The following CNN sports news video contains an interview with Scott Mercier, who is a former cyclist. He says he did not dope during his career and actually quit instead of using performance-enhancing drugs. This clip aired in relation to Lance Armstrong’s admission during an Oprah interview that he doped all 7 times that he won the Tour De France. This video was added to the CNN website on January 18, 2013.
Mercier was on the same team as Lance Armstrong (the USPS team). He says he was tempted to dope while he was on the team but decided to quit, instead. He said he personally had a good experience with Lance Armstrong. But Mercier was on the USPS team BEFORE Armstrong joined it. His interactions with the disgraced cyclist were not as a teammate.
Mercier does say that he was not directly pressured to take performance-enhancing drugs. But he just decided to quit on his own because he didn’t want to go down that path and felt like it was headed in that direction.
Scott Mercier hopes that integrity and ethics are coming back to the forefront instead of winning at all costs. He says people are tired of the lying and cheating. Unfortunately, I don’t see it that way. Americans don’t give a crap about cheating. And the organizations only do just enough to make it look like they care. There should ideally be a lifetime ban in every sport for confirmed doping. However, the problem with that is that there are occasionally some false positives that make that a difficult thing to enact.