‘I knew what I was doing’ - No regrets for Riis after doping past

Former Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis is never afraid of speaking out, telling it the way he sees it, but his reported comments at a recent sports forum in Copenhagen were incredibly blunt.

"I was completely doped. I knew what I was doing. I don't regret it because it was part of that time and part of a system that we all silently accepted,” he said, according to a piece in the Spanish website Sport.es.

Riis’s approach is different in some ways; he admitted to winning the 1996 Tour using performance-enhancing drugs, including blood booster EPO, though, unlike others, he was never stripped of his title. At least he eventually owned up to his wrongdoing. However, the lack of shame or contrition may well grate on fans, and even some of his competitors.

Riis’s history with the shadier aspects of the sport extends beyond his riding days, though. A report by the Danish anti-doping agency run in 2015 accused him of failing to intervene when he was the boss at the CSC team. This was described in the report as “totally unacceptable.”

The same report also stated that Riis gave rider, Tyler Hamilton, a phone number so the American could contact Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, apparently saying, “Fuentes is the best in the business, with blood doping, he is the doctor to go to.”

Blood doping was the scourge of pro-cycling through the 1990s and into the 2000s, with a number of high-profile riders being caught and banned, while others admitted their transgressions. Among the highest profile of those sanctioned for breaching anti-doping regulations was Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of his Tour de France titles when US Anti-Doping’s net finally closed around him.

The ensuing fallout revealed what many keen observers of the sport already knew, that doping was widespread across the sport.