@mark shelton
Will it go on or will he just continue to gain the odd bit of media exposure before eventually disappearing from public view? After all he's not really saying anything new and there is no real contrition.
Incidentally the playing field was not level - EPO has varying levels of efficacy so perhaps Lance was just lucky in that it gave him the greatest boost to be able to outperform Ulrich, Basso, Riis etc., who were all doping themselves. Added to this there may have been numerous riders who weren't doping or at least not in such a systematic way as Armstrong. He was undoubtedly a talented athlete but we'll never know his true talent only how he rode doped. Added to his bullying and contempt for anyone who stood in his way then he has the punishment he deserves.
I look forward to the increasing gaps between the LA stories on this site and the cycling press.
You should spend more time learning punctuation than licking LA's arse.
I wasn't Licking Armstrongs arse. Took me all my time to think about posting my opinion because of the more than average amount of dickheads on this site who think they're the dogs' bollocks!!!! i won't be doing it again so some pedantic tackle tart, all the gear no idea idiot can slag off my F@**ing punctuation!!!!! Seem to be justified in my concerns
I wasn't Licking Armstrongs arse. Took me all my time to think about posting my opinion because of the more than average amount of dickheads on this site who think they're the dogs' bollocks!!!! i won't be doing it again so some pedantic tackle tart, all the gear no idea idiot can slag off my F@**ing punctuation!!!!! Seem to be justified in my concerns
You should spend more time learning punctuation than licking LA's arse.[/quote]
That's a very intelligent comment. Clearly a Graduate.
Forgiveness is next to Godliness
We are all sinners in Gods eye
Has anyone ever worked out how much less would be written about cycling in the media if there had never been any drug scandals ?Probably keeps a few journalists in a job. Especially in the off season. Thank heavens for cheats eh.
Also in breaking news:
Lance's mum thinks he should get his titles back too, an opinion shared with with ex athlete Lance Armstrong
I think people forget that at least part of the reason his punishment is relatively severe is his refusal to co-operate with the investigating authorities even when it must have been obvious that the game was up.
I have to say though that 'everyone else was doing it too' is the sort of excuse that the average 7 year old works out early on doesn't really fly...
But Armstrong has only been in 'time-out' for 2.5 years since the USADA document, and 2 years since he confessed himself.
Given the fact that he was doping for at least seven years, it seems a bit premature at best to be talking of this now. As others have said, actions have consequences.
I completely agree about the disparity with the stripping of wins against other jerseys, and if proved the disparity between American cyclists and European ones, but the solution should be harsher punishments for those deemed to be 'getting off lightly', rather than letting infringer's off the hook faster.
Guilt doesn't fade off!
The retrospective EPO testing from the 1999 tour is interesting, when you compare the number of samples from Armstrong that tested positive, compared with the number of samples from others.....
I was never a fan of Armstrong. But how can he be stripped of his titles but the green / polka dot jerseys still stand. It's a farce. He is treated based on his bullying arrogant nature rather than the doping. There is no evidence that he did more drugs / transfusions than the majority of the peleton. So why did the team mates who gave evidence get short sentences and he gets life. Was he the ring leader or was it the doctors ? Armstrong was not the Daddy of dopers.
Also until proved otherwise I do not think he looked like a juiced rider in 2009/10. But he certainly spiced the race up in 2009. You cannot take away his athleticism.
He was not the antichrist just a bully and a cheat. He should have the same sentence as the others. Or the others should get same sentence as him.
It is horrifically unfair that Lance has been punished so harshly when others have done the same and got away with a slap on the wrist. But why anyone should care about him being treated unfairly is beyond me? He's never worried about fairness before. Punishment for Armstrong should be more about showing what will happen to the next GT winner who gets popped.
people must realise that there are consequences for their actions lance is guilty and must stay guilty.
people must realise that there are consequences for their actions lance is guilty and must stay guilty.
No one says he isn't guilty. It's just that everyone else was probably guilty as well. Back in the mid to late 90s they were all at it. Armstrong was just a smarter better cheat than all the other cheats and he beat all the other cheats into the bargain.
Now it was clear that back in the day Coppi et al were also well at the aphetamines everyone knows it and its part of history. The key fact in the drugs arms race that has always been part of pro cycling is that the drugs weren't all that spectacular at performance enhancing prior to the mid-90s. So a really good clean pro rider could be competitive with a dirty rider. Cheating was an edge but not a massive one. Round about the mid 90s and the development of EPO you had a substance that was so effective at improving performance that it would not have been possible for a clean rider to compete in a dirty race. Essentially this was a European cycling culture that teams like US postal had to deal with. I can't find the quote but one of them was on record as saying that when they arrived as the top cyclists in the US and clean and realised they could not even keep up in European races. So either they just gave up the idea that they could be pros in the European scene or they could do what all the other pros were doingand get in the race.
So let Armtstrong have his titles back and everyone will still know that he was a drugs cheat that beat all the other drugs cheats to win the Tour de France. And let's not pretend that Armstrong was the only one of a few that did it. Cos that would be a lie.
I know what you mean but he was not smarter than the cheats that didn't get caught or the ones (like David Millar) who were wise and grown-up in their tone and actions after getting caught. Even now, Lance wants us to let him race again so we don't punish the cancer victims or his mum, who "doesn't have MS but if she did" etc etc!
This is what it's about. This stuff, supposedly from Scott, and all the other crap being bandied about is all part of the Armstrong PR machine in overdrive. Even my colleagues at work, who know very little about pro cycling, are sick of this stuff popping up on sports news websites etc.
He's trying to appeal to people's better nature with the crap about the 'unfairness' of it all but playing fair was something he never did, either on the bike, via the media or in the courts. He has repeatedly shown that he is NOT sorry and would do it all again. So why forgive him?
This!
Interestingly Scott Mercier appears as 'Lance's friend' in the latest Rouleur (a pathetic, weird and arselicking account). This is the concerted PR effort from Lance to rehabilitate himself, not by coming clean, not by admitting all his misdemeanours, not by helping cycling and sport, but by manipulating the public....his prime MO.
Just piss off Lance unless you really are sorry.
I'm sure I'll regret asking this, but how does he demonstrate that he 'really is sorry'?
Write a book about how really sorry he is, and how it made him really, really sad, but now he feels better to admit it. Then go on TV telling every one about his book and how sorry he is and how it all made him really really sad. Sell lots of books. Sound familiar?
Did you not read my post? Coming clean, admitting all his misdemeanors etc. He still denies doping in 2009 and 2010. He could help change things, but instead chooses not to. They gave him the opportunity to reduce his ban by doing this but he refuses, so he is no better than before. Plus if he can't admit the more recent doping and give details of what he did why should he be let back in to anything? Chances are he's just going to do the same. The evidence suggests that Lance was wrapped up in doping of some sort of other (via connections in his early career) from the very beginning, albeit that it probably roids, not EPO. He still shows no sign of changing - so tell me know why Lance should be allowed back?
Lance came to Europe as a big name in the US - I think he had just been crowned US junior champion. And in his first pro race in Europe (Classica de San Sebastian) he came dead last. On his own. 30 minutes behind the winner.
I think the quote you're referring to was something like "we realised that we had bought knives to a gunfight" and he talked about his choice at that moment was to give up what he had been so determined to achieve, go home and work in a bike shop, or to do what everyone else was doing and take PEDs.
I know what i would have chosen.
Yes thankyou for that. It was the quote I was thinking of. And it makes the decision he faced quite clear.
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