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imago images / Belga
![Lance Armstrong continues to reveal from his dark past.]()
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Lance Armstrong continues to reveal from his dark past.
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AP
![The second part of a TV documentary about the former US cycling star has now been released.]()
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The second part of a TV documentary about the former US cycling star has now been released.
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Keystone
![In it, Armstrong tells about the cover-up of doping and his collaboration with a physiotherapist.]()
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In it, Armstrong tells about the cover-up of doping and his collaboration with a physiotherapist.
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“I was an idiot and completely in attack mode,” Armstrong later admits.
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2013 is the year when everything changes in Lance Armstrong’s life. Until then he is the big hero, the standing man, the model athlete. The American fell ill with testicular cancer at the age of 25. But he flips death and sets out to take seven Tour de France triumphs in a row and become one of the best cyclists in history. A heroic epic that is normally only told in fairy tales and Hollywood films.
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But then comes the ominous year 2013 when Armstrong makes his extensive doping confession. The deep fall of a once great athlete. What he was only because he was constantly cheating and lying. The image? Logically in the bucket. With the help of the ESPN documentation “LANCE” he wants to clean up with everyone and everyone. The first part has already been published.
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Now the second part follows. And here, too, the 48-year-old Armstrong shocked with some hair-raising statements. He is asked what the worst thing he has ever done. The ex-Rad-Star thinks for a long time. The answer is expected to be: “Doping.” But he thinks longer and longer.
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First helper, then scapegoat and «whore»
Finally Armstrong says: “It’s probably how I treated Emma O’Reilly and how I talked about her. That is probably the worst. » That makes you listen. Who is Emma O’Reilly? And what could Armstrong have done to her that is worse than lying to millions of fans, sponsors, media and family members for years?
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From 1996 to 2000, O’Reilly was a masseuse, physiotherapist and Armstrong’s personal assistant with the US Postal Service Cycling Team. She knew that the team was taking doping abuse to a new level. She even helped cover it up, for example by covering needle punctures on the arms with make-up.
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When O’Reilly went public with it in 2004, Armstrong launched the offensive, saying it was not voluntary, but was released for “inappropriate things.” Did he have evidence of that? Armstrong replied that O’Reilly invented it all because she was pissed off at the team. “She’s afraid we’ll come out … as a whore or whatever. In addition, the cyclist publicly claimed that O’Reilly was an alcoholic.
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Armstrong in “full attack mode”
O’Reilly also appears in the second part of the TV documentary. There she denounces not the drivers because of the doping offenses, but the world association UCI: “I somehow thought that if I ever wanted to speak, it was only to do good,” she says. «My revelations were actually about the UCI. It is you who create this problem. »
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«It annoyed me that the whole system was not set up to protect the driver. They were just fodder for other people’s big plans », the physiotherapist continued.
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The trigger that O’Reilly went public was the death of Marco Pantani († 34) in 2004. And Armstrong then did what he had always done. As he says, he went into “full attack mode”.
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“I was an idiot”
Armstrong has now also considered his statements to O’Reilly: «Calling a woman a whore was simply completely unacceptable. I think it’s really difficult to be worse than that. » Why did he do it anyway? «Because I was an idiot and in full attack mode. That’s why I did it. I would have said everything. »
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The second part of the «LANCE» documentation has been out since Monday. In it, the former cycling star continues to clean up. It is another step towards rehabilitation for a person who has made the wrong decision more than once in his life. (leo)
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