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Lance Armstrong finally admits to doping, lying in interview with Oprah Winfrey

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Lance Armstrong finally admitted to cheating his way to the top of the cycling world during a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey last night.

The stone-faced liar answered “yes” four times when Winfrey asked whether he took the drugs he was accused of using.

“Yes or no — did you ever take performance-enhancing substances?” she asked at the beginning of the interview.

“Yes.”

He copped to using blood transfusions, EPO and testosterone among other drugs in each of his seven Tour de France victories — and said he couldn’t have won without them.

“Was it ever possible to win the Tour de France without doping?” Winfrey asked.

“No,” he replied.

The long-awaited confession came after he was stripped of his seven Tour titles last year following a scathing report issued by the US Anti-Doping Agency alleging that he and his teammates were part of a sophisticated crew of dopers and cheaters.

His matter-of-fact statements last night were emotionless, and he shed no tears during the 1 1/2-hour television special. Part Two is tonight.

“I view 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 moved on,” he Armstrong told Winfrey.

“This story was so perfect for so long — you overcome [cancer], you win the Tour de France seven times, you have a happy marriage, you have children. It’s just this mythic story, and that wasn’t true.

“All the blame is on me. But behind that story was momentum, and whether it’s fans or the media, it just gets going, and I lost myself in all that, and I’m sure there would be other people that couldn’t handle it. I certainly couldn’t handle it. I controlled every outcome in my life. The story is so bad and so toxic and a lot of it is true.”

Armstrong admitted that, wjile doping was commonplace in cycling, he hurt the sport with his web of lies. “I didn’t invent the culture, but I didn’t try to stop the culture, and that’s my mistake,” he confessed.

He denied charges he was his team’s doping ringleader and said he did not force riders to take drugs, countering claims by the USADA.

“The idea that anybody was forced or pressured or encouraged was not true. I’m out of the business of calling somebody a liar, but that is not true,” he said.

“Are you saying to me that you did not expect other top riders to dope in order to reach that team’s goal?” Oprah later asked.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

An ashen-faced Armstrong denied he felt he was cheating, saying the pervasiveness of doping in the sport meant he had to take drugs just to compete with his rivals.

“I viewed it as very simple. You had things that were oxygen-boosting drugs, for lack of a better word, that were incredibly beneficial for performance or endurance sports, and that’s all you needed,” he said. “My cocktail, so to speak, was only EPO, transfusions and testosterone, which in a weird way I almost justified because of my history with testicular cancer.”

Drugs were as vital as water, he said.

“That’s like saying we have to have air in our tires or water in our bottles,” he said. “That was, in my view, part of the job.”

“At the time, it did not feel wrong?” Winfrey asked.

“No,” he said. “Scary.”

“Did you feel bad about it?” she continued.

“No,” he said. “Even scarier.”

“Did you feel in any way that you were cheating?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Scariest.”

“I went and looked up the definition of cheat,” he continued. “And the definition is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe. I didn’t view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field.”

He said he understood the anger of those he cheated. “They have every right to feel betrayed, and it’s my fault. I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn back trust and apologize to people for the rest of my life,” he said

Armstrong said he wished he had responded to charges by the USADA, whose report last year led to him being stripped of his Tour titles.

“I’d say, ‘Guys, let me call my family, my sponsors, my organization, tell them what I’ve got to do, and I’ll be right there,’ ” he said.

Armstrong refused to say whether a teammate’s former wife, Betsy Andreu, was right when she claimed that she heard him list the steroids he was taking to an Indiana doctor treating him for cancer in 1996.

“It was a confidential, personal conversation,” he replied.

“They’ve been hurt too badly,” he said, when asked if they had made peace. “I did call her crazy. I think she’d be OK with me saying this . . . I said, ‘I called you crazy, I called you a bitch, but I never called you fat.’ ”

He denied that he failed a drug test in 2001 and then bribed the International Cycling Union and other officials. “There was no positive test. No paying off of the lab,” he said.

Armstrong said he stopped doping in 2005 and was clean when he placed third at the 2009 Tour de France.

The interview aired hours after Olympic authorities took away his 2000 bronze medal.