Lance Armstrong says he was one of the first victims of cancel culture: ‘Yesterday a hero, today a zero’

Lance Armstrong has opened up about life after his public downfall in a revealing episode of the Frodeno Going Mental podcast, hosted by German triathlon icon Jan Frodeno. The former American cyclist — who stood on the Champs-Élysées in the yellow jersey every year from 1999 to 2005 — says he believes he was one of the first high-profile victims of cancel culture.

Frodeno titled the episode Built to Survive, a theme Armstrong explores in depth. He reflects on growing up with a single mother, who had him when she was seventeen, and on surviving testicular cancer. But it is the collapse of his reputation from 2011 onwards that he keeps returning to.

“That’s when I really had to find a way to survive,” Armstrong said. “I had to tell myself: look, I am done, finished. Time will tell if that’s true, but I feel like I got caught up in the cancel culture that America has gone through. I was probably one of the first to experience that.”

Armstrong eventually admitted to Oprah Winfrey that he had used performance-enhancing drugs — a confession that brought his carefully constructed image crashing down in front of the entire world. “The day after I told the world, I realised how it worked: yesterday you were a hero, and today you’re a zero.”

The priority in the immediate aftermath, he says, was staying on an even keel. “The only thing I promised myself was that I would stay healthy and not become addicted to anything.” Armstrong later struggled with alcohol, though he now remains active in sport. Giving up entirely was never an option. “I knew I couldn’t just crawl into a corner and cry. You keep going. Life’s messy and you have to keep going and sort your things out.”

Armstrong faced criticism during his career for being a tyrant in the peloton. He doesn’t entirely disagree. “But I don’t think there were a lot of nice guys at the top of the sport at that time,” he said. “Looking back, maybe I should have enjoyed it more and taken stock of what I’d achieved. I took certain things to extremes.”

“It was a job and I was paid to win, so that’s what I did,” he continued. “But I may have taken that too far, and in the end I paid a price for it. It worked on the bike — but ultimately it didn’t work off it.”