Den stora tråden om Cykelsport - Girot, Touren och allt annat

Team NetApp-Endura's wildcard invitation to the Criterium du Dauphine is not only its third WorldTour race for 2013 but also its third wildcard from the ASO. That gives team manager Ralph Denk thoughts of a possible wildcard for this year's Tour de France.

“We are aware that the invitation to the Dauphine means something. Traditionally wildcard teams who ride Paris-Nice or the Dauphine, can have hopes of the Tour,” he told Cyclingnews. “But it would be presumptuous to read more into this invitation.

"That was the thing that upset me the most about 2009 and 2010. I thought you lying bastard. I can still remember going toe-to-toe with him, watching him and his body language. The man I saw at the top of Verbier in 2009 to the man I saw on the top of Ventoux two weeks later, it wasn't the same bike rider. Watch the videos and see the way the guy was riding. I just don't believe anything that comes out of his mouth anymore," said Wiggins.

"I was very determined not to watch it. I was a fan of Lance; I remember watching (him win) the Worlds in 1993. I was 13 then. Then he came back and won the Tour de France in 1999 when I was 19 years of age, I was on the track programme and that was so inspirational at the time, seeing what he had come from in those pictures with cancer," he said.

"Part of me didn't want to watch it, the fan in me didn't really want that perception of him to be broken as an amazing athlete. But I watched it with my seven-year-old son, and those initial first questions - the yes/no answers - watching him suddenly cave in after all these years of lying so convincingly... there was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness... I was slightly emotional as well if I'm honest. It was difficult to watch really. My wife couldn't watch it, she walked out the room.

"It's heartbreaking for the sport, but then the anger kicks in and you start thinking "you f*****g a******e" or whatever feelings most people had when watching it. I had to explain to my son what it's all about, he's won the same race as his dad has won. But by the end of the hour-and-a-half, I had the best feeling in the world.

"When he started welling up about his 13-year-old son asking him what it's all about - I never have to have that conversation with my own son. His father's won the Tour clean; there's this element of being smug about the whole thing to be honest. Then I got a 'you deserve everything you get' kind of thing. By the end, I was feeling no sympathy for him behind all the welling up and the tears."

"I love him," Wiggins said. "I think he's great. He's transformed the sport in so many ways. Every person in cycling has benefitted from Lance Armstrong, perhaps not financially but in some sense. Even his strongest critics have benefitted from him. I don't think this sport will ever realise what he's brought it or how big he's made it.

"Cycling was in the dark ages before he came along, in many ways. You only have to look at the support along the roads, compared to what it was 20 years ago. The majority of that is because of Lance Armstrong. Obviously he has his enemies and people among the fans who don't like him, but they've all benefitted from him and his existence on the Tour."

“I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Lance and have sided on the side of innocent until proven guilty with him. There isn’t an athlete or a cyclist out there that isn’t more tested than he is, certainly since his comeback, he’s probably been the most tested cyclist in the pro peloton and you take that on face value and that he’s never failed a drugs test and until he does he’s clean. That’s how I’ve always had as a stance on Lance.”

“All the other stuff that’s come on with Landis and things like that is one for the courts and whether the truth will ever come out is down to this investigation. I think time will tell with that. As it stands today, with the time I’ve raced with him – and I’ve never raced with him in his era of winning seven Tours – but in his comeback, he’s probably been the most tested athlete and never failed a drugs test.”

“I think you have to question Landis’ credibility because he lied under oath before and the stories that you hear about him drinking and things like that and you know, [making] telephone calls to people I know, threatening them with things, you just think that the guy appears to not all be there. So when you see these kinds of claims in the press you have to question his credibility because it’s almost like it’s coming from a mad man, but at the same time maybe that’s all borne out of frustration and things.

“You just never know but you just look at the way his life has gone over the last five years and you think there’s one person who it would have been so easy to have just admitted it when it happened in 2006, come clean if he did do it and he would have been back racing in a professional team making pretty good money. It’s quite sad how his life has gone away, just dwindled away and now there’s all these claims and counter claims and it’s quite a sad story for him.”