Lance Armstrong’s progressive implosion after his doping scandal continues. He goes away for about six months, and then he keeps cycling back. Each time, Lance reminds us of his true colors, as if we needed reminding. He has grown impatient after people laughed at his repeated requests for forgiveness. In 2013, he went on a big “admission” tour where he confessed to Oprah and to Livestrong employees. His Tour de France titles were stripped, and Livestrong pushed him off the board of directors.

Lance was banned from competing in any sport, which continues to bother him. He whined about the injustice of it all during last summer’s non-apology tour with Esquire where he insisted “I won those races.” His justification all along has been that every cyclist doped, so he shouldn’t have been singled out for punishment. That “excuse” hasn’t changed.

Lance stuck his head out of his borrowed mansion full of art and Lanceritas to complain some more. He stopped by BBC Sport. You can watch the full interview here, but let’s do some highlights:

He’d do it all over again: “If I was racing in 2015, no, I wouldn’t do it again. Because I don’t think you have to do it again. If you take me back to 1995, when it was completely and totally pervasive, [I’d] probably do it again. That’s the honest answer. But it’s an answer that needs some explanation. I mean, I look at everything — when I made that decision, when my teammates made that decision, when the whole peloton made that decision. We get it. It was a bad decision in an imperfect time. But it happened.”

Positive effects of 1990s doping on the sport? “I know what happened to the sport of cycling from 1990 to 2005. I saw its growth, I saw its expansion. I know what happened with the industry …. I know what happened to my foundation, from raising no money to raising $500 million, serving 3 million people. Do all those people want to, do we want to take it away? I don’t think anybody says yes.”

Pulling the sympathy card: “But what’s really frustrating, and probably 80% of it, is that if my mum got [multiple sclerosis] tomorrow — and thank God she hasn’t — and I wanted to run the Boston Marathon to raise $100,000 for the MS Society, I couldn’t do it. And not just run, I couldn’t walk it, run a little bit, walk the aid stations and finish in four hours 15 minutes, but raise a hundred grand — I can’t do it.”

A wee bit of regret: “What I would want to do is, I would want to change the man that did those things. Maybe not the decision, but the way he acted — the way he treated other people, the way he just couldn’t stop fighting. It’s great to fight in training, it’s great to fight in the race. You don’t need to get in a press conference or an interview or a personal interaction and fight. That’s the man that really needed to change and can never come back.”

Is it time for forgiveness? “Listen, I’m not going to lie to you. Selfishly, I would say, yeah, we’re getting close to that time, but that’s me. My word doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is ultimately what collectively those people on the street, whether that’s the cycling community, the cancer community, it matters what they think. Listen, of course I want to be out of timeout. I mean, what kid doesn’t?”

[From BBC Sport]

Lance also reiterates that he won those seven cheated Tour titles fair and square. And he wasn’t at all tempted to dope when he returned from retirement in 2009. He’s so full of crap, but I think he believes himself.

Lance’s lifetime ban from competititve sports should stand. He not only lost his cycling titles, but the NYC and Boston marathons wiped his times from the record. No sport will have him, and he’s acting like a frustrated child. I can’t feel much sympathy for a guy who cheated for years and reaped all the glory. He even stooped so low to drag his poor mom into the discussion for sympathy. Rude.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet & WENN