UCI president Pat McQuaid has said that he believes Lance Armstrong owes the full truth plus an apology to the sport and has urged the American to do so.
“I would like to see him jump on his private plane and come to Switzerland and say 'what can I do?” McQuaid told a group of reporters in St. Petersburg, according to Reuters.
“He has not apologized to the sport of cycling. Everyone accepts he has not come clean. If he has information that is valuable to the sport he has to come forward."
“He should sit down and work with us...with USADA and the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA).”
Armstrong denied doping for many years but handed a lifetime ban by USADA after he declined to fight a number of serious charges put to him. He eventually admitted the use of banned substances in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in January, but has declined advances from USADA to sit down and to tell everything he knows.
USADA has raised questions about the UCI’s conduct during Armstrong’s career, suggesting that the governing body may have protected the American against detection. McQuaid and the UCI deny this, but the Independent Commission set up by the body was scrapped by it in January, bringing to an end a process that the UCI had originally claimed would fully vindicate it.
McQuaid has reiterated the claim that the governing body did nothing wrong. “I do not think the UCI made mistakes. The statistics show the UCI was the most advanced in the fight against doping.”
He added that he didn’t believe that Armstrong would have taken the risk of using doping products after suffering advanced testicular cancer, being cured and then deciding to return to the sport.
“I was fooled,” he said. “I believed the was no way a man so close to death would go and start putting stuff into his body that could be dangerous.”
McQuaid is currently preparing for the UCI presidential elections in September, where he will seek to become head of the organisation for a third term. He has faced calls for his resignation over the Armstrong affair plus the scrapping of the Independent Commission, but has insisted that he will remain in office and run again.