Pedersen frustrated by ongoing doping questions: "The damage is done. And so we're all just trying to repair it from here"

According to the Dane, the current cycling world is living with a legacy from dark times, and it will not be easy to move on from that. “My opinion on what happened then is that it was absolutely wrong. But what irritates me the most is that we are paying the bill for it,” he explains in statements collected by CyclingUptoDate from the documentary Shadows of the Past. “That is why I have an opinion on what happened. Otherwise, I could basically be completely indifferent to what these crazy people had been up to.”

A German documentary claimed that cycling is still ruled by doping, but Pedersen disagrees. "I put a lot of f*cking hours into this. I spend a lot of time on it. Without putting myself at the top, I'm one of the ten in the world who trains the most and hardest. I've gotten here because of really hard work, and it hurts me and my pride when someone questions that. It’s very sensitive for those of us who are active to be compared to that time. A lot has happened in cycling since then.“

Pedersen is tired of the controversy surrounding his sport. “I don't want to defend myself. I just want to give a better picture of what we do, and then the old boys can give a picture of what they did.” His compatriot Jonas Vingegaard also faces accusations from time to time. “Jonas does it in a super professional way, while I go much more with my emotions. When he says it's okay, you ask, my reaction is, why are you asking? I think it's ridiculous.”

The Visma | Lease a Bike climber finished second in the Tour de France. A Tour victory did not materialize, but Pedersen believes that Vingegaard's performance deserves nothing but praise. “We can be happy and proud that we have another Dane on the podium,” he said in the Lang Distance podcast. “He's been on the podium five times in a row. It's really amazing. And he's won the Tour twice. I have enormous respect for that man.”

Back to the doping issue. How can the current peloton regain the trust of viewers? “I really don't know what tool I should take from my toolbox to do this in the best possible way and come up with the best possible answer,” he says. “For me, it's just a natural reaction when I'm challenged on something where I feel unfairly treated. I really do in a situation like that because my hard work is being neglected.”

Whether you cycle slower or not, it probably won't matter. The accusations will always come, Pedersen thinks. “The damage is done. And so we're all just trying to repair it from here.”