Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody's going down.

We all want to be forgiven. There's a lot of really, really bad people who want to be forgiven but will never be forgiven, and I might be in that camp.

[A 2005 response to doping allegations] Unfortunately, the witch hunt continues and tomorrow's article is nothing short of tabloid journalism. The paper even admits in its own article that the science in question here is faulty and that I have no way to defend myself. They state: 'There will therefore be no counter-exam nor regulatory prosecutions, in a strict sense, since defendant's rights cannot be respected.' I will simply restate what I have said many times: I have never taken performance enhancing drugs.

At least I didn't invent a dead girlfriend

There was more happiness in the process, in the build, in the preparation. The winning was almost phoned in.

At this point of my life, I'm not out to protect anybody. I'm out to protect seven people, and they all have the last name Armstrong.

Nothing goes to waste, you put it all to use, the old wounds and long-ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy.