Lance
Armstrong has said the worst thing he ever did during his fame was the way he
treated Irishwoman Emma O’Reilly, a former soigneur with the US Postal Service
pro cycling team.
When
asked on the second installment of the two-part ESPN documentary, ‘Lance’, what
was the worst event during his bullying and general behaviour towards people he
said: “Probably the way I treated and spoke about Emma O’Reilly, that’s
probably the worst.”
During
his career Armstrong referred to O’Reilly as an “alcoholic” and a “whore” in a
bid to discredit her when she began to talk about doping and revealed she had
used make-up to cover needle pricks on Armstrong’s arms.
Interviewed
now about those remarks, Armstrong says his behaviour was not acceptable.
“To
call a woman a whore is just totally unacceptable… it’s hard to be worse than
that,” he says in an interview for ‘Lance’.
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Asked
why he did it, he replied: “I had a version in my head that I… I wasn’t trying
to say that she was a whore… Why did I do it? Because I was an idiot in full
attack mode; that’s why I did it. I would have said anything.
“I
couldn’t be a different person off the bike; there was no getting in my way.
And it worked really, really good for training and racing; perfect for that.
“It
just doesn’t work good when you’re dealing with another human being who is not
in the race.”
O’Reilly contributed to the ‘Lance’ documentary and said what motivated her to speak out when she did was a desire to see the UCI do much better and break what she felt was as a system in pro cycling.
That system, she believed, was “was set up, not to protect the riders… the riders were just fodder for other people’s grand plans”.
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She
added when David Walsh of The Sunday Times contacted her, she believed he could
write a constructive piece about the problems in cycling.
O’Reilly has previously said that Walsh “exploited" her and “hung me out to dry” - those remarks can be read here.
In
‘Lance’, Emma O’Reilly says when Walsh told her he couldn’t use her comments
about the UCI in his story, she knew he was going to focus more on Armstrong
and that meant she was “left to face Lance’s wrath on my own”.
Armstrong
also said his treatment of Italian Filippo Simeoni was close to as bad as his
treatment of O’Reilly. Simeoni testified against Michele Ferrari, who was
coaching Armstrong and telling him how to dope.
In
the 2004 Tour, when Simeoni went on the attack, Armstrong chased him down to
force him to sit up and go back to the bunch because if the yellow jersey was
in the break the peloton would have to chase it down.
He succeeded in bullying the Italian out of the breakaway and they both went back to the bunch. Armstrong then turned to the camera smiling and did the zip closing gesture across his lips.
It was a gesture intended to convey that Simeoni should have kept quiet and not testified.
Armstrong now says when he reflects on how he treated O’Reilly and Simeoni and had met them years later, he saw how his poor behaviour had made life very difficult for other people.
However, there were no comments of that nature about Floyd Landis; his former team mate who turned whistleblower and whose testimony almost single-handedly brought Armstrong down.
At
one stage when Armstrong is reflecting on his life now, despite being banned
from cycling for life for doping, he says: “It could be worse; I could be Floyd
Landis, waking up a piece of shit every day.”
Asked if that was what he really felt of Landis, he replied: “I don’t think it, I know it.”
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